Design vs. Develop

Lynda.com now has videos available on the most popular open-source programs for publishing content. There’s the one on Joomla! I recorded, one on Wordpress by Maria Langer, and now one on Drupal by Tom Geller. So which one is right for your next site? Sign up for an Online Training Library account today and find out!

For $25, you get a month-long subscription where you can watch all of our videos in their entirety and as many times as you wish. You will also have access to the rest of the video library which covers topics like Flash, HTML, Photoshop, CS3, and Search Engine Optimization. Use Lynda.com to learn everything you need to know for launching your next site!

UPDATE: As Maria pointed out in the comments, you can watch the first few videos of each Lynda.com title for free. This will give you a general feel for each system.

I upgraded Wordpress this evening and decided to change the permalink structure. This is probably a bad idea in general, but I was having problems where you couldn’t link to an individual article. You would see all of the articles for a day, then get taken to an anchor for the specific post instead.

I promise no more hijinks.

A month ago, I switched not only the theme and title of this blog, but also the software underneath from Joomla! to WordPress. I always intended to expand my Joomla! based blog into something more substantial; a new way of presenting and sorting information, opinions, reviews, and recommendations. However, I didn’t get very far in achieving this.

Meanwhile, blogs have become so prevalent that people will assume you website is actually a blog if it feels somewhat like one. With this in mind, visitors have a certain expectation of how your “blog” will behave; if it doesn’t, people can get confused and possibly frustrated. So now I’m using blogging software instead of content management software.

Here are my impressions of WordPress. The user interface gets all the points for KISS principle. Writing posts, seeing new comments, scanning incoming links, and adding images are all a pure joy! It’s also nice to see the autodraft saves so that you don’t accidentally lose your work. WordPress also has enough functionality for building a very basic non-blog website if you need one. Finally, I’m happy to see the WordPress folks following a web software convention I feel is crucial: the backend has an interface distinctly separate from the one seen in public. (Not going to mention the names of any offenders here.)

However, not all is rosy with WordPress. Within hours of putting up my blog, dozens of spam comments were pouring in, making me wonder whether I should turn back before it was too late. Fortunately, they died down after a couple of days and a few keyword filters. I have comments set to be displayed only after the email and name have been approved. (If you use your OpenID, your comment will appear automatically.)

The other gripe I have about WordPress is the templating. I took a peek to see if I could quickly throw together a basic theme to match my main website. Unfortunately, I was in for a rude surprise. While this isn’t the worst system I’ve seen, WordPress themes are broken into too many pieces in the wrong places, with poor internationalization to boot. It’s very irritating to work in a world where an HTML tag opens in one file and closes in another; this is just begging for mistakes to be made.

Despite these speed bumps, I’m definitely enjoying WordPress and will change the theme to something else once I find one that suits my tastes (or have time to build a new one).

If you run a website, here’s a resolution you can keep: make sure your host is up to date. This is something that only takes a few minutes to check and can help you avoid hacker-induced headaches. With PHP being the most popular programming language used on the web, chances are your site uses it. You’re definitely using PHP if you use popular programs such as Joomla!, Drupal, or Wordpress. Even if you keep these programs up to date with the latest patches, your site can still be at risk if your host doesn’t keep PHP itself updated.

If you’re running Joomla! or Drupal, checking your current PHP version is easy. In Joomla! 1.0.x, log into the administrator backend and go to System > System Info. The PHP version will be listed on this screen as well as under the PHP Info tab. In Drupal, use your admin login, then go to Administer > Logs > Status Report.

Aside from this software, there are other ways you can get the PHP version number. Most shared hosts often give you a control panel where you can log in and manage your account. If your host offers CPanel, the PHP version number will usually be displayed on the front page in the left column.

As a last resort, it’s easy to create a phpinfo() page you can use to get the version information. Open up a plain-text editor such as Notepad or TextEdit and add the following code:

<?php

phpinfo();

?>

Save this file as version.php (or anythingyouwant.php) and upload it to your web server using FTP to you web root directory. Then go to http://www.yoursite.com/version.php. Delete version.php from your server right away: you just want it to be available for a moment so you can get the information.

You now have your PHP version number. So now what?

As of this writing, the current version of PHP is 5.2.5. If this is the version you have, congratulations! Your host is up to date with the latest stable copy of PHP there is. If you have a version of PHP that starts with 5 but isn’t the latest, check with your host to see if they’re in transition. A lot of hosts set aside some servers with PHP 5 when it first came out in July of 2004 for testing purposes. You might be on one of these servers.

If your PHP version is 4.4.74.4.8, your host has the latest stable version of PHP 4. Ask and see if they have a plan in place for upgrading your account to PHP 5. If your host is running a version of PHP earlier than 4.4.7, look for a new hosting provider immediately: your host is at least 7 months behind in applying security patches. Don’t count on them keeping you up to date in the future, they’ve already failed you.

As of this past Monday, no new versions of PHP 4 will be released and it is officially obsolete. On August 8th, the PHP team will not even release security updates for version 4.

UPDATE: the PHP team released 4.4.8 the day after I posted this. The switch from .7 to .8 represents some security patches. It is not considered an entirely new version of PHP; everything should still be backwards compatible. If you are running 4.x.x, make sure your host upgrades you 4.4.8 promptly.

Aside from keeping up to date with software that’s being actively developed, there are other reasons to move to PHP 5. It performs faster and has new features your friendly open source programmers desperately want to use. The Joomla!, Drupal, and Wordpress teams have all avoided writing code that only works on PHP 5 to make sure that you can run their software. Now is the time to return the favor and go with PHP 5!