Tag Archives: joomla

CMS Updates

Updates for Joomla and WordPress users.

Today, WordPress 3.9 was released.

New features include:

  • Drag and drop images right into the editor.
  • Images formatted as galleries now show up in the editor.
  • Audio and Video Playlists.
  • Improvements to Widget editor and Themes with previews

wp-newThe built in updater will NOT upgrade your WordPress site automatically, this only works within the same point release. Contact 2020Media if you’d like us to backup, upgrade and test your site, or for just £12 let us do this for you for an entire year. See www.2020media.com/managedwp for details.

Joomla 3.3 is just around the corner.

An important change is that the minimum supported version of PHP will be PHP 5.3.10. Users who are unable to update to 3.3 due to the new PHP requirements are able to use the one click-click update, once they can update to PHP 5.3.10. You can quickly check this from your Joomla System – System information menu – last PHP Information tab.

The main features/changes of Joomla 3.3 are:

  • PHP 5.3.10 and above is now required
  • stronger password hashing storage
  • microdata implementation for Joomla content opens the door to better search engine experience
  • Replaces MooTools based JavaScript with jQuery equivalents
  • new cloud storage API

Read more on the changes at the Joomla Community site.

Joomla News

There’s a new Joomla version out – one reason to upgrade is the old version has a cross-site scripting vulnerability.

  • Version affected 2.5.14 and earlier 2.5.x versions. 3.1.5 and earlier 3.x versions.
  • Vulnerability: Inadequate filtering leads to XSS vulnerability in com_contact.

The other reason to upgrade is that Joomla 3.2 has a host of exciting new features. Here’s one of those trendy infographics to give you the details

Joomla 3.2 – 10 new features – An infographic by the team at JoomlArt.com

Less than 3 weeks until JoomlaDay UK 2013

Joomla!Day UK takes place on

Saturday 5th & Sunday 6th October 2013

(with a pre-event social on Friday, 4th October)

 

There is a great line-up of speakers from the UK, Europe and the USA who will be covering a huge range of topics pitched at all levels of experience, from complete newcomers to developers, designers and administrators.

Find out more and book on the JoomlaDay Site

 

Find out what’s new

Joomla! 3 – Are You Ready? Joomla! 3.x has many new features, including being responsive-friendly both front and back-end by default.

There are lots of exciting features being released in the forthcoming update 3.2 including a Rapid Application Development (RAD) layer and Content Versioning (allowing you to see who made changes and roll back).

Several speakers will be explaining these new features and exploring how you can use them with your own projects – it’s an ideal opportunity to make sure you’re up to date with the latest developments and stay ahead of the game with new features in the pipeline! Find out more and book your tickets here

2020Media Supports Joomla

joomladay2020Media had a stand at last years event but will be attended as delegates this time around. We hope to meet you there.

Read more about Joomla here.

Attention Joomla and WordPress users

Two updates within 24 hours.

1. Joomla users should check what version they are using and download and install the latest patch.

Joomla! version 2.5.13 and earlier 2.5.x versions; and version 3.1.4 and earlier 3.x versions has been declared vulnerable to Inadequate filtering leads to the ability to bypass file type upload restrictions. This basically means if you have a upload box on your site, hackers can use it to upload malicious code to your hosting space.

The solution is to upgrade today to the newest Joomla version, Upgrade to version 2.5.14 or 3.1.5 depending on which release you are on.

2. WordPress has released a new version, which fixes 700 bugs and includes a brand new template. The new version is 3.6 and all users are advised to upgrade.

2020Media strongly recommends users make a backup before doing an upgrade. We are also happy to do upgrade for customers on request, free of charge.

 

CMS Trends

Content Management Systems Market Share

We last looked at market share of web content management systems in 2011 so we thought it was time for an update.

Last time we looked, WordPress had a 14% market share of the entire web. Now its higher. WordPress is used by 17.7% of all the websites, that is a content management system market share of 54.9% (as many websites don’t use a recognisable content management system at all).

WordPress now claim to serve 65 million websites, up from 50 million 22 months ago. This includes hosted blogs.

Best of the Rest

Joomla has maintained it’s position as No.2 CMS with a 2.7% market share. Drupal is in 3rd place with 2.3%. Blogger (Google Blogs) has overtaken vBulletin with 1.3% of the web.

content management systems
Top content management systems May 2013

How to read the diagram from Web Technology Surveys:
67.8% of the websites use none of the content management systems that are monitored.
WordPress is used by 17.7% of all the websites, that is a content management system market share of 54.9%.

Trends

The trends look good for WordPress. It’s growth continues, and it is actively maintained and updated. New releases are generally welcomed by the community.

Trends
Trends

And not so good for Joomla. However Joomla has been much more active recently, so it will be worth watching to see if it can recover. Drupal appears to be in the midst of an internal restructuring so we will see how things change in the next 12 months. However it’s a firm favourite with a loyal band of developers so it’s not likely to disappear any time soon.

CMS Everywhere?

This graph shows the decline in websites that don’t use a content management system at all (that we could detect).

It’s goes from over 80% in 2010 to under 70% today. That’s a drop of 15% in 3 years.

Decline of sites with no cms
Decline of sites with no cms

The trend does seem to be flattening out, but here at 2020Media, we would say most – say 70% of new websites we host use a content management system.

Why use a CMS?

Content Management Systems (CMS) give non technical people the tools to add/edit web pages. Using a CMS running a website becomes all about the content and not the ins and outs of how it works. With a CMS a user doesn’t need to understand html or any other type of coding, a CMS allows a website owner to concentrate on the important stuff, the content.

Benefits:

  • Lower setup and operating costs
  • Website Owners keep control over site content
  • Page styles can be changes from a single source file
  • Multiple users can update a site at once

Why NOT use a CMS

  • Lack of personality – many CMS based sites use off the shelf templates and don’t look distintive or truly reflect the company or person they are about.
  • Lack of quality – A CMS can allow anyone to edit the site – and as it’s now so easy, this job is sometimes delegated to someone inadequately trained to do justice to the job. A website is your company or your personality on the web. Should it really be controlled by someone you barely trust to make the tea?
  • Poor design – When designing a site from scratch, a good designer will seek to find the right calls to action. Some CMS based sites are a morass of irrelevant information with no clear priority given to the most important content. But good design work can overcome this and succeed with a CMS.
  • Security – security is the bugbear of all CMS systems – they are victims of their own success and a target for hackers. Bad actors can target thousands of sites with the same attack script and will get some success. A hand coded site rarely gets attacked in the first place – even though it may still contain vulnerabilities. If someone is going after you in particular neither option is a guarantee of safety.

2020Media is a UK host specialising in hosting popular content mangement systems like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. We also provide standard PHP, ASP, Java and ColdFusion hosting platforms for any website.