Category Archives: Opinion

Opinion

Joomla! Day UK 2011

1 Comment

2020Media was proud to sponsor this year’s Joomla! conference Sept 24-25th 2011.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB8LyRosHzE

Joomla!Day events are a great opportunity for the community to come together and share learning, find out about the latest developments, meet the people behind the extensions which they use, and network with others who are involved in this area of website design.

With 175 delegates from around the world, Joomla!Day UK 2011 brought together people from all walks of life with every possible level of experience with Joomla! – from complete beginners who had never installed the popular open source content management system, through to developers who have been part of the team since the project began, and everything in between.

Microsoft kindly provided their offices, allowing the event exclusive use of their amazing facilities including a 200+ seat auditorium and 15 breakout rooms, as well as excellent hostesses who ensured that everybody was registered quickly and found their way to the right rooms during the event.

Videos of the sessions are being edited and will be appearing on the Joomla!Day UK 2011 website and YouTube channel, along with slides from all speakers.

Ryan Ozimek, the President of Open Source Matters (OSM), gave the keynote on the first day.

Ryan reminded the conference that the future for Joomla goes well beyond the CMS. The CMS has been an amazing piece of software, built by the community and extended by the community, but has been focused mostly on Web publishing. Ryan said “When I visit universities and talk to young people, they’re not that interested in building the next commenting system or blogging platform. They want to use Joomla to build the next Twitter or Facebook.”

2020Media is a proud supporter of the Joomla! project from events like Joomla!Day, Usergroups, the Extension Directory and providing top-class hosting facilities here in the UK.

Opinion

WordPress London Meetup 22nd September

3 interesting talks encouraged members of the London WordPress Meetup group to fill the venue to capacity on Thursday evening.

BuddyPress

Buddy Press Dev Paul Gibbs
Paul Gibbs

Core developer Paul Gibbs talked us through the new release of BuddyPress, the social network “out of the box” plugin for WordPress. BuddyPress 1.5 is an almost complete recoding of the plugin, taking advantage of the new features in WordPress 3 and above. It  includes a new theme with a fresher look (as many users never attempted to create their own), more complete documentation so that developers and designers can take and extend the core plugin code, and the ability to embed media from sites such as YouTube directly in your site.

WordPress E-Commerce

Jeff Ghazally WP-Ecommerce developer
Jeff Ghazally

Jeff Ghazally, one of the developers of the WordPress e-commerce plugin called WP e-commerce spoke about the new version of this plugin, and demo-ed setting up a online music store for digital music downloads in under 5 minutes. Although the core plugin is free, most users need to purchase a plugin add-on to give them the functionality they require. Add-ons range from $10-$195. Community plugins add more specific tasks. WP-ecommerce downloads total over 1.3 million to date, making it one of the all-time most popular plugins.

Better WordPress Search

Shakur Shidane
Shakur Shidane talks about SOLR search

Developer Shakur Shidane gave us an overview of using Apache SOLR project to add a full featured search to WordPress sites. Search in WordPress is pretty simply – for example it can’t recognise the similarity between “smile” and “smiling”. The SOLR project includes and much more. Although not suitable for most small WordPress users on shared hosting, due to the technology requirements, Shakur’s talk showed us the WordPress can be used for the biggest of sites when required.

Hosting for WordPress

The talks this week at WordPress London showed us just how powerful WordPress can be. From a fully featured social network for your specific group, to extensive e-commerce ability, to high powered search, WordPress is ready for heavy lifting.

If you have a WordPress project coming up that may need specialist support, why not get in touch with us? 2020Media offers specialist hosting support for WordPress for all sizes of website. With ‘no-click’ WordPress install, experienced and friendly technical help and free support, the team at 2020Media are waiting to hear from you.

 

Opinion, Tips and Tricks

London Joomla User Group report

1 Comment

joomla UG LondonThe September London Joomla User Group meeting took place with less than a week to go until the only UK Joomla conference of 2011 – Joomla!Day UK 2011. Several of the speakers were at the meeting and we were given a preview of one of the talks coming up on Sunday.

Coupon code for 100% discount on your extra tickets is MAXIMUM.

Use the code for today (Wednesday 21st September) only.

Other topics discussed were getting Joomla running on a local Windows setup for development (Microsoft’s Web Matrix was recommended); the imminent release of the long awaited VirtueMart 2 – this will actually be released during Joomla Day London; a discussion about everyone’s favourite extensions; and finally we talked about making Joomla fast.

Jet Set Joomla

rockettheme- AfterburnerWe asked what the fastest Joomla theme was – Afterburner from Rockettheme was suggested; honourable mentions went to Joomlapolis and Morph.

To further increase your site’s speed, use of a content delivery network was suggested – although not free, these can definitely help. If you sign up via the guy who makes the Joomla plugin there’s a discount for one popular commerical CDN.

Use Firebug for Firefox to check the download speed of all the components of your site – find out if anything is dragging your load times down.

 

 

Opinion

Preview New Features

Here’s a sneak preview of some new features we’ll be adding later this year for our customers.

Improved Reporting

Users of our customer portal will be able to get a daily report of their service usage. This example features bandwidth reporting:

Bandwidth Report
Bandwidth Report

These new reports will cover website bandwidth, disk quota, broadband usage etc.

Automatic Renewal

What would happen if your main domain name expired? You’ve asked for automatic renewal of domain names and services, so we’re working to introduce this soon. Payment systems and domain registry backend systems are being integrated so that if you have a registered continuous payment method set up, such as Direct Debit, we can seamlessly allow you to set your services to auto-renew. Unlike some companies, we’ll never make this mandatory and you’ll always have the choice.

Key Benefits

  • Simplifies your life; your 2020Media subscription is automatically renewed every year without any action required by you.
  • Saves time and reduces stress, you don’t have to worry about remembering to pay for your subscription before it expires.
  • Automatically receive the appropriate best pricing for your hosting plan.
  • Never miss your payments, avoid charges for arrears or court costs on overdue invoices.
  • Avoid redemption and reactivation charges on expired domains.
  • Opt-out of automatic renewal service at any time.

Simple, secure and making our payment system more streamlined.

Customer Portal

customer portal thumbnailHave you looked in the 2020Media customer portal recently? This is the hub of all your 2020Media products and services.

Portal Docs

  • All invoices can be downloaded at any time.
  • Renewal notices are archived here.
  • 30 day Financial statement, generated daily.
  • 90 day statement, generated monthly.
  • Account credentials  available 24/7
  • Usage reports (coming soon)
  • Services listed with important dates (updated on request)

Tickets

  • Keep track of support queries with My Tickets.
  • View the complete history of the query.
  • Search facility – locate previous requests.
  • Open and respond to queries via email or the web.
  • Works with mobile devices with specially optimised view.

The customer portal also includes an area where you can update your profile and password. Add social media links, and upload a photo.

Login to the customer portal at  https://pfs.2020media.com/ and let us know what you think.

 

 

 

Opinion

Events

We’ve searched out the UK events for some of the hosting technologies we offer. Hope to see you there!

CiviCon London 2011

CiviCRM logoCiviCon London is only a few weeks away and covers all things CiviCRM, the free CRM system designed with non-profits in mind. If you’re still on the fence about attending, check out the interesting slate of sessions, including “Raising millions for charity with CiviContribute”, “CiviCampaign and CiviEngage in the wild”, “CiviCRM and human rights work”, and more:

Register at:  http://london2011.civicrm.org/

More about CiviCRM: http://www.2020media.com/civicrm

 

DrupalCon

drupal logoDrupalCon London takes place August 22 -26, 2011.

DRUPALCON LONDON HAS SOLD OUT – But you can sign up for the waiting list.

Keynote speaker Dries Buytaert is the original creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform. 2020Media is a strong supporter of Drupal, and recently became a Silver supporter of the Drupal organisation – helping to promote and support development of future versions.

Registration: http://london2011.drupal.org/

More about Drupal: www.2020media.com/drupal

 

How to Open your Conference

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc

 

WordPress Meetup

wordpress logoWordCamp was held in Portsmouth UK on 16-17 July 2011 at the University of Portsmouth.

http://2011.portsmouth.wordcampuk.org/

Presentations: http://wiki.wordcampuk.org/2011_event_reports

Most useful: http://www.slideshare.net/nickgarner/worodcamp-uk-porstmouth-advanced-seo-for-wordpress – a really cool report on advanced SEO.

More about WordPress: www.2020media.com/wordpress

 

 

Joomla!Day UK 2011

joomladayThe 3rd JoomlaDay in the UK takes place on Saturday 24th September 2011 and Sunday 25th September and will be hosted at the Microsoft Conference Centre, Cardinal Place, Victoria, London.

The first day is the formal conference and is split into 4 streams: Newcomers, Administrator, Designer, Developer

Register at: http://www.joomladayuk2011.org

More about Joomla: www.2020media.com/joomla

 

Java/Tomcat?

Tomcat logoWe can’t find one in the UK this year. There are plenty of local groups having regular meetups though. See http://java.meetup.com/ to find a local group. If there’s nothing close to where you live, why not start one!

Spring: http://skillsmatter.com/user-group/home/london-spring-user-group

More about Java Tomcat: www.2020media.com/java

 

 

ColdFusion

a box of coldfusionThe annual ColdFusion event is called Scotch on the Rocks. This took place 3-4 March 2011 in Edinburgh, and was a sell out event. Booking early for next year will be essential. To find out what happened, see

http://www.scotch-on-the-rocks.co.uk/blog/

Keep an eye on: http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/events/

Usergroup: http://www.ukcfug.org/

More groups here: http://groups.adobe.com/

More about ColdFusion: www.2020media.com/coldfusion

 

In Summary

Not everyone has the time, money or inclination to go to a conference – but they are definitely worthwhile. If you’ve never been to a technical conference you may be surprised – they tend to be more casual, relaxed places than you might expect.