Hi from Ottawa,

Designing websites and following industry news here, which we want to share with you. The Joomla! Development Team has just released version 3.4.5! This is a very important security patch, everyone using Joomla 3 for their websites need to upgrade immediately. The security holes in question exist in the Joomla! core codes, meaning every unpatched Joomla! 3 website, regardless of setup and configurations, are at risk of being compromised. Publishing the patch and security vulnerabilties on the web would also have the undesirable side-effect of making the exploit more well-known - so it is imperative that everyone update asap.

Version 3.4.5 only contains security-related fixes, so in general, it shouldn't affect templates or frontend experience.

You can update your site in your Joomla admin panel, or download the packages on the Joomla! site.

If you need any assistances with Joomla upgrades or need to restore compromised Joomla site, we at Joomla Bliss are ready to help you. Give us a call!

What is a Content Management System?

For a new modern website a Content Management System (CMS) is a must. A website CMS allows you to update content on your website without knowing HTML, CSS, PHP or any other web design elements. You can access your website via your browser and update its contents the way you work with your Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail accounts. 

What most clients ask for is a CMS recommendation for their future website. Expert opinion is highly sought after because most marketing folks do not have first-hand experience with more than one CMS.

CMS Evaluation and Recommendations

Our approach to any task is simple and always the same: provide the best quality at the best prices and make things work well in the long-term with minimum effort. Our approach ensures that future scalability of features and functionalities as well as support is easily attainable and that a website’s future is as “predictable” and scalable as possible. These were the reasons why we decided to specialize in open-source software in general, and Joomla CMS in particular.

There are many open-source Content Management Systems (CMSs) for websites, but the two leaders nowadays are Joomla and Drupal, with WordPress still being predominantly used as a bloging platform. There is also a rising use of Sharepoint as a website CMS.

Sharepoint

In our view, Sharepoint is not an appropriate CMS to build websites. Sharepoint was designed to be an Intranet document management system and when used for websites it presents a very high learning curve for users. Furthermore, Sharepoint requires the skills of an Architect and Business Analyst to set up a proper infrastructure – and this adds cost to the total cost of ownership (TOC) of the project.  Customization of visual skins (web templates) via Sharepoint requires more programming time as well. Overall, while any software can be adapted to do whatever is necessary, and so can Sharepoint be adapted to build websites, we do not recommend "forcing" software to do what it was not meant to do and hence, we do not recommend Sharepoint as a website CMS. 

WordPress

WordPress was designed to be a blogging platform for simple websites. While its functionalities have been improving greatly and may one day become on par with Joomla and Drupal, as of now, it is safer to avoid using WordPress if more than static content is required and if scalability is important.

Improvements in WordPress require changes to its core, and hence, when version upgrades are implemented, existing components often break. 

The interface, while being famously simple, often becomes confusing when various functionalities are added into the site. The blogging features are always on the way. A lot of "simple" management ends up being done at the code level.

WordPress requires little training time, but in the long-term, its total cost of ownership is on par with Sharepoint. The available out-of-the-box extensions are numerous, but their features are not as granular and always require manual programming and customization even for very simple things. We speculate that this is, perhaps, the main reason why so many web designers push WordPress to their clients – more customization generates more revenue for them.

Drupal

Drupal is one of the best open-source website CMSs. It competes head to head with Joomla in all key areas: performance, speed, security, maturity, quality of extensions, etc. Even the infamous “difficult” user interface and admin flow of Drupal is gradually improving and might soon become history.

However, compared to Joomla, Drupal’s total cost of ownership is significantly higher. Drupal developers are also more expensive, 15-20% more expensive than Joomla developers, when all costs are factored in. Furthermore, quality of available templates is much lower and the development community is much smaller than that of Joomla. The number of extensions is also not as vast and as a result more specialized knowledge is required to source the right set of components and plugins to enable specific set of features and functionalities and ensure scalability for the future.

With Joomla, one can type a question in Google and find the answer to it with a screen shot illustrating every step within seconds! Not so with Drupal, hence support needs to be purchased more often and even small tasks will require more time to learn and implement. In other words, the learning curve is rather high with Drupal and, again, more training and support will be required in the long term.

Overall, Drupal is a great CMS but the total cost of ownership as well as the still-not-so-easy management makes it less attractive than its main competitor Joomla.

Joomla

As of 2012, Joomla is officially considered the most popular open-source CMS. It is also the fastest growing one. Over 15 years old, Joomla is very mature and stable. It has the largest and strongest design community, offers the best templates, and the largest number of quality third-party extensions that often require no customization at all – all of which together allows for a fast development, cost-effective scalability, and minimum support.

Joomla has no technical or usability disadvantages if compared to any other CMS, and yet it offers the lowest cost of ownership the long-term. This is the main reason why we selected Joomla for our web development projects.

The learning curve for new users is minimum. Training can be conducted in a swift and efficient way and usually takes 60 min or less. The maintenance level (SLA) required to support even large complex sites is usually one of the lowest.

We believe that Joomla is the best choice for 90% of websites. It offers the highest quality and the safest implementation of all types of requirements, even some very complex ones, and yet it bears no compromises in any aspect of a web design and development project. Joomla is exceptionally powerful, scalable and yet easy to use, and its total cost of ownership is the lowest.

Below is a CMS comparison table that summarizes the information we presented in this section. Note that rating is on the scale from 1 to 10 wherein:

• 10 stands for the best performance or the lowest required expenditures in time and/or cost,
• 1 stands for the worst performance or the highest required expenditure in time and/or costs, and
• half star = 1 point

More stars means better performance

Note that for some items, such as, frequency of upgrades required, for example, more stars means better performance, which means "upgrades required less often". Likewise, for the architectural design skills item, fewer stars means worse performance, which means "more architectural design skills are required, hence higher costs".

The 3.4 release introduces new features into the CMS such as improved front end module editing, decoupling of weblinks, composer integration, Google new reCaptcha and security improvements by implementing UploadShield code which can detect most malicious uploads by examining their filenames and file contents.

This release was possible thanks to a hard work of over 130 different volunteer contributors.

Over 700 bugs have also been resolved with the 3.4 release of the Joomla! CMS.

One of the articles on web design published by Smashing Magazine provides some useful insights on recent changes in the web design field affected by mobile devices.

The article makes many valid points, such as mouse click versus taps, etc. Those details are important to keep in mind when designing a website.The presentation is good and so is the conclusion. But there is one point concerning the main design principle that caught our attention. Here is what the author is saying:

"The way we designed our websites until recently was by putting a header with the logo and navigation at the top, putting the subnavigation on the left, putting some widgets on the right, and putting the footer at the bottom. When all of that was done, we’d cram the content into the little space that was left in the middle. All of the things we created first — the navigation, the widgets, the footer — they all helped the visitor to leave the page. But the visitor probably wanted to be there! That was weird. It was as if we were not so confident in our own content and tried our best to come up with something else that our guests might like.

But rather than pollute the page with all kinds of links to get people out of there, we should really focus on that thing in the middle. Make sure it works. Make sure it looks good. Make sure it’s readable. Make sure people will understand it and find it useful. Perhaps even delight them with it!

Once you’re done with the content, you can start to ask yourself whether this content needs a header. Or a logo. Or subnavigation. Does it need navigation at all? And does it really need all of those widgets? The answer to that last question is “No.” I’ve never understood what those widgets are for. I have never seen a useful widget. I have never seen a widget that’s better than white space."

Well, it's just like saying, why do you need a roof and a wall and an entrance, focus on the living room. That's all that matters, your guests will be there after all.

An interesting moment we found is how everything has to be linked to "confidence" these days.

Companies are trying to display a summary of their website's content on their home page for a reason, to make sure users don't miss something important, not because they have no confidence in what's in the center of the page. Granted, it often creates a cluttered look, hence a granular top navigation can be useful to mitigate this.

But in any case, it is not a power game. Confidence in one's content has nothing to do with sidebar widgets and additional navigation links. Without navigation, your users will be confused.

If you run a focused website, a blog on a particular and rather narrow topic - one living room solution might work.

But if your website has a repository of documents, tools, etc .- your users will be utterly confused. Recently, I was talking to someone who was trying to locate a particular item on the shopify.ca website. This site has the above-mentioned living room design, it does not have a traditional navigation, so clicking back and forth and scrolling down endlessly is the only - annoying! - way.

The use of white space is, indeed, a good thing. No arguments here. But "never seen a widget better than a white space"? Huh? How about calendar of events? Weather storm monitoring? Traffic congestion report?

So please, confident web author of smashing magazine, for those of us who is used to structure and logic, let us keep some navigation, at least one level somewhere! Not all concent can - or should - be reduced to a flat one-level menu.

We noticed that a lot of websites found a way out of this trendy pickle by finding a heavy use of the left-site navigation. Not sure what's the difference. If you are going to use a hierarchical navigation, you might as well provide one common point of reference and use a drop-down top menu like we did before. 

Planning on undertaking a website design or website redesign project? Allow us to present the ultimate website redesign checklist.

1. Kick off the project. Get executives on board
   • Schedule informal one-on-one meetings with your key executives and ask them what they would like to see in a new website.
   • Then schedule a group meeting with all key executives.
   • Get their consensus on all main points regarding the future website's usability and look and feel
   • Define roles and get proper authority for yourself. Get your executives to officially appoint you as the Project Lead by sending an email announcement to everyone in your company who maybe involved in this project.

Why free open-source software products are so good?

It is somewhat counterintuitive to accept the fact that open-source web content management systems (CMS) or other open-source projects, for that matter, are actually of higher quality than their commercial counterparts. There are several reasons behind this phenomenon, representing a peculiar mix of social and technical factors. 

The CMS Advantage

There is a long discussion going on about which one of the three leading open-source web content management systems (CMS) is better: Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress. Here is our view on the topic.

A few simple tricks to speed up your Joomla website

It is a well-known fact that websites that have a Content Management System (CMS) load slower than those that don't have a CMS. Simply because there is more things to load, a lot more. But that should not sway you away from having a CMS, especially a CMS like Joomla. So here are a few simple techniques that you or your web designer can implement to significantly speed up your Joomla website. 

Joomla today announces that its core files have been downloaded more than 30 million times from Joomla.org. Joomla now averages around 1 million downloads every month.

Joomla’s Popularity Grew by 40% in 2011, with 3100 Government Agencies Using Joomla for Websites, Blogs and Intranets

We conducted a small feasibility study researching a possibility of creating dozens of web sites for link building purposes. Below are our findings. There are no major revelations away from what is already available on the net, but some important factors are clarified, so enjoy, and if you have something to add, don't be shy to use the Comments field.