Category Archives: Opinion

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.

Opinion

Blogging Trends

2 Comments

Has WordPress reached a tipping point? Right now 14% of the web is powered by WordPress. That’s an astonishing statistic.

comparison of top blogging platforms
Comparison of top blogging platforms - July 2011

According to the WordPress stats page, there are over 50 million websites using WordPress. About 25 million of these are WordPress.com sites – that is, sites that are hosted by WordPress themselves on their shared blogging platform. These hosted sites are in the main blogs rather than full-blown websites. As a specialist in WordPress hosting, we find customers need the extra power you get with Self-Hosted WordPress, which is what we provide.

It was in September last year that Microsoft gave users of it’s Windows Live Spaces blogging platform 6 months to move to WordPress. From what we’ve heard, the transition was smooth. Live Spaces once hosted 7m bloggers and had 300m visitors.

The Google owned blogging service ‘Blogger’ doesn’t publish user numbers, but it’s thought to be around 15-20 million. In July of 2011 it was announced that Google intends to change the name of the service from “Blogger” to “Google Blogs,”. Whether this rebranding will have a negative or positive affect remains to be seen.

So what is WordPress’s secret?

Here are some of the features of WordPress

WordPress.com Features

  • Free hosting for up to 3GB worth of space
  • Blog content is maintained on WordPress.com web servers
  • Ability to choose and customize templates (limited flexibility)
  • Easy to get started; easy to use
  • Upload and store image, video, and other (limited) file formats

WordPress Self-Hosted Features

  • Blog content is maintained on user’s preferred web host
  • Nearly unlimited ability to choose and customize templates and widgets
  • Takes some technical ability to setup and configure – that why you should choose 2020Media!
  • Files support limited only by web server, which likely means more than you’d ever need.

Use as content management systems

Finally, we look at the use of software that started out as blogging platforms as full blown content management systems. Many of our customers use WordPress as a website content management system, not as a blog.

Once again, WordPress is leading the way.

Top content management systems
Top content management systems

How to read the diagram from Web Technology Surveys:
73.5% of the websites use none of the content management systems that we monitor.
WordPress is used by 14.5% of all the websites, that is a content management system market share of 54.6%.

So although most websites surveyed didn’t use a content management system that could be detected, of those that could WordPress was again the clear leader.

 

Opinion, Tips and Tricks

Themes that do more

4 Comments

The WordPress.org website includes an online directory of thousands of completely free themes. WordPress insists on GPL licensing which also means these themes are free to modify to your own custom design if you wish.

There are also many many sites offering paid for themes. The quality is generally high and if you are after something that gives your site instant wow appeal, it can be worth spending a few pounds on a theme. Expect to pay USD $35- USD $95 (GBP £20 – GBP £60) for a theme.

This post is about WordPress themes that do more than just change the appearance of your site. We’re looking at themes that include specific functionality. This often means the theme comes with extra plugins to perform these roles.

Business Directory

The DirectoryPress WordPress theme is a complete theme and plugin. Cost  is USD $79. The theme includes maps, payment gateways for paid directory listings and around 20 different template designs.

Business Directory for WordPress is a plugin only. It allows simple text based listing, submitted by the unregistered users. There’s no editing facility. Cost is free although a suggested donation of USD $5 is requested by the author to help fund further development.

WP Business Directory Manager is a plugin only. It supports user registration, paid placements (at extra cost to the plugin creator). It allows images in the listings. The plugin is free and you can see a live example at www.hairdressing.co.uk

Jobs

9-to-5 theme. This theme from a paid theme provider costs USD $35 and includes both a  job board theme and the listing plugins. Features include ajax filtering, google maps, and the ability to take payments via paypal for paid listings.

Jobroller is another paid theme. It includes separate portals & tools for both job seekers and employers, has built-in payment gateway support and a has a CV section. Cost is USD $99.

Job Manager is a plugin only. It’s designed for a single company’s job listing and includes functions to take online applications and manage the interview process. It’s free and has been downloaded over 30,000 times from WordPress.

Classifieds

Sofa OpnPress is a paid theme that styles itself “WP Yellow Pages”. It offers front-end editing for users, paid or free listings mode, a voting system, and supports localisation. Cost is USD $35.

Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin is a well established free plugin (2 years old) and boasts upwards of 70,000 downloads from WordPress. It allows for paid or free ads, moderation, notifications and social integration. A number of premium (paid-for) modules are available which add things like featured listings, fee per category and google checkout integration.

wp-classified is a simpler option that adds a simple information & advertising blackboard or classified page in to your wordpress site. The plugin is free. A few comments in the forum indicate that some users find the documentation lacking.

Charity

Agency Theme is a paid theme that includes a nice “donation bar” on the home page. Ideal for fund raising towards a target, the donation bar shows progress towards the specified amount features a prominent donation link. Cost of this theme is USD $95. A number of plugins that offer a similar feature can be found on WordPress.

10 themes for non-profits. Not a theme or plugin itself, this post reviews 10 beautiful themes designed with charity websites in mind.

Donate Plus is  a free WordPress plugin with PayPal integration. The plugin contains lots of options for creating a donation form on your site, and includes a recognition function for displaying donations and comments. In function it’s similar to Just Giving, though does not include any Gift Aid functionality.

Conclusion

We’ve chosen just 4 categories here but there are dozens if not hundreds of customised themes and plugins for just about any specific function you might care to imagine (let us know in the comments). Costings shown above were correct at the time of writing but are likely to change in the medium-long term. Sometimes you may need to pay for the feature you want, but compared to the cost of bespoke development it’s likely to a be fraction of the cost. Many of the developers actively encourage customisation work so even if the plugin or theme doesn’t do quite what you want, it’s very well worth contacting the provider to ask if they will make a change for you.

About Us

2020Media is an established UK hosting provider. We offer WordPress hosting with expert technical assistance. Our service includes free migration from other hosts or WordPress.com and plenty of free help getting your site up and running. Hosting plans start at £45+vat/year.

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Opinion

Control your own Blog

Blogger Status message
Blogger Status - Offline

With the news that popular blogging service Blogger has had continual problems for the past 3 days, isn’t it time to think about self-hosting your blog?

Rather than rely on a massive service like Blogger or WordPress.com, if you host your blog independently you gain control over your site, tech support you can actually speak to you and access to a huge amount of extra features that’ll make your blog stand out from the crowd.

Blog hosting from 2020Media can be added to any existing hosting plan (sometimes at absolutely no cost), or setup as a standalone service. With hosting plans starting at just £45+vat/year (that’s £3.75/month – less than a pint!) it’s very easy to start getting the benefits of an indepedent blog. We offer free installation and setup too.

Opinion

CiviCRM for Drupal 7 and Joomla 1.6

1 Comment

CiviCRM 4.0.0 has been released for the latest Drupal version – 7 and the new Joomla version – 1.6. Up until now it was necessary to install CiviCRM on the older Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5.

Highlights

  • CiviCampaign has been integrated with other components such as CiviContribute, CiviMember, CiviEvent, CiviMail and CiviEngage
  • Joomla v1.6 introduced an ACL based permissioning system. This gets CiviJoomla to much closer parity with CiviDrupal.
  • CiviMember now allows membership upsell. This allows membership type to be changed on renewal
  • CiviCRM Extensions. You can now browse and download CiviCRM extensions from within your CiviCRM install.
  • A new API – version 3, introduces standardisation of functions, inputs and outputs.

For users of existing Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5 CiviCRM installs, the simultaneous release of 3.4 for these versions includes the same features.

2020Media provides free installation of CiviCRM on all Drupal and Joomla hosting plans.