Web Hosting Blog - Host Color

Yes, it is hard decision, no doubt. Five or ten years ago all you had to do is to find a web designer, a company or freelancer, and to draw your project. You were not supposed to make any decisions at the time, except to say what do you want. The web design professionals knew what to do. This was before and during the dot-com boom. Today we have to make choices every time we need to get something done on the web. The more technologies and solutions we have in our pocket the smarter we should be to be able to choose the one that best works for us. What do I mean?

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Today any website owner can choose between a dozen of very popular content management systems and hundreds of others. Only Host Color supports more than 20 different CMS software as a part of auto installer software library in web hosting Control panel.

According to some surveys Joomla, Drupal and WordPress beat others. To criteria is “rate of adoption” and it is based on measurement of 3 factors:

• the company used the following metrics
• the number of downloads and installations
• third-party support by developers and publishers

We can not judge by ourselves who’s best in the Open Source CMS market. As our customers and blog readers know that Host Color supports the development of MODx CMS (see also “Welcome New Generation Ajax CMS to Your Hosting Account“) and supported the Drupal developers conference DrupalCon Szeged.

I would suggest anyone who wants to build advanced website to spend at least a few days to learn more about Joomla, Drupal and MODx and to decide which one best works for their website. This means to visit developer communities, to read reviews about CMS software and to make a list with pros and cons.

We can say that Joomla is a good solution for a web publishig when it comes to text, pictures, sound and video files. It is very much pre-configured and it is not hard to deploy it and to build a website. Joomla is a good option to create content but it not that easy for developers to write/add new modules.

Drupal is a great platform with hundreds of modules. It is best CMS to build community websites. If you have a in-house development team Drupal is probably the best choise to use. It allows high level of customization.

MODx is the most promising CMS. It is an Ajax based object-oriented content management system. MODx also has very friendly to use user side and managing content and integration of various software applications such as forums, shopping cart, social networking software and etc is easy. It is very customizable as well.

Blogging CMS

Online personal diaries (Blogs) became very popular form of web publishing when software developers created applications that are so easier to use than that even average Microsoft Windows users feels much comfortable using their interfaces than working in Windows environment. This type of CMS made blogging a very accessible. The most popular CMS platforms used for blogging are WordPress, b2Evolution, TextPattern, Movable Type, FlatPress, LifeType, Serendipity EggBlog, SBlog (all of them are supported in our “Blogan” Hosting Plan).

WordPress and b2Evolution that are best (or at least most used) blog publishing platforms. The main advantage of both WordPress and b2Evolution is that they are very user friendly and you don’t need to do almost anything to start blogging of web publishing. Of course website onwer’s hands are very tied if they need to add new functionality or their projects require a higher level of customization.

I don’t think that I have to write more about both blogging CMS mentioned above as they are very popular. To use any of them with Host Color please check service plans: WordPress Blog Hosting and b2Evolution Hosting.

Two Types of CMS

There are significant differences between 2 types of CMS, at least from a technical point of view - Push CMS and a Pull CMS. You can read a good article about Push and Pull CMS at SitePoint. I will mention only that the Push CMS is characterized by the caching and delivery of content as flat files in a web server-neutral format.

In a Pull CMS, special delivery software is installed directly on the live web server. When a request is made for a web page on the Pull CMS, the necessary content pieces are pulled from the database and assembled into a single page.

How to choose?

When start drawing a web project anyone should learn something about different technical aspects of web publishing. this is very important because it outlines the production costs and the time the whole process would take from the design and development phase to website launch.

I suggest anyone to get a consultation with web developer, web desginers or even better with a web business consultiing company. Of course you don’t need to use consultant when you need to create WordPress blog. But be adviced that consultants save not only your money but also make sure your website will be released as well optimized and ready to become a high-profile web resource.