Category Archives: Opinion

Opinion

Redesigning and relaunching a website

2020Media relaunched it’s website today – www.2020media.com

If there’s one thing that doesn’t change about the internet, it’s that it is constantly changing. As a web host founded 15 years ago, we’ve seen a lot of technologies develop and unfold across the ‘net, especially in the last couple of years. The hand-coded HTML website from the early days of the web are now a rarity, and developers, designers and end-users have embraced the CMS [Content Management System].

We’ve refocused our website and promote and inform our customers that 2020Media provides quality CMS hosting, with a special emphasis on open source. The open source stable of CMS software have taken a leading role across the web – over 60% of websites 1 now use a CMS of some kind or another. Blogging systems like WordPress have become full blown website development platforms, and specialist developer platforms like Drupal have become user friendly and widely adopted. There are also open source e-commerce and non-profit specialised systems that are equally prominent2.

Original Mini
Original Mini
New MINI
New MINI

Another reason to refresh a website is linked again to the fast pace of change on the internet. The Mini cars of 2014 still are recognisable progeny of the 1960 originals. However I’d challange anyone to compare a modern website with a 1996 example. So every few years it’s necessary to give a website a fresh look, taking account of modern fashions and fads, whether you like them or not!

With this in mind, and not wantingto end up on “Ancient and Abandoned Website that Still Work” we decided our own website was overdue a fresh look using an up to date CMS and the content needed editing and rewriting.

Like your neighbour the builder who’s own house looks like a explosion in a brick factory, our own build has taken weeks months years longer than planned! However there comes a moment when one can delay no longer and it’s time to publish (and be damned!).

newsite1There’s still a lot of work behind the scenes to update old links, complete certain sections (we do still offer broadband and servers!), and apply the various changes needed to get the best from search engines like Google and Bing.

Notes

1:http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all

2:http://www.2020media.com/shared-hosting/civcrm-hosting

Opinion

What Happens at a CiviCRM Meetup?

people at CiviCRM meetup at techhub
A recent London CiviCRM meetup

CiviCRM is the CRM system designed for non-profits. Not only is it an Enterprise level bit of software, it’s also open-source and free to download and install. Investing in a CRM (constituent relationship management) for an organisation of any size is a major undertaking, as it will likely underpin all the actions that organisation takes in relation to its supporters.

Therefore it’s best to evaluate the shortlist of CRM software in as much detail as possible. One way of doing that with CiviCRM is to go along to a meetup – an informal gathering of people intersested in the software. Usually led by an expert, meetups can take different formats. Here we present a typical line-up at the London CiviCRM group.

“The meetups are designed for those looking to find out more about CiviCRM or considering it for their organisation. There are always a mix of experience levels represented and are a great forum for asking your questions or meeting current users, implementors or developers who can help with your project.”

Running Order

  1.  Introduction to CiviCRM
  2. Case study (often presented by someone non-technical from a organisation using CiviCRM)
  3. Community update
  4. What’s new?

The London user group is especially lucky in that it is attended by several of the core development team of CiviCRM so it’s a fantastic opportunity to talk with them.

We at 2020Media have attended CiviCRM meetups and found them refreshingly non-techie, friendly to all skill levels, with many newcomers at every meeting (so there aren’t of those cliques of old hands who eye suspiciously any new face!). Many of the developers who are there especially like to talk with actual users and implementors (as do we, as a specialist CiviCRM Hosting Service Provider).

Find out about the next CiviCRM event near you at https://civicrm.org/civi-upcoming-events

 

Opinion

Drupal 8 is coming

1 Comment

Billed as “Something for Everyone to Love”, Drupal 8 is now in Beta testing and we are expecting the release of a final version soon.

Drupal8Tablet

The new release clearly owes a lot to WordPress, and this is no bad thing. WordPress is rightly praised for its ease of use, and conversely the opposite always been the first thing people say when they start to use Drupal. So from a user perspective, the new design and associated features such as the mobile admin interface can only benefit the Drupal community.

Content Creation in D8
Content Creation in D8

What has caused some controversy is the move to a completely different coding methodology (Drupal 7’s procedural code versus object-oriented programming (OOP) in Drupal 8). What’s the problem? It means developers have some work to do to migrate modules and themes to work in Drupal 8. Drupal is often used for enterprise and/or complex bespoke sites that have undergone a lot of customisation work (always one of the strengths of Drupal) and the coding change will result in a lot of work before an upgrade to the new version is possible.

However it is worth remembering that the previous major version change (from 6 to 7) was also a big jump (and has even resulted in many, many Drupal sites remaining on version 6).  A similar effect can be found in Joomla, with Joomla 1.0, 1.5 and 2/3 being majorly different from each other, with no simple upgrade available.  Only WordPress seems to have escaped this painful process so far. Perhaps WordPress benefiting from coming to the party later and learning from these other established CMS’s growing pains.

 

Key New Features in Drupal 8

Mobile in its DNA

Deploy content once and watch it display the way you want on any device.

Multilingual Capabilities

Translate anything in the system with built-in user interfaces.

New Configuration Management

Transport configuration changes and manage versions with ease.

Built-in Web Services

Build mobile apps with Drupal as the data source, or even post back to Drupal from the client.

Effortless Authoring

Use the WYSIWYG editor and in-place editing to quickly create formatted content and make changes on the fly.

Fun and Fast Theming

Build sites quickly with the fast, secure and flexible TWIG template engine.

Views, Out of the Box

Easily customize the front page, listing blocks, and more. Simply create custom admin pages, customize filters, actions, and more.

Field Power

Drupal 8 includes more field types in core, and lets you attach fields to more types of content like entity reference, link, date, e-mail, telephone, etc.

Better Markup with HTML 5

The page markup in Drupal 8 is now HTML 5-based. Each output template has simplified elements and classes with native input tools for mobile fields like date, email and phone.

Industry Standard Approach

Non-Drupal developers can embrace object oriented programming and proven technologies from the larger PHP community.

CMS Market Share – March 2014

Let’s take a look at the latest distribution of market share amongst the most popular website content management systems (all supported by 2020Media, natch!)

  1. WordPress 60.2%
  2. Joomla 8.7%
  3. Drupal 5.4%

A year on year comparison shows why Drupal just might be making radical changes (click to enlarge slide):

Market share trends
Market share trends

Whilst WordPress continues to grow, Joomla more or less holds it position but Drupal is clearly losing share. Is the drop due to the uncertainty over what Drupal 8 would hold, or is it the end-users are switching to easier to use CMS systems and this downswing is temporary and the new look D8 will win them back?

2020Media will be watching developments and will keep you updated.

Opinion

Super Fast Hosting

We make every effort to keep our hosting and network as fast as possible. We have multiple redundant links out to the rest of the internet and our network is entirely under our own control.

We recommend customers use third-party sites to test their websites as results from your own browser can be misleading (due to caching).

Website loading speed is mainly affected by the page design itself – one with a lot of large images is clearly going to take longer than a text only page.

However a customer recently responded to our annual survey and I happened to check his site against third-party testing site Pingdom.com. Have a look at these cool results:

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/ezZWtk/http://mso.org.uk

Yes your eyes do not deceive you, MSO.ORG.UK is faster than 96% of all tested websites

mso.org.uk testing results
mso.org.uk testing results

If you visit the site, www.mso.org.uk it’s by no means a plain text boring website – so all credit to the web designer (and a pat on the back for us!)

Opinion

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.