Appliedi.net Windows Web Hosting Blog

If you have done any research on dynamic websites or content management systems recently, you have undoubtedly come across a solution called DotNetNuke. To date, DotNetNuke (DNN) has been downloaded nearly 7 million times, and an online community with over 700,000 members worldwide. DNN is an open source application framework that makes it possible for people of most levels of expertise to quickly and easily build a website that is dynamic, secure, reliable, and has all of the bells and whistles right out of the box.

Not long ago, DNN released version 5.01.00 of this framework, marking a major milestone in the evolution of this framework. For the first time, the version 5 series has been officially endorsed as being “production ready,” meaning that the DotNetNuke Corporation says that this version of DNN is ready for you use for your websites.

DNN 5 promises that fastest, most secure, and most flexible release of the DNN framework ever. DNN has always had a great selection of modules for you to use for free, such as the Forums module, Blog module, Survey module, Wiki module, Chat module, Store module, Map module, and so many more. DNN 5 brings a rewritten module called Forms and Lists, which allows you to build things like a custom feedback form to present to your customers.

With DNN 5, you now can integrate cool features such as Widgets into your website. Widgets are a great way to interact with your website visitors. They allow you to import JavaScript-based widgets to do things like adjust the design of the site, import videos from sites like YouTube, and more.

This release also makes your website more valuable by implementing SEO (search engine optimized) features for you such as human friendly URLs, Google Analytics, a Pure CSS library, 301 redirects, improved XHTML and ADA compliance, and more. These features are some of the most important in our current economy, where every little bit of edge can help you get ahead of your competition. You DO want to be ahead of your competition, don’t you?

Another very notable feature that is now found in DNN is content versioning. You are now able to roll back any text or HTML content in the HTML module that is included in DotNetNuke. You can also require content approval, allowing you to stage your new HTML content until the right person looks at it. Once they approve the new content, it will be pushed out to your website for your website visitors to see. This feature alone is with the price of DotNetNuke (which happens to free).

If you’re a developer or power user, you may be happy to know that DNN implements technologies such as jQuery, Internet Explorer 8 web slices, improved support for unit testing, .Net framework 3.5, support for any data source, an extensive provider model, and a web-based dashboard showing the “health” of the site. DNN is also an open API, allowing you to extend nearly any feature that it has, such as the Token Replacement Engine, which allows you to do things like build custom template engines.

We could go on and one with the new features. Just know that you can trust the DotNetNuke Corporation to constantly add new features, fix bugs, address security issues, and not allow the framework to get “stale.” They regularly evaluate the latest and greatest technologies out there, making sure that you too can take advantage of these new technologies without having to worry about your level of knowledge or expertise. Roll out your next website using DotNetNuke today!

It’s simple, if you are a shared hosting or fully managed server customer here’s all you have to do!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Are you interested in trying the Kentico Lite CMS?

Much like other applications we’ve recently introduced, Kentico is now as easy to install through the control panel as a few clicks. Kentico Lite has many features bundled with it right out of the box. See the following Knowledge Base article for instructions on installing Kentico Lite and begin using this wonderful CMS.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Community Server 2008 Express is now available for FREE to Appliedi Innovation’s web hosting customers in a few easy clicks from the control panel. Community Server 2008 is a premium content management system (CMS) and Social Networking application from Telligent, the people who made the application that powers myspace, Microsoft’s xbox website and other major sites. Some of the major built-in features include blogs & forums (with integrated Search), photo, file, and media galleries, and a control panel. There is also a built-in email server that can make the forums work more like an email discussion where email replies are automatically generated on the forum. Community Server 2008 is a CMS similar to Dotnetnuke, Kentico, or Joomla, etc.

Our Community Server 2008 application pack has been custom coded into the control panel to make the process as painless as possible. It literally takes less than 5 minutes to install. Please see our support article that explains the process. This express edition can also easily be upgraded to other versions of Community Server 2008.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Today Joomla released an update to their CMS called “Naiki” and our PHP webhosting customers using this CMS may want to install the update. If you are running a previous version 1.5.x, you should download the update patch and run it. You can read the release notes and installation instructions here.

Although Applied Innovations is an ASP.net specialized web-host, many do not realize that PHP is available to our customers. With the flip of a switch in the HELM control panel, you can enable PHP. Then, with a mySQL database which is included with VS-1 and higher plans, you can install Joomla! for free and have a huge community of PHP/Open Source developers working together to bring you free add-ons such as the famous free shopping cart “Virtuemart“. PHP runs on Windows, and it runs great especially with “Fast CGI” which is installed on AppliedI’s shared webservers. It should be noted that an advantage of Windows and IIS is that you can run ASP.net 3.5 and PHP side-by-side. Something you can not do on Linux (Well, not 100% functionally anyway; see “ASP.net – mod_mono“).

Popularity: 1% [?]

Andre recently blogged about how many people are using wordpress as more than just a blog engine, they’re using it as a full blown content management system (CMS). I’m pretty well versed in WordPress and what’s available for it and today I was looking around today for new themes and plug-ins we could integrate with the AppliedI One-Click WordPress installer and came across a couple items that caught my attention, Mimbo an online magazine theme by Darren Hoyt and WP e-Commerce, an e-commerce solution for wordpress by Instinct Entertainment.

Creating your online magazine with WordPress

Mimbo is a magazine-style WordPress theme that makes use of the WP template tag system to create a very non-traditional layout. You can see a live demo of mimbo here to get a feel for just what it does out of the box.

On Darren’s blog you’ll see many posts of sites that are based on the Mimbo design. Here’s a few links to some of the sites that are mimbo powered:

• http://idahoforronpaul.com/
• http://tricvoice.medianewsonline.com/
• http://www.sakejournal.com/
• http://www.douglasturner.com/

So with wordpress, a theme like mimbo and a little creativity you should be able to launch a pretty impressive online magazine yourself.  Mimbo isn’t the only magazine style wordpress theme out there as there are a number of commercial solutions available too:

• http://www.wpremix.com ($$$)
• http://hyalineskies.com/wordpress/gridlock/ (FREE)
• http://sandbox.limpag.com/ (FREE)
• http://news.revolutiontheme.com/ ($$$)
• http://www.wp-magazine.com/ ($$$)

And that’s just a sampling of the vast number of magazine style themes out there for wordpress. Not to mention the thousands of other themes available.

Creating your WordPress powered online store with WP e-Commerce

Let’s face it, the Internet has completely changed the way today’s consumer shops and has made virtually every brick and mortar store with an online store an International business.  E-Commerce is here to stay and as technology changes and evolves so does E-Commerce.  Enter, the Web 2.0 era of E-Commerce, blogs/CMS applications merging with shopping carts.

WP e-Commerce is a new plugin for wordpress that allows you to e-commerce enable your wordpress powered website.  WP e-Commerce is available as both a free version (for personal use), an upgraded version (GOLD version, $15) and a business class solution ($250).  For the features you get, even at $250, it’s a reasonably priced product.

Here’s a quick run down of the features:

• New – Search Engine Friendly URLs / Permalinks (latest RC)
• New - Marketing options under shop options (latest RC)
• New - Members Only Module
• Customizable pagination for product listing
• Unlimited products & categories
• AJAX powered Sliding Shopping Cart
• Shop front highlighting for newly added products
• AJAX powered Web 2.0 DropShop – additional gold module
• Grid View – additional gold module
• Fancy AJAX Alerts on Add to Cart
• Purchase history for logged in users
• New and improved Audio Player Module for selling MP3 files
• Chinese Language file
• Share this / Digg Product social networking promo tools
• Downloadable CSV files
• Detailed Purchase Log & Filters
• Configurable Tax settings including USA & Canada
• PayPal IPN
• URL linking to products and images
• – Next version
• RSS product feed widget
• Google Cart

Best of all, WP e-Commerce can integrate into your wordpress based site as either separate pages or widgets and the available widgets currently include:

• AJAX Shopping Cart Widget
• Categories & Brands Widget
• Donations Widget
• Product Specials Widget

A few sites based off of WP e-Commerce include (this list was taken from their website and may change at any time):

• www.orangutan-appeal.org.uk
• www.tabletalk.com
• www.imagecubes.com
• www.koloroo.com
• Eden Ripley
• Ochblog
• Crafty Designs
• Standard Electronics

Best of all, the installation of WP e-Commerce couldn’t be easier, upload the plug-in, enable it and configure it. That’s it.

I can see WP e-Commerce being used by people selling online e-books or audio files, subscription based services, donations, merchandise (it includes the ability to assign attributes like size, color, etc to products) and any number of simple e-commerce needs. So if you’re looking for a low cost, easy to use e-commerce solution and already have a wordpress enabled site or plan to use wordpress, give WP e-Commerce a peek. It may not have the features and functionality of the larger, more expensive solutions but for the price, it packs a pretty nice punch.

I encourage you to visit the WP e-Commerce site and experiment with it today.

Popularity: 39% [?]

WordPress has become so popular that I’m 90% sure that you have at least heard about the name. WordPress is in reality a blogger-like application that can be installed onto your own web hosting account.

With it you can even create your own community of bloggers, each person with his/her own blog, or you can have multiple authors on a single blog as well. Everything was thought of.

WordPress isn’t only this though. In essence yes. But it can be more, much more.

Many people, including myself use WordPress for more then just blogging. On my particular case, it’s the only CMS and it’s actually the platform that delivers all my website’s content to visitors. Everything dynamically!

In fact, I predict WordPress will turn into a full Content Management System such as Joomla, phpNuke or Post-Nuke. It really has the power for it. Actually it’s way more powerful and it can be much more secure then the ones I just mentioned. It’s all about patience and time to secure it.

Don’t worry, it isn’t insecure. But just like every other popular application, vulnerabilities are found more easily, and unfortunately they also become public from night to day. Again, a few tweaks here and there will kept your site secure from all the threats.

One of the things I’ve done on mine was to promptly restrict admin access to my IP only. Even if you have a dynamic IP and cannot do this, you can always restrict the IP range to your ISP. This is done by using rewrite rules.

More information on this can be found at:
http://blogsecurity.net/wordpress/article-210607/

Having this covered, WordPress can be your best pal on content management. Especially with the new tool from Microsoft: Windows Live Writer.

So with WordPress you’ll be able to submit new articles and update existing ones without even having to open a browser window.

What else could we ask for?

Plus with so many themes and plugins being developed for it, you can even sell cars through it. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? WordPress can do everything, really. Like I said it’s just a matter of putting time and effort into it, and it will become the perfect CMS for you, guaranteed.

Some interesting links:
Installation guide by Jess Coburn (Appliedi.net)
WordPress’ official plugin directory
WordPress’ official theme directory
WordPress compatible Hosting

Popularity: 2% [?]