How important is trust on the internet? Are our online identities safe?
These are just some of the questions likely to come up at the 2013 UK Internet Governance Forum which takes place on Tuesday 10th September in Central London.
Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, Ed Vaizey MP is already confirmed as a keynote speaker. Other leading commentators from politics, academia, civil society and industry will also contribute to the debate and help to influence the next global Internet Governance Forum.
The Childnet IGF Youth delegation will also bring the views of younger users to the discussions.
The event will also be attended by Internet Society UK England Chapter http://www.internetsociety.org.uk/, a free to join society for all those with an interest in having a say in the shape of the internet in years to come.
Dates have been announced for a WordPress conference in London later this year.
The very first WordCamp London will take place on 23rd & 24th November 2013!
The two day event will have one main conference day and the second day will be a Contribute Day where you can come along, hack, write, support, and contribute to WordPress.
The conference day on 23rd November will be held at the Bishopsgate Institute. The Contributor day on 24th November will be help at Mozilla Spaces in London.
What’s a WordCamp?
“WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other”.
The first day will comprise presentations from WordPress experts and enthusiasts from the UK and around the world. The second day will be a Contributor Day – both seasoned and new community members will spend the day working on the project.
The next London Meetup is just around the corner and it would be great to see you there. It will be taking place on Wednesday 29 May from 5:30pm – 8:30pm (talks starting at 6pm) at Wikimedia UK, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London, LON EC2A 4LT.
For those interested in using CiviCRM these sessions are a great way to learn more about how it works and get feedback from those already using Civi. If you’ve previously been to a meetup or use CiviCRM then you already know how great it is but you can still learn more about the different modules of Civi and perhaps get some inspiration of what more CiviCRM can do for you.
WPMU recently published a post on free WordPress themes from premium theme developers.
Theme designers who generally charge for their work, often list a couple of free themes as a showcase. Typically these are hard to find, but this post brings a list of 120 themes together.
My only reservation is to check the age of any themes you decide to use – check if it will work with the current WordPress version (and will it be supported in the future).
2020Media’s managed WordPress service keeps WordPress, themes and plugins up to date to your site is safe and secure.
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.
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
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
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.
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