Introduction & review of popular open source applications such as wordpress, joomla, drupal, dotnetnuke and open cart etc. We also do comparison of similar apps and recommend the right choice for different web application purpose.

Why Joomla for Enterprise Website Creation?

why joomla for enterprise website creation

Joomla is definitely a perfect choice for enterprise website creation. Especially when you would like to apply lots of functions and would like to keep everything under control, joomla is the best among all other platforms. Since Joomla 1.2, we have been testing and configuring the software on different websites. This article provides in depth reviews for why joomla is the best choice for enterprise websites.

Joomla, know as the best content management software and widely supported in different languages in the world. It's not only powerful for content management but also for second web development core. The base system can be fully customized based our website requirements. We can coding or make full use of available extensions to setup a powerful website system.

Content Management

Primary and key feature of joomla system. All articles/files are well organized on admin side. Unlike any other cms software, we can easily publish/unpublish an article by turnning on/off buttons. We can also determine what content to be showed on exact place by article properties configuration. No coding and no development skills needed at all! Media files, pictures and articles are well categorized so we can easily trace the needed one.

User Management

User management is the art of joomla. Beside the traditional simple name list, each user is assigned a badge with roles. We can easily change user status and update user details without leaving the page. The best feature is an authenticated user has full access to all other services on website. For example if you have enabled forum or shopping cart etc, users can posting or make orders directly without having to use a new login. It's extremely helpful when we have a big website for professional management.

Security Management

joomla security

Security is key feature of the software. When we talk about joomla security, it's about website strcutre and admin panel protection. The joomla project is supported by thousands of global professionals with frequent updates. Each release is heavily tested in different environments before official announcement. Means we can put into production website creation safely. Moreover, the joomla extention directory provides various security solutions for different requirements. For example security enhancement for login area and admin dashboards. For more joomla security tips, check out this page for details.

Blog & Forum Management

joomla blog extension

Probably the best part of joomla for enterprise website creation. Normally you need a company blog or community forum for either internal or public news announcement and interaction. You always have to use different softwares and install seperately for each. But joomla has everything for itself. The joomla extension directory provides a bounch solutions for blog and forum. Either free or licensed, we can always find a perfect one.

Popular joomla blog extensions: Easy blog Joomblog
Popular joomla forum extensions: Kunena Discussions

Shopping Cart Management

joomla virtuemart extension

Virtuemart(virtuemart.net), a dedicated ecommerce project for joomla software. You no longer need other shopping cart solutions if you have used joomla for website development. Virtuemart has approved itself to be leading ecommerce platform by powering hundreds of large e-stores. Virtuemart now is well known about powerful products management and order management. It also has pre setup payment gateways for quick and easy store configuration.

More virtuemart resources:

As we learnt above, joomla is really just limited by our imagination. For large website project like enterprise website creation, joomla is simply the best. Not only for it's powerful structure and resourceful extension directory, the extremely powerful scalability makes everything is possible, for either new and existing websites.

Best Joomla Hosting

It's simple server configuration for joomla support. However, we must have a professional and fully optimized server environment to host an enterprise joomla application. Not only for current website stats but also for expected future growth. We need to ensure the server can meet our current and future requirements so we don't have to switch providers. So for enterprise websites, we highly suggest InMotionHosting and Arvixe Business Hosting plans. We get what we pay, their price is relatively high than most traditional shared hosting service but generates much more value than expectation. They have deeply optimized server system for joomla script with professional support team.

Read more about arvixe business hosting
Learn more about InMotionHosting Joomla support

Managed WordPress Hosting. When and Who?

managed wordpress hosting

What managed wordpress hosting is? Why or when you should use a managed service? If you have researched on the web and puzzled about the various offer, we provide a clear and easy understanding in this article. We also provide in depth reviews on how to select the right managed wordpress hosting plan quickly and professionally.

Briefly introduction of managed wordpress hosting

The word "Managed" has explained everything. Means your wordpress site security/optimization/updates and all stuff will be handled by hosting provider on server end, users just need to focus on website content and promotion. In this way you don't have to worry about most technical parts and everything is hold in safe hands. At the meanwhile, you need to pay more for the service since their people have done extra effort to support your site.

Thus, you can judge easily those companies who announce to offer managed wordpress hosting service. If the price is exactly the same of regular shared hosting, then their wordpress hosting is no different than normal hosting solutions.

Pros and Cons of managed service

The main advantage/disadvantage is already very clear but could be in further details by following categories

  • Performance, the direct difference comparing to traditional service. Because we have paid extra money for it, hosting providers configured few accounts on same server space thus there're sufficient server resources to support our wordpress sites. Moreover, all managed wordpress hosting providers have fully optimized their servers to serve wordpress script based their development experience. Their people are monitoring all hosting servers/service by both automatic and manual operation to deliver the best performance as they can.
  • Security, the most advanced feature comparing to any other hosting service. Because for managed wordpress hosting server, everything is about wordpress without other scripts. In this way, they can apply any security rules without considering incompatibility with other service so our wordpress site security is greatly improved.
  • User experience. Based all above advantages, the final result is perfect user experience will be generated. Because of the hassle free service, we have no worries about anything like hacking attempts, server crash etc because everything is frequently backed up for urgent recovery.

The weakness? None besides the high cost. Cost is the primary consideration for managed wordpress service. As everything is maintained by hosting provider, they have to invest more manpower and hardware equipments to ensure the service quality. Because of this, you don't have to consider a managed hosting if you operate a personal or small wordpress site.

Who need the service? Managed wordpress hosting is highly recommended for business site purpose. For example your enterprise site is crated on wordpress platform or you run a famous wordpress blog site that's not suitable on shared hosting. Then a managed wordpress service should be your primary consideration. Based all bonus it provided, it's even better than dedicated server service if you configured everything to wordpress.

About WPEngine managed wordpress hosting plan

Who provides managed wordpress hosting service? WPengine is probably the best one which is recommended by both wp developers and business users. The WPengine team are all wordpress developers who are 100% familiar with wordpress script. Because of this, they have customized the hosting server setup with their own optimizer. From wordpress software installation to huge site optimization, everything is automated with their service. WPengine provides multiple powerful plans and could be fully customized to meet your requirements.

Just began in 2010, the wpengine service already earned more than 14000 global clients with over 120000 wordpress installation. On 1/14/2014, their company secured $15 million in growth funding from North Bridge Growth Equity as announced from their blog post. Europe office is planned to provide better support for local clients. From industry news announcement, around 20 firms are interested to invest their project because of their leadership in this business. From wpengine recent development, they're planning to put everything on cloud and bring revolutional improvements for their service.

wpengine managed wordpress hosting plan

Alternative choice of managed wordpress hosting? Probably you need to hire a wp professional to configure and optimize your site and monitor it 24*7. However, the cost can go up a bit if you do not have sufficient experience in managing a big website.

10 Must Have Joomla Extensions

Joomla is an excellent web development software with great extension resources. People can create any sort of website using this platform without dealing lots of technical stuff. Joomla is only limited by your imagination! That's guaranteed by its official team. However, you must know where to begin with and how to simplify the development experience. Hence we collect a list of the following 10 joomla extensions. They will support your web development side by side.

JCE editor

The primary one that is recommended by almost every Joomla! professionals. JCE is short for "Joomla Content Editor" which is a powerful editor solution to replace the default one. With JCE you can embe almost all available script tabs and even dynamic languages like php. People just use the editor just like a local program like word.

joomla jce editor

Official site: www.joomlacontenteditor.net

K2

K2 completely changed the way you use Joomla either from background or frontend operation. Using K2, you can transform your Joomla! website to a news/magazine site with author blogs, product catalogs, work portfolio, knowledge base, download/document manager, listing & more!

http://getk2.org

SH404SEF

A must installed extension if you want to develope a SEO friendly site. The purpose of SH404SEF is to make your joomla site URL static and remove any dynamic parameters. It's not only good for SEO but also greatly reduced potential hacking possibilities. It's programmed by anything digital team and provided as commercial solution.

http://anything-digital.com/downloads.html#sh404SEF

Virtumart

The best ecommerce extension for joomla platform. The virtumart is a solid project with strong support. It's dedicated to Joomla only and available as an Joomla extension. The software comes with lots of great templates to help create a professional and powerful store site. You can convert your entire joomla application to shopping cart or just use virtumart as part of your existing website.

http://virtuemart.net

Kunena forum extension

Simple but fully functional forum extension. Easy to integrate & customize, it's just working like a dedicated forum software. The best of the best is your existing site user don't have to regiter again in order to access the portal. Your forum and all website services are connected together.

http://www.kunena.org/

eXtplorer

A file manager extension which can be added to most websites. eXplorer is functional the same as your file manager in cpanel hosting control panel where you can add, copy and remove files directly. The difference is eXplorer only working under your joomla installation directory.

http://extplorer.net/files

Akeeba Backup

The best joomla backup extension where you can generate full backup and apply quick restoration. Using Akeeba, you don't have to leave your site then log into your hosting space for such operation. The backup process is handled background and you can also automate the process by schedule tasks. All your backup data is placed in cloud so you don't have to worry about your hosting server storage.

http://www.akeebabackup.com

Mobile Joomla

Mobile device friendly is crucial for the modern requirements. All search engines give mobile friendly sites more score from SERP because about half people using mobile device to access the internet. It might be hard for you to make an existing site mobile friendly, but the mobile joomla extension can complete the work in few minutes and everything is automatic.

http://www.mobilejoomla.com/

Nice Google Analytics

The best joomla extension if you do google analyzing frequently. This extension will connect to your google webmaster account directly so you can manage website stats on the fly. You can fully customize the way in using the service.

http://trinitronic.com/downloads/nice-google-analytics

SP Share

The best social sharing extension if you have lots of great content to share with people. SP Share includes all popular services like facebook, twitter, linkedin and pinterest etc. Just one click then your contents can be shared instantely to those social media sites. The best way of content promotion if you're SEOer.

http://www.joomshaper.com/joomla-extensions/sp-share

Best 5 WordPress Themes & Plugins for Photo Gallery

Is wordpress good choice for photo gallery site? Absolutely yes, wordpress is only limited by your imagination. For its light weight and powerful structure, you can customize wordpress to any kind website. Here we're going to introduce how to use wordpress to develop a professional photo gallery site in quick time.

A photo gallery site will always take lots of disk space to store your high quality photos, speed is also extremly high requirement to load your photos properly from anywhere in the world. Thus a fast and affordable wordpress hosting service is your primary task before uploading your photo gallery site. Based editoral experience over 10+ reputable wordpress hosting providers, webhostinghub(http://webhostinghub.com) is awarded the best photo gallery website hosting based server performance, plan features, price and tech support.

There're lots of practice on how to build a gallery site via wordpress. In this article we'll focus on the top wordpress themes and plugins that we can get easily for quick deployment. The top themes/plugins below base on usability, colors, layouts and real user ratings. Just take a look below and learn more about the products.

Top 5 WordPress Photo Gallery Themes

WPExplorer Photo Gallery Theme

Demo & Download | Price: FREE
One of the most responsive and free gallery themes, PHOTO is simple but perfect choice for photographer and art designers who like to maximum their images on website. The full-style post layout has no widget and footer so you can insert pictures/videos via most suitable size with easy navigation.

WPexplorer photo gallery

DeepFocus Photography WordPress Theme

Demo & Download | Price: $39
DeepFocus is developed by elegantthemes team – a professional wordpress theme development group. Just like its name, the theme is deeply designed and optimized for photo gallery purpose. You can turn your wordpress blog into a fully functional online photo gallery while still maintaining all of the features of a normal blog. Theme codes are secured with W3C validation for fast response. You have 5 color choice to fulfill your localization for 100% compatible with leading browsers. What really matters is you get professional tech support from Elegantthemes group and you have access to over 86 other themes downloads for single paying!

Deepfocus photo gallery

Stock Photography

Demo & Download | Price: $75
Stock Photography is a commercial wordpress theme which is feature for atmospheric and stylish design. The unique and arruping design makes it possible for any photo gallery site creation. This theme integrates with free Sell Media plugin and all of the extends, users can sell and license photos and sell prints online with ease. Being an ecommerce theme, it's fully supported by official team, you get video tutorials and customization guidance. You also have choice to purchase single theme license or pay a little more for all other commercial themes. Their people will release a new theme at least per month.

Stock photo gallery

Cardamon WP

Demo & Download | Price: $50
One of the most beatiful photo gallery themes for wordpress. Users get ultimate set of tools for theme customizations plus 10 gorgeous skins for different conditions. Cardamon WP is packed with custom widgets which will allow you to display different types content. Moreover, you can create as many widget areas as you like and display them on different pages. No coding skills required as everything is integrated to wordpress visual editor.

Cardamon photo gallery

Photojax Minimalist AJAX Photography Portfolio

Demo & Download | Price: $45
Another great commercial photo gallery theme by Themforest. It is a clean and minial, yet unique wordPress photography theme with lots of modern theme features. There're galleries, audio player and a minimal blog included for a great photography portfolio site. Another great feature is right click protection for your intellectual and photographic works, warning message is customizable.

Photojax photo gallery

Top 5 WordPress Photo Gallery Plugins

NextGEN Gallery
The ever greatest and most popular photo gallery plugin for wordpress. There're more than 8 million downloads generated till present. Nextgen gallery plugin provides all we need for photo gallery site. It's developed and maintained by www.nextgen-gallery.com and the development has always been active. View & Download

Cincopa
Cincopa is more than a simple photo gallery plugin. You can add photo albums, video galleries and music playlists with no programming skills needed. There're total of 44 skins with media file management tools to convert your site to media site by few clicks away. View & Download

Uber Media
Uber media is an upgrade of wordpress media manager with support for third party services such as Flickr, Instagram, 500px and almost all social media service. Great plugin if you like to save space under a shared server environment. View & Download

WP Flip Image Free
WP Flip Image Plugin is a great way to show your photo gallery and images in an elgant and smart way. With up to 8 languages support in admin area, you may use WP Flip Image in many ways: Photo gallery, Portfolio, Prudocts gallery, Social icons and many more! View & Download

Super Zoom Gallery
One of the greatest gallery plugins that support thumbnail and zoom capabilities. Shortcode available for simple use in blog posting. The great features provide the best solution for ecommerce shops where users can view thumbs and full size product pictures without navigating to another page. View & Download

10 WordPress Problems with Solutions

Wordpress is NO.1 choice for most people either for blog or web development purpose. However, you might run into problems easily in using the software as time goes by. We have collected some of the most common wordpress errors with fast solutions to get your website back. Similar solutions might available too on other places, but we will provide the most simple practice based our editorial experience.

1. Admin user password lost

Lost your admin password is not a serious problem but it does happen frequently among wordpress users. The first thing you can try is "forget password" option from login page, mostly it should work and you'll get password in your contact email account. But what happen if the option not working? Just several steps below to reset it:

  • Login and navigate to "phpmyadmin"
  • Select your database from left panel then click "SQL" on top navigation.
  • Type the following query then click the Go button.

UPDATE wp_users SET user_pass = MD5('newpassword') WHERE user_login = "admin";

Please replace "newpassword" with the password you wanted. Once done, you can login to admin panel via new password.

2. WordPress admin dashboard is not arranged properly

The problem is caused by either your local firewalls or plugin compatibility. Some firewall will block website css files so the first you can try is to disable firewall for a while then check if it's working properly. If not, you can now check if there's any upgradable plugin. Upgrade if any, or deactivate it if still not working.

3. Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by

The problem is normally caused by spaces in wp-config.php. To solve this error, just open this file then remove all spaces after "?>" tag and make sure nothing exists after it.

4. WordPress admin dashboard blank

This problem is normally produced after a new wordpress theme installation or wordpress upgrade. Except for the admin dashboard, your entire blog is showing a blank page. There're 2 solutions available for quick fix.

Rename current installed theme folder via control panel file manager or FTP. This will switch your wordpress site to use default theme so you can login to admin again after that.

Reset plugin folder via file manager or FTP. Rename "plugins" folder to "plugins-old", refresh your wordpress site and see if it's working. Mostly it should work based our experience. If not, you can try to move your plugins from "plugins-old" to "plugin" one by one and check if any plugin is not compatible with your current version wordpress.

5. Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted

This error is because of the php memory size limitation on server. We can easily by pass the limit via wp-config.php file by following steps below:

Open your wp-config.php file then add this line: define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');

6. You are not authorized to view this page (403 error)

You receive an error message "You are not authorized to view this page. (403 error)" after inserting the username and password in the wordpress login page.

Most probaly your blog is hosted on a windows server where "index.php" is missing from default page value. What you need to do is to add "index.php" to your website default page in control panel. It's called "Directory Indexes" from most control panel software.

7. Fatal error undefined function is_network_admin()

This error is mostly caused by a failure auto upgrade over wordpress site. The simple fix is to upgrade manually as suggested by wordpress official. Full details about manual upgrade can be found on this wordpress page:  http://codex.wordpress.org/Updating_WordPress#Manual_Update

8. WordPress Admin Login 404 Issue

The problem is because you have changed your wordpress site url to another address or your file permission is not set properly.

To update your wordpress site address, please follow steps below:

  • Go to phpmyadmin and find "wp_options" table, click on Browse
  • Find "siteurl" under the field option_name then click edit
  • Change the URL to your current domain address for option_value then press "go" button

If your site url is correct and you still get the error, it should be your file permission on wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes directories. Set file permissions to "755" via control panel or ftp program then refresh your site again. It will work.

9. "Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance" message remainins after an automatic upgrade

The error is produced after an automatic wordpress upgrade. The solution is to remove .maintenance file under your blog root directory. the .maintenance file is placed by wordpress during an automatic upgrade to notify visitors that the site in under a short maintenance. It might not be deleted after upgrade so you need to remove it manually.

10. Can't delete a plugin

If you have deleted a plugin in wordpress admin but it still appears even after you have deleted the directory via FTP. It's because the plugin might had uploaded some hidden/nested files inside the plugin directory which didn't appear in FTP. For this case, you have to delete it from ssh

If you have SSH access to your blog,

  • Login your site via SSH.
  • Use SSH commands to nagivate "../wp-content/plugins/".
  • Use ls -al to see the full list of folders.
  • Delete the particular plugin folder with rm (Folder Name).

The original posting is published by Kay Tan, however we have simplified it based our experience. If you like to check other solutions, you can find it on this posting.

Best 5 Free Premium WordPress Themes

WordPress is the most popular website and blog software which is used by over 20% global websites. It's easy to get wordpress running but it can be pretty hard to get a professional design that fulfill your requirements. However, a good wordpress theme is always not cheap to get. Especially when you need some custom modification, theme owners will charge more. We have collected the best 5 free wordpress themes that work with different website topics. Introductions and download links are provided below, choose the best one that work with your site!

TimeNews
As the name suggests, this wordpress theme is dedicated for news update blog site with illustrated structures. it allows to show up articles in multiple styles so you can easily define what stuff to show for hot topics and what to put under entertainment categories. The best of the best is you can fully customize it by following its guidelines with little change from code behind. If you're running a news website with frequent updates, TimeNews wouldn't disappoint you.

best 5 free wordpress themes - timenews

Features

  • Easy to use and powerful theme options
  • Responsive design and mobile friendly
  • Shopping cart supported
  • Newest version wordpress compatible
  • SEO optimized
  • All major browsers compatible

Theme page & Download URL: http://www.fwpthemes.com/timenews-wordpress-theme/

Leponto Mag
Best wordpress for company blog site. Leponto mag is featured for clean code design and fully integration to social community sites like twitter, facebook and linkedin. Each post updates like date, comments will show up on left bar for quick views. You can easily customize widgets by poll, faq base and categories etc for easy navigation and interaction to clients. Based it's simple and clean structure, it's compatible with almost each version wordpress so you don't have to worry about the frequent wordpress releases.

best 5 free wordpress themes - leponto mag

Features

  • PSD logo design included
  • Latest version wordpress compatible
  • Across platform/browser compatible
  • Simple and light weight design

Leponto Mag official page & download: http://www.simplewpthemes.com/themesdemos/?themedemo=LepontoMag

PaletosiMagazine
The best wordpress theme for magazine site. This theme is mostly featured by its powerful image treatment. No matter if you upload a large or small picture, it will be resized properly with no color loss. Mostly, high quality pictures will take big size and long time to load up. For those sites like fashion or photography etc has high requirements to picture quality and don't wish a single color downgrade. PaletosiMagazine will not only help with picture quality but also help with optimization and organization. Your original picuture and thumbnails will all be saved with high quality with multiple size options.

best 5 free wordpress themes - paletosimagazine

Features

  • High quality picture saving
  • Built in content slider
  • Banner management
  • Social button integration
  • Flickr widget
  • Google anlytics included

PaletosiMagazine download & demo URL: http://www.simplewpthemes.com/2012/04/paletosi-magazine/

Practis
Practis offers the beauty of a professionally designed website with the efficiency of a veteran developer. This wordpress theme includes a bounch of great features for great website creation. It's not just a simple wordpress theme, you can easily edit for any kind website purpose such as coperate website and ecommerce shopping cart. All theme files are followed by leading programming concepts. Just few files to work with for great customization!

best 5 free wordpress themes - practis

Features

  • Responsive design and mobile friendly
  • Shortcodes generator in editor
  • Woocommerce cart supported
  • SEO friendly and cross platform compatible

Theme URL & demo: http://newwpthemes.com/practis-free-wordpress-theme/

Naturali
Best free wordpress theme for environment friendly. Yeah, for environment I mean nice natural colors and structures for a simple website but with fresh air. Best choice if you operate a spa institute or clean technology group. The theme layout is pretty simple but pretty powerful from behind. You can fully integrate the site with lots of services like social community service, ecommerce apps etc. You can easily customize the outlook via few changes in code behind.

best 5 free wordpress themes - naturali

Features

  • PSD logo included
  • Banner/thumbnail management
  • Social sharing buttons
  • Cross browser compatible

Theme download & Demo: http://www.simplewpthemes.com/2012/02/naturali/

All above 5 best free wordpress themes are currently powering one or more our websites and fully tested by our own. We highly recommend to use based our editorial experience.