All posts by 2020Media Blogger

2020Media is a leading UK web host offering Linux and Windows website hosting. The company specialises in WordPress, Joomla and Drupal support.

Church Wi-Fi and 2020media

“Every church should have Wi-Fi, says Andrew Lloyd Webber”

By Tracey Nolan from Toronto, Canada (Andrew Lloyd Webber - Colour) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Andrew Lloyd Webber
This was the headline today, and reported by The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and The Sun.  Lord Lloyd Webber, who sits as a Conservative member in the House of Lords, indicated that discussions over installing internet for the general public at churches have already taken place with the Government. He said: ”I want to get every church in the country on Wi-Fi. ”Once you do that, the church becomes the centre of the community again.

This would make churches a more integral part of the community, he says.

It’s caught the imagination of the Twitter flock too:

Church Wi-fi is being discussed on Twitter
Church Wi-fi is being discussed on Twitter

How do Churches go about offering Wi-Fi in a safe and responsible way?

High Performance Cisco Access Points
High Performance Cisco Access Points

The managed Wi-Fi hotspot service from 2020Media offers a solution that provides value for money and internet safety.

Key Features

  • Enterprise principles applied to a small business priced package.
  • Cloud Managed so no expensive on-site visits are necessary.
  • Capture user logon details to provide compliance with UK legislation.
  • Hotspot page fully brandable.
  • Firewall and Traffic Management built-in with local network isolation.
  • Block inappropriate websites at no extra cost.

2020Media has years of experience offering SME internet solutions and has worked with non-profits to get the best possible value for their constituents.

Call us to arrange a no obligation demo, or to find out more about what we can offer. Tel: 0370 321 2020

Other Benefits of Managed Wi-Fi

WiFi with Facebook Login

  • Build Loyalty
    Guests can post a story to their News Feed, showing their friends they visited your location and promoting your organization by virtual word-of-mouth.
  • WiFi with Facebook Login
    Deep integration between the Wi-Fi hotspot and Facebook lets your customers connect to WiFi by checking in on Facebook, using your organization’s Facebook Page as a splash page.

WiFi with Facebook Login gives organizations access to aggregate and anonymous demographic data Facebook provides about visitors.

Location Analytics

  • Use the cloud control panel to compare visitor trends between sites or after launching campaigns, and to find the effect of actions on visitor dwell time or repeat visit frequency. Customize the display to show data for a specific day, weekend, or even trends over a month.

 Contact 2020Media to find out more

Call us to arrange a no obligation demo, or to find out more about what 2020Media can offer. Tel: 0370 321 2020

 

Joomla 2.5.28 released and what it means to you

The Joomla project has released Joomla 2.5.28 that has been tagged as the last release in the Joomla 2.5 series.

Officially, as of December 31, 2014, the Joomla 2.5 series will no longer be supported. This means that there are no new releases planned for Joomla 2.5, as the Joomla project is putting all its efforts in its Joomla 3.3 and upcoming 3.4 series

There are no security related fixes in the Joomla 2.5.28 release, so there is no real rush to upgrade. However as this is the last of the Joomla 2.5 series you should start planning to upgrade your Joomla 2.5 websites to the even more secure, feature rich and mobile ready Joomla 3.3.6 environment. From January 1st Joomla 3.X will be the only security maintained release.

Joomla have a mini-guide on the uprade process: https://docs.joomla.org/Planning_for_Mini-Migration_-_Joomla_2.5_to_3.x

Differences between Joomla 2.5 and Joomla 3.3

The main differences between Joomla 2.5 and Joomla 3.3 that will most likely influence your upgrade situation are:

  1. Joomla 3.3 uses Bootstrap, where Joomla 2.5 does not. The Bootstrap markup makes your Joomla website responsive, which means that your Joomla website should look great in all viewing devices (desktop, tablets and mobile phones)
  2. Joomla 3.3 uses jQuery, where Joomla 2.5 does not.
  3. Joomla 3.3 needs PHP 5.3.10+, but Joomla 2.5 will work on PHP 5.2.4+. (Please check with us if the server that runs your site now meets this requirement)
  4. Joomla 3.3 needs MYSQL 5.1+, but Joomla 2.5 will work on MYSQL 5.0.4+.

In addition to these high-level differences your upgrade process may run into snags due to one or more of the following issues:

  1. Extension compatibility (in case you have installed some third-party extensions on your Joomla 2.5 site that are not Joomla 3.3 compatible)
  2. Template compatibility (there are some differences in the Joomla templating system that will most likely make your Joomla 2.5 template not fully compatible with Joomla 3.3)

Planning your Upgrade

Before starting to upgrade, you should do your homework. You have a live website that you need to upgrade, so spend some time to carefully plan your upgrade project (yes, you should view it as a project).

Here are some planning steps that will help you:

  1. Verify that your hosting environment supports the Joomla 3.3 technical requirements (PHP 5.3.10+ and MYSQL 5.1+). If it does not ask your host helpdesk to upgrade your account appropriately.
  2. This is a great opportunity to remove any inactive extsnions you have on your Joomla 2.5 website. There is no need to keep old inactive extensions on your website and it does pose a security threat in the first place.
  3. Make a list of all your third-party extensions (modules, components and plugins) installed on your Joomla 2.5 website. Visit each extension provider website and make sure that you have the latest version and that this version is also Joomla 3.3 compatible. Some extensions might have a new – only for Joomla 3.3 – extension release. If this is the case, then download such releases and keep them handy for your post Joomla 3.3 upgrade steps. Some extensions (usually modules) might need post upgrade configuration changes due to the new CSS stylings (and Bootstrap) present in Joomla 3.3 – make a list of needed changes for each one.
  4. Contact your template provider and download the Joomla 3.3 template version or ask them for specific instruction on changes that need to be made to your Joomla 2.5 template once you have upgraded to Joomla 3.3.

 

Upgrade Steps

Once you have done your planning steps and have all your resources ready (e.g., new template, new extension, etc.).  you can follow these steps:

  1. Make a backup of your Joomla 2.5 website before starting – even better to clone your Joomla 2.5 website and test the upgrade process on the clonned site before replicating it on your production site.
  2. Verify that your Joomla 2.5 site is on using Joomla 2.5.28. If it is not, you can easily upgrade to Joomla 2.5.28 from your Joomla 2.5 Component → Joomla Update page
  3. Verify that your third-party extensions are the latest Joomla 2.5 (and Joomla 3.3 if possible) compatible versions. You should have done this in step 2 of the planning process, but you can also do a sanity check by making sure that there are no reported upgrades in your Joomla 2.5 Control panel Updates icon or your Extension → Extension Manager → Update tab.
  4. Go back to your Joomla 2.5 Component → Joomla Update page and click on the Options button and then change the Update Server parameter in your Update Source tab from Long Term Support (recommended) to Short Term Support and click the Save button. Please note that these parameter settings are no longer accurate as Joomla 3.X will be supported for at least 2-4 years.
  5. Your Joomla 2.5 Component → Joomla Update page should now show you the option to one click install the latest Joomla 3.3.6 (or better) release. Click in the Install the update button.

Your Joomla 2.5 website has been upgraded to Joomla 3.3 and you are now ready for your post upgrade process steps.

 

Post Upgrade Steps

Now that your website has been upgraded to the latest Joomla 3.3 release, you can follow these post upgrade steps:

  1. Visit your Joomla 3.3 Extensions → Template Manager and select the isis – Default template as your Administrator template.
  2. Install any Joomla 3.3 extension upgrades you identified during step 2 of your planning phase and/or make any post upgrade changes recommended by your third-party developers.
  3. Install your new Joomla 3.3 compatible template from your template provide and/or make any changes to your existing template.
  4. Test and inspect everything – frontend and backend.

 

Default Joomla Template Upgrade Steps

As indicated in step one of the previous section your Joomla 3.3 administrator template should be set to Isis – Default.

If your Joomla 2.5 website was using one of the built-in Joomla site templates, e.g., Beez2-Default, you can choose to use one of the Joomla 3.3 site templates, e.g. Protostar – Default. If this is the case, you may also need to change the position of your main menu module from position-7 (which was the case on your Joomla 2.5 default template environment) to position-1 (for the Protostar template on Joomla 3.3). You should also set your Menu Class Suffix on your main menu module to nav-pills to get the default menu styling on Joomla 3.3.

 

Conclusion

Upgrading from Joomla 2.5 to Joomla 3.3 is not as complicated as you may think. Proper planning and doing your homework should get you to your Joomla 3.3 – very secure and totally responsive – website.

Credits

Article adapted from http://www.joomlapolis.com/support/tutorials/95-installation/18478-migrating-from-joomla-25-to-joomla-33?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=news20141215, Joomlapolis is the creator of Community Builder.

Drupalgeddon – our response

drupalgeddonDrupalgeddon!

The recent #drupalgeddon incident and comments from a customer made us rethink how we apply Drupal updates for customers (2020Media is a leading UK Drupal hosting provider. We offer a tuned hosting environment for Drupal that is fast and responsive).

For those who missed it on the BBC news and elsewhere, ‘drupalgeddon’  was a security weakness in the Drupal content management system which allowed attackers to take over websites.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29846539

Mark Stockley, an analyst at security firm Sophos, said the warning was “shocking”. “Many site owners will never have received the announcement and many that did will have been asleep,” he said. “What Drupal badly needs but doesn’t have is an automatic updater that rolls out security updates by default.” There is strong feeling on both sides with many arguing against “dumbing down” Drupal.

Whilst we wait for an auto-update mechanism in Drupal (perhaps in Drupal 8?), we’ve always been able to update Drupal for our customers. It’s a free service but one done “on request”.

We do not apply updates automatically to any and all Drupal sites we host for a very good reason. The risk of breaking a customer’s site is too great. It’s worth noting the Drupalgeddon security problem was the first such in 9 years. So it’s arguable the risk of such a security problem happening again on such a scale is manageably small. Drupal updates typically replace the entire Drupal codebase, leaving just the /sites/ folder untouched. If a  customer or their developer has made any changes to a core file, these changes will be wiped out.
Sometimes a bug will be fixed or a feature changed as a result of an update. The site may well have a work around in place already for the bug and the update will then cause the site to break. These are just a few of the reasons.

The problem for us is, we did not build the site in the first place, nor are we familiar with it’s inner workings. So for us to be sure the site is in a working state after an update is very hard to do. A working homepage does not signify the site is 100% working. If the customer is going to be involved, which in our view they have to be, to check the site after the update, they should be involved all the way through – from the point of getting a Drupal notification email of an update, or getting a notification from the Drupal security list through to the timing of the update, to checking the site afterwards in case a roll back is required.

What changes have we made? Actually very little. We have simply streamlined our internal processes to make the technical side of doing the update a lot quicker. A lot of our customers have several sites with us. So we are now using some simply scripting so we can update all a customers sites, once they give us the go ahead.

Inspiration for the scripting came from Dane Powell ‘s blog: http://danepowell.com/node/69

Our version of the script is:

Update Multiple Drupal Sites Script


#!/usr/bin/env bash
installpath[1]=/our/pathtosite1
installpath[2]=/our/pathtosite2
installpath[3]=/our/pathtosite3
for index in 1 2 3
do
filepath=${installpath[index]}
printf "Updating %s\n" "$filepath"
cd $filepath
drush pm-refresh
drush archive-dump --overwrite --destination=/pathforbackups/backup.tar
yes | cp .htaccess ../
drush vset --always-set maintenance_mode 1
drush cache-clear all
drush up drupal --yes
drush vset --always-set maintenance_mode 0
drush cache-clear all
yes | cp ../.htaccess ./
chown -R apache:apache ./
done

 Notes on the script.

This script is for discrete Drupal sites, not Drupal multisite.

We copy .htaccess out of the way and put it back afterwards and we noticed Drupal updates sometimes overwrote the original.

The final steps resets the file ownership permissions on the site to whatever your webserver runs as. If using suphp this would need to be changed.

Output is written to the command line so you can see what is going on.

Use at your own risk. Comments and improvements are welcome.

Joomla User Group Report

The London Joomla user group meeting took place on 21 October 2014. I went along and this is my report.

jugl

The London meetup takes place every month on the 3rd Tuesday. More details can be found at the user group’s dedicated website at http://www.joomlalondon.co.uk/

The meeting started with general news on Joomla.

We were reminded that several security fixes have been released recently and these should be applied by website administrators as soon as possible.

One of the meeting regulars, Hugh, is a JED maintainer (the JED is the Joomla Extension Directory and is where you’ll find all the possible extensions, plugins and components to Joomla). Hugh reported that there is a new version of the JED imminent. However unlike the last overhaul, extensions will not need to be resubmitted.

Our discussion then moved onto some general tips for Joomla developers.

A useful tip for developers was that right-clicking and viewing source in Firefox/Chrome will highlight in red any unclosed tags.

We learned that Chrome’s developer mode has an option for viewing a site as if it was on a mobile device, along with connection speeds. However some users said it wasn’t very accurate.

Phil and Joe from SoftForge demonstrated the useful ability to set breakpoints in code within Chrome, which is a useful technique for debugging Javascript – and extremely helpful if using AJAX.

Hugh gave us a useful demo of a recently built site for a client and demonstrated some beautiful design techniques.

We then listened to two talks which had been given at the recent Joomla Day event.

Hugh Douglas-Smith
Hugh Douglas-Smith

Workflows with Joomla and Administrator Shortcuts. Both presented by Hugh. Hugh’s company can be found at http://www.webappz.co.uk/

Workflows with Joomla

Hugh presented a walkthrough of creating a workflow using off-the-shelf Joomla components. The example given was a website that offers loan applications.

The workflow given was for a customer to apply for a loan and then the various steps of processing the application being setup and viewable.

The technique used was using User Groups to keep track of the different stages. Menu items are given permission such that they are only visible to specific user groups, and the user is moved from group to group as they progress through the process.

The first stage, where the user submitted the form required some custom PHP code to change the usergroup for the user, and to refresh the session so that the user immediately saw the updated menu.

Administrator Shortcuts

Too many to mention but a few highlights for me:

  • Parameters can be added to a menu link
  • User redirects on login
  • Language overrides can be used to include variables
  • Article Editor can be customised per user – very useful if giving to a non-skilled user
  • Removing Unused CSS Selectors from a Website – the Dust-me browser plugin http://www.brothercake.com/dustmeselectors/
  • What software is that website running – another browser plugin: https://wappalyzer.com/
  • Making notes/messages appear in Admin – this is done within the Module Manager.
  • Create a “Standard” install if you regularly build sites by using Akeebabackup.

For the final part of the meeting we talked about our favourite extensions and more Joomla news.

A particlualry useful extension which most of us had not heard about was Kazaaman automatic menu manager. Whenever a new article is created, this plugin will create a menu item for it.

This is a plugin that creates a menu, and automatically maintains it. You can see the menu in your Joomla menu manager, and use it exactly like any other menu. It is a tree menu, and it maintains your category and article tree structure perfectly in your new menu.

KazaamOf particular interest to me, was the revelation that Joomla is so dependent on menus that if you create articles that aren’t linked in menus (I tend to link only the top level of a site to the main menu, and then link within articles to other articles), Joomla really doesn’t like this and you will see in the url that it’s created a baffling structure of sub-categories. If however every article belongs in a menu, then this does not happen and you can control your url structure. The menu does not need to be shown – it can be inactive.

Finally, Joomla 2.5 LTS is coming to end of life in December 2014. This means the Joomla team will no longer be providing security and other updates to it. The LTS stands for Long Term Support, and there will be a version of Joomla 3 that will become the new LTS version in due course. The new mechanism for this is that Joomla 3.x will continue with regular releases until Joomla 4 comes along. At that point, the final released version of Joomla 3.x will become the LTS version.

If you’d like to know more about Joomla, need help with your website, or would like to see the services 2020Media offers for Joomla, please see: http://www.2020media.com/shared-hosting/joomla-hosting

2020Media and WordPress

2020Media is a internet company with a established track record. In this post we’ll find out why 2020Media and WordPress make such a strong solution for any business or non-commercial site.

The Rise and Rise of WordPress

wordpress-logo-textWordPress has come a long way in the past ten years, evolving from a niche blogging tool into the undisputed king of content management systems in the world.

But what was it about WordPress that allowed it to flourish where so many have languished? The story of its success is simple: bloggers needed a quick and easily customisable platform to host their content and WordPress offered a free, open sourced publishing tool that people could adopt and tweak as they wished. But the days of WordPress being simply a ‘blogging platform’ are long gone. The past 10 years have seen the software evolve into a sophisticated content management system that users can build entire websites and applications on.

Over the years it’s seen its fair share of rivals from the likes of Blogger to Joomla, but with recent research revealing that WordPress now accounts for a 62% share of the content management system market, it’s clear the system is now leagues ahead of the competition. An astonishing 23% of all websites in the world are published using WordPress (source: http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all).

 2020Media – a UK web host with a great track record.

heart2020Media was founded by three friends in 1999. Initially working in streaming media and Java, the company soon broadened it’s services into web hosting, domain names and internet services.  Over the first few years (and the first DotCom bubble), 2020Media gradually brought all the essential services in house so that it was no longer dependent on any one supplier for any part of it’s services. This included joining RIPE in 2002, using independent datacentres, and becoming an accredited domain name registrar.

With a keen personal interest in Internet Governance, emerging web technologies and the open source movement, the directors have guided 2020Media into it’s current position as a leading UK web host with a highly skilled and knowledgeable team of experts ideally placed to help the SME market, tech-savvy entrepreneurs, local government and the non-profit sector achieve their goals on the internet.

WordPress and 2020Media Together.

2020Media has specialised in hosting WordPress sites for several years. We proudly support many WordPress events, share our knowledge, and try to give back to this open-source project in as many ways as we can.

Join us on Twitter
Join us on Twitter

Our friendly UK support team is available 24/7 by phone, web and email. The expert team solves hosting, domain and WordPress specific issues. We make sure every team member sees each support issue as a personal challenge and we’ve never found a problem too tough to solve.

Our aim in providing superior WordPress Hosting is threefold:

  • Security: Never compromise on WordPress security. Daily backups on every site.
  • Performance: Optimised WordPress servers. Advanced caching technology. A network built for speed & security.
  • Support: To be there whenever our customers need us and to be proactive in sharing expertise and advice.
Your Partner for a Safe, Reliable WordPress Host

Through our community involvement in WordPress, our daily experience in working with the software, and our established track record as a UK web host, 2020Media could be the last host you’ll ever need.

Hosting plans come as off-the-shelf or bespoke and range from shared hosting for under £50/year to virtual and dedicated servers. Support is included. Managed WordPress (WordPress maintenance services) brings additional peace of mind to keep each site fully patched, optimised and backed up.

Read more about our web hosting plans, our WordPress maintenance services, or 2020Media the company.

Contact us and we’ll be delighted to talk about what you need from an ISP – that’s Internet Services Partner…