CMS FAQs - 3
CMS FAQs 1 CMS FAQs 2
CMS FAQs 3 - this pageThe big CMS Question & Answer session continued.Q: How to create an htaccess file on an IIS server?A: You can't.
For some reason this has become a popular query lately. You cannot create an htaccess file on a Windows server (a Windows server = an IIS server) because it is an Apache server tool, and only exists on a standard, LAMP server. An IIS server does not have user-operated tools such as this, you must contact the hosts for every single change or adjustment you need. Often they charge for this otherwise people would be running them ragged.
An IIS server is controlled by the IIS Manager, a console that is only available to the host. In contrast a normal LAMP server is controlled by top-level files that can in many cases be adjusted at local level. One example is the htaccess file, for which there is a server-level example, plus each website can have a local one to adjust server settings further.
Of course this is a perfect arrangement for many reasons. You can fix server default configurations that are not optimal for your site; and you can use SEF solutions on a CMS or ecommerce application that interact with the server via the local htaccess file. It's one of the reasons a LAMP server is far easier to manage than a Windows server: the webmaster can make all routine changes. This cannot be done on shared hosting, on an IIS server. However if you have your own IIS server this will not be a problem, you will have access to the IIS Manager console.
Also you need to consider the fact that perhaps you might be trying to run a PHP webapp on an IIS server. This is possible, as long as PHP and MySQL are installed - but far from desirable. The CMS or ecommerce application will run, in this case - but many plugins may not function. The obvious candidate is the SEF URL solution, which often needs an htaccess file. All problems can be resolved by changing hosts, and moving on to a LAMP server. Alternatively, use an ASP application, as that is designed to run on an IIS server.
You cannot run popular PHP cms or ecommerce software efficiently on an IIS server. It may work, but it can only ever operate at reduced efficiency.
Q: Why does a cms need to be uploaded to a dedicated server?A: There are two reasons for this.Firstly: specialist requirements. If the CMS is a heavyweight enterprise-class model, then it might well be expected that a dedicated server is needed anyway; so needing a dedibox, here, is not a negative.
And if the webapp was designed to appeal to people looking for a big intranet application, or even just one for some office teams to use, then a dedicated server is not a handicap as one can easily be set up in the office. In any case, for most teams, an old and redundant PC will do as server load will be very low.
So if the CMS you are looking at is in one of those classes, it is no drawback to need a dedibox - it's assumed to be a basic requirement.
Also, it may be an ASP / .NET CMS. These have different requirements from PHP CMS apps and have much more restricted server suitability. For example they run in a Trust environment: the levels are Medium-Trust, High-Trust, and Full-trust. Some require a Full-Trust environment and this is only available on a dedibox. In practice that means the CMS can only be used as a medium or large enterprise tool.
Secondly: a CMS needs to have a web installer if it is to be widely used. This means to be able to be installed via the web, using FTP and browser management. Otherwise, the 99% of website owners on normal hosting could not make use of it. Almost all PHP CMS can be installed in this way. However, many cms using other types of codebase cannot be remote installed, which means they can only be used within an office, or with hosts who will set up a dedicated server specially. Some WCMS need to be compiled on the server, which means that even hosts offering dedicated servers may well not be an option - you have to run your own server and have physical access to it. (To compile a cms means to build the application as a software group, by physically working on the actual server.)
Of course, these arrangements are highly restricting for most owners, even up to medium business size. It means that such CMS have a very limited appeal in terms of the numbers in use. However, as far as large enterprises go, any installation routine is acceptable, since other factors are more important.
Q : Compare CMS and .NET
A :
Yes, a lot of people ask this. A CMS is a fully-featured way of
publishing a lot of content, and/or for easy management of content that
gets changed regularly, and it will provide extended functionality -
especially when there are sufficient plugins.
Microsoft .NET, and the OSS equivalent WebDAV, are simply ways of editing content on hand-coded websites.
A CMS is about a thousand times more capable in every department.
Microsoft .NET is basically an alternative to Dreamweaver-style website
management - you have to build the pages in the first place, then the
application syncs the website for you. That's basically all it does.
A CMS, in contrast, builds the whole site and its navigation for you,
builds most of the page for you, and manages the site automatically.
Then, it does an all-singing all-dancing job with dozens of different
types of content and ways of managing them.And,
of course, .NET only runs on an IIS server (a Windows server), which is
strictly a minority choice that will handicap you in many ways. It's
much easier for a novice host to run - but that's about it. If you
still want to expend time with hard-coded sites, then using WebDAV
might be more logical - at least then you can use a normal LAMP server,
PHP etc. Some
ASP-based website content management systems use .NET as the website
editing machinery, instead of HTTP (browser-based editing) or FTP. The
equivalent in OSS, though - WebDAV - is never used for this purpose, as
far as we are aware.
We have seen some 'custom' CMS built around .NET and ASP. These
generally refer to a semi-dynamic hard-coded one-off site that has some
limited functionality. As a 'cms' these are about the same as a donkey
compared to a Lamborghini. A
CMS has access to a wealth of plugins that easily and quickly expand
the functions a website can perform, and the tasks it can handle. An
ASP-.NET site - or any other hard-coded site such as PHP or just plain
HTML to start with - must have each and every one of these new
functions coded from scratch. This type of site is suitable for small
sites with limited dynamic functionality that have few content changes;
and perhaps for sites that major on static graphic effects of some
kind, like art displays and certain other image-based applications or
custom-code jobs. All other websites - and especially those that need
extended image-based dynamic functionality like image galleries and
video - are better off on a capable CMS.
Q : Best ASP CMS?A :
Good question. We are not specialists in this area so it would be
unwise to offer an answer - but in any case you need to be more
specific. Commercial or open-source? Exactly what class of CMS are you
looking for?
As regards commercial CMS, there are plenty of offerings, so budget is
the key question. At the lower end of the scale (from £5,000 / $10,000
and up) Colony has a lot going for it. In OSS, perhaps the best ploy
would be to install a local server and then get hold of some of the
open-source ASP apps we list. Install and trial them - which is
straightforward - and then you will be able to see how to proceed.
DotNetNuke is a popular choice; a mature application with good
documentation. Umbraco is the fastest mover in ASP CMS and moving forward very rapidly. It has a number of plus points but like many webapps in this class, hosting can be tricky if your budget is limited. Umbraco also needs a lot of developer input to set it up - it's not really for webmasters.
There is never any easy answer to "Best whatever" - it's what you want
to use it for. For example, a multi-user CMS will need frontend
editing, and some don't have this. To embed videos from YouTube etc
on-page you need the right plugins, and this would limit your choice.
So try them out, check what plugins are there, and then decide.
The main advice we would give in this situation is that without a
shadow of a doubt every server - including an MS Windows IIS server -
needs PHP / MySQL installed. Without that, add-ons of many types (like
genuine full-function statistics applications) are impossible to
install. You won't be able to use any of the best forum, blog or wiki
apps, as they all run on PHP - MySQL.
Also, try to host with a service that gives you a proper server control
panel, like Plesk for IIS. Without this (and Windows hosts tend to be
worse than LAMP hosts here), life is just too difficult. FTP-only is a
poor substitute, as you will be missing all of the management functions
that Linux / Apache users on a LAMP server take for granted. How to set
up cron jobs? How to check email parameters / users / spam rejection
settings? How to check the server errors? How to set file permissions
when they fail to set properly via FTP? How to manage your databases?
How to set custom error pages? You can't webmaster sites properly
without a server control panel.Search
optimising for ASP-based sites is the same as any other; Microsoft
codebases are fully SEO-compliant. Provided, of course, that the server
is a full-feature machine run by real hosts. SEO on IIS servers run by resellers and incompetents is a nightmare.
Q : Most stable CMS?A : I guess this is another "Best of...?" question.
Firstly - in what type of CMS? Large commercial - open-source ASP - open-source PHP - or what?
When you've worked out what your budget is, then go to sites that specialise in those areas and look around.
If
you have a low budget and need the simplest CMS that will handle high
page numbers and heavy traffic (which is what "most stable" infers),
then Drupal will probably suit. It's a standard PHP CMS, which means
deployment is a snap; it'll take high page numbers; it takes high
traffic; and as it's open-source the core webapp is free. It isn't easy
to manage, so you'll need an introductory period when no one is
expecting any great results from you.
If, by "stable", you just
mean trouble-free and without glitches, then I'm afraid all CMS have
some minor issues. The best way to avoid them is to be extremely
careful about adding templates and plugins since these cause most of
the problems. If you install any old template - or a dozen of them -
and also install any plugin that takes your fancy, then you'll find
that every CMS will give problems. The core application is usually OK
but there can be big inter-operability issues with everything else.
The straight truth is that you cannot have a CMS with Plugin X plus Plugin Y plus Plugin Z ad infinitum,
because they often won't work together and the whole system will have
gremlins. If you think you can have a set-up that performs an endless
number of tasks, with a big feature set, then unfortunately you
can't. It's like the difference between Windows 98SE and Windows XP; if
you have a small number of things to accomplish, of a simple nature,
then you cannot beat W98SE, provided you keep it skinny - it's very
fast and very simple. There is nothing wrong with it at all for
straightforward tasks, limited in overall numbers. I wouldn't use
anything else to run my boat navigation systems, it's the fastest by a
mile.
If you get WinXP and then add everything possible, in the
hopes of having a tremendously powerful system, then maybe you will -
on the days it's working right; and provided you've got plenty of
time to wait. And like an operating system, if you turn a CMS into a gross
fatboy you are guaranteed some problems.
Q : What are the issues if you build your own PHP CMS?
A : Jeez, you must like pain.
[more tags: grow your own cms, roll your own cms]This
is a surprisingly popular question, so there must be a lot of fearless
devs out there. But have you seriously thought about what this entails?
Teams of people, the best and the brightest developers in the world,
toil for years to get their projects to a sufficient stage of maturity
that they deserve the title of A Real, Working, Good CMS. You should be
able to figure that out by reading some of these reviews - many are
critical, because there is so much work left to do before some apps can
honestly qualify for that title.
In
any case, why try to reinvent the wheel? What's wrong with the best of
the free OSS apps out there? Either join an existing project and
contribute; or if you just want something simple, maybe, then use a
simple CMS - we've identified a couple for you. If you don't like them
- fine, then fork off.
Er,
sorry about that :) I mean, start with the existing CMS, and create a
fork, going off the way you want. It's a popular strategy in OSS. At
least that way, a lot of the groundwork will have been done; but we
don't advise it because, surely, somewhere out there in the 2,000-plus
CMS in existence, there must be something you can live with?
Anyway,
first select your codebase. Then comes whether you work at a server
farm or not, and therefore have access to the boxes - 99% of the time
the answer is no, so you'll be looking for a remote-install CMS. You
can do the dev work on your local LAN. Then - what sort of CMS do you
want? Basic, with your own Dreamweaver page as a template; or maybe
with complex ACL; or with an existing shopping cart backend? Choose
one, then extend it yourself, if by some chance you don't like it
as-is; but you'd probably be better off joining the project.
Alternatively,
if you simply mean a couple of PHP pages to give some dynamic
capability, then you are probably going in the wrong direction -
semi-dynamic sites are a poor choice unless every single aspect needs
to be custom code. That's OK for commercial sites with big funding, but
doesn't suit many others.
Caution: we
see a lot of 'custom-built' ASP attempts at a CMS. Normally
they are about as good as a home-made nuclear reactor - it might sort
of do the job, but you really don't want to be anywhere near it...
For a skeleton solution, what about webDAV or .NET (depending on
whether you want to go LAMP or IIS)? Unless you need something really
special, though, you might be better off with something like CMS-MS,
maybe with a couple of new extensions to fit your intended profile.
Dynamic site webapps are a much better proposition all round if they
are a community effort, these days, so be sensible and join a project.
And to follow on from the last question, here is another one on basically the same point:Q : CMS 'XYZ' is no good - I'm going to build my own. What do you think?
A : Er - are you sure?
It is
fairly common to see, on forums and so on, developers writing something
like this or a variation: "I'm fed up with XXXX CMS, it just doesn't do
what I want, it's no good at all, it's buggy, I'm going to build my
own." Or a variation on this theme. This has two major errors that need
pointing out:
1. You chose completely the wrong CMS in the first place. They are
often targeted to a narrow functional area and you picked the wrong
one. You tried to use a CMS with no ACL for multi-group working; or a
provider-consumer CMS as a portal. Your fault, not the CMS.
2. There are 2,000 or more of them out there - find the right one for
your purposes. Join the project if it's OSS. If you find that only a
commercial CMS does something you wish an open-source app did - then
help to make that happen.All
CMS are incomplete or buggy according to one viewpoint or another. So
is every piece of software. It doesn't do what everyone wants, because
it can't - find one more suited to your purposes. All are 'buggy' to a
certain extent, especially if you are trying to make it do something it
is not suited for.Find a CMS - or especially an OSS CMS project
- that suits your purposes better, then help to improve it in the
direction you want. If you want ACL, use Drupal - don't try and make
Joomla do that because the core is not suitable. If you want
exceptionally capable ecommerce, then try and find a way to bridge a
full ecommerce app to a CMS - no CMS right now has native ecommerce
support on the scale of the full ecommerce packages. Don't try to make
an application do things it is not capable of doing.
A lot of people have been down the road you are on. Don't try and do all that work again, there's no point.And lastly: please, please, please validate your code. Research
the requirements for search engine compliance, and accessibility issues
- then incorporate that knowledge into your applications / extensions / sites / webpages. And validate the pages generated, before handing on to the client. Please.Once
again - for the Nth time - around seven or eight out of ten (that's up
to 80%) of web pages we work with are code trash. Even clients coming
to us with sparkling new websites that cost them a lot of $$ have sites
where all the pages have 50 - 100 code errors. As far as we are
concerned this is fraud. If the vast majority of developers and website
designers have never even heard of code validation, what point is there
in talking about accessibility, usability or other SEO issues?
Q: How to install dreamweaver on xampp?
A: Umm, er, I'd have to think about this one. It is one of the hardest questions I've been asked, actually.
An
excellent question to finish up with - and no, I didn't rig it. Truth
is stranger than fiction and even my fevered imagination couldn't have
produced this one...
OK,
let's try and work it out by stages then. I think there are two
approaches to this search query on Google that ended up on our site
(the swine, why can't they send those tricky ones somewhere else?): the
intricate technical possibilities of actually achieving the impossible
here; or assuming it was a typo and that it should have read: "How to install Dreamweaver [websites] on XAMPP?"
First
let's have a go at the improbable. Our task, should we choose to accept
it, is to install a client-side visual / HTML editor onto a server.
This tricky proposition might be just a little easier because it's
going to be a local machine - with XAMPP it has to be a LAN PC - so at
least we won't have to try it over the Net. On a Linux box.
We
won't ask the obvious question (why would you want to do this
anyway?!), we'll just wade in. Let's first install DW on the PC, that
should give us a start. Next, how can we serve it? Interesting. Well -
we can't really, as the visitor's browser will not be expecting a 60MB
.exe file, they normally get web pages. On the other hand this could be
a route to a new kind of webapp - you don't bother with a site, just
serve them an HTML editor and they can build their own. It will
probably need some AJAX. On second thoughts, Ruby on Rails would be the
tool for this, you can do anything with it (apparently).
So, how
about we serve a site we built in Dreamweaver instead; or would that be
cheating? To be honest I can't see how we're going to serve an HTML
editor anyway, so let's take this option - please.
1. Install Dreamweaver on PC.
2.
Create website, using htdocs directory as local root folder. That means
you can completely forget about the FTP procedure normally necessary -
this should be an excellent timesaver!
3. Or, go completely the
other way, and use a complex remote access procedure, to extend the job
by around 5,000%. If the LAN server is in the next room and you can't
be bothered to get up and go in there, and the government are paying -
well, this is the standard procedure I believe.
4. Serve website as per normal.
5. Ignore the fact that the usual method is a whole lot easier, whereby the editor (Dreamweaver) resides on your PC back home and you FTP the finished site pages up to the server.
Or, assuming the question was just a typo anyway in the first place:
1.
Build site on local PC as per usual; FTP up to site using built-in
Dreamweaver FTP client; run site off server as per usual. Or just
transfer the files by LAN or USB thumbdrive since the server is sitting
right next to you.
Hope this helps.
They
always say that, don't they, no matter how fatuous the answer.Though I
think it originated with Auntie Jill (who is not the least bit fatuous).-----------------------------------------------
Audience question, to panel: "How can I make sure Goggle indexes my pages correctly?"
Reply
1: Bruce, "You'll need a 5.75% k/w ratio plus a 3:1 PR sculpture on the
critical pages along with a minimum CTR ratio for the landing page ROI
profile of 3 ex 5."
(I was too far away but it sounded like that.)
Reply 2: Jill, "Oh, I shouldn't bother too much, just write it naturally. Don't worry, be happy."
Reply 3: Aaron, "Ignore them, they are parasites."
:))
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CMS FAQs - 3
