Heart Internet offers our customers access to an extensive library of free cgi scripts allowing them to install professional applications very quickly and with minimal effort. This article will cover the benefits of using our Content Management Systems (Joomla, Drupal, Typo3 and Nucleus) and why using them will help streamline the publishing of content online.

Quick and Easy to Update
Content Management Systems allow users to add new pages to a website with minimal effort. Your entire website is managed via your administration control panel where you can add new articles, images, polls and many other features via an intuitive interface.

Web Experience not Essential
Traditionally you would need to hire a web designer/developer to manage your website. Using a CMS eliminates the need to do this. Everything from the look and feel of your website to article management can be handled via your control panel.  It is also a very cost effective way of running your own website as everything can be updated and managed by yourself. If you are ever in need of help or guidance, you can check the CMS provider’s FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section of their website or try posting your problem over at their official support forums. A list of useful links can be found at the bottom of this article.

Automatic Navigation Generation
Menu’s will be created automatically when you add new pages/categories which will form the basis of your websites navigation, e.g. Homepage, Contact, Articles, etc. This eliminates the need to manually update your navigation each time you add a new section, saving you time, effort and preventing the risk of creating dead links.

Searchable
Using a CMS will allow your entire website to be searchable enabling people to find content fast.  The advantages of having a search system in place on your website will save users the time of having to trawl through static pages trying to find what they need. It makes for a much better user experience and is certainly less frustrating.

Scheduled Content
With most Content Management Systems you can post date articles allowing you to publish them on a certain time or day of the week.  This is especially handy if you need to publish content at certain times but you’re not available to do so – the CMS will update it for you.

Protected Content
A CMS can make certain pages viewable only to people you choose. For example, you can allow visitors to your website to view all of your basic articles but require registration for them to view premium content.

Consistent Design
Don’t worry about creating new pages for every article as a Content Management System will automatically produce them for you. The article page will be created from a single template and, no matter how much content you add, you can rest assured the look of your website will stay the same.

Extendable
Content Management Systems, such as Joomla, have an excellent resource of extensions allowing you to develop your website further and offer more functionality.  There are hundreds of extensions available, including Ecommerce, Forums, Galleries, Classified Advertisements and so much more. A link to the entire database of extensions can be found below.

Remember you can easily install your own CMS from our database of scripts that come with any hosting account.

Helpful Links

Joomla Extensions
http://extensions.joomla.org/

Joomla Community Forum
http://forum.joomla.org/

Drupal Forum
http://drupal.org/forum

Typo3 Documentation
http://typo3.com/Support.1228.0.html

Nucleus Support Forum
http://forum.nucleuscms.org/

We have added a new feature to WebMail so that you can manage autoresponders from http://www.outitgoes.com/. You can specify your mailbox username and password and then create, delete or disable an autoresponder.

This is handy for when you are out of the office for the day or for when you go on holiday. Remember that you can also change your mailbox password on http://www.outitgoes.com/.

If you are a Heart Internet Reseller this features allows any of your end users who do not have access to the eXtend control panel to manage their own autoresponder.

After reading Jonathan’s blog article about how bandwidth has changed over the last ten years it got me thinking about the hardware we use in web hosting. I’ve just placed an order for additional web servers of the following spec:

Dell 1950

• Two Quad Core Intel® Xeon® X5460, 2X6MB Cache, 3.16GHz,
• 8 GB 667MHZ FBD
• Primary HD: 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 15.000 rpm Hard Drive
• Secondary HD: 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 15.000 rpm Hard Drive
• Perc6i SAS RAID Controller
• dual Broadcom® NetXtreme II 5708 Gigabit Ethernet NIC

When we launched WebFusion in 1997 we built our own servers for the first year then started to use equipment from Penguin Computing. We selected Penguin as they were one of the first companies to supply rack mounted servers to the Linux community. They are based in San Francisco and we often had to wait up to four weeks for delivery – having said that they always put toy penguins in the packaging to ease the wait! The spec of the servers in 1998 was:

 
• Two 300 MHz Pentium II w/256K Cache
• 128 MB ECC 100 MHz SDRAM
• Integrated Adaptec 7890 Ultra2 SCSI Controller
• Primary HD: Quantum 9.1 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
• Intel 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Adapter

Of course in 1998 we only gave 10MB disk space with each account and bandwidth was limited by the fact that nearly everyone was on dial-up, so these servers coped fine. Today’s websites are much more demanding of servers, so even though the spec is significantly higher, we still only put the same number of accounts on each server as we did ten years ago.

We upgraded our bandwidth today, adding 50 Mb to our current infrastructure, it’s the second time we have upgraded this year. There’s nothing particularly special about this upgrade, except that it got us talking about how much our bandwidth requirements have changed over the last few years.

When we setup WebFusion in 1997 (which we sold some years ago) we started with a 64 KB line, that cost £20,000 per year! We had 600 websites on it before we needed to upgrade and we used it for our office Internet access as well. When we upgraded we went to 128 KB and it was sometime before we hit 1 MB. Back then most hosting companies had a spare room with all their servers in and “air conditioning” was provided by a couple of fans. I remember that the largest hosting company at the time had 2 X 2 MB lines and this seemed quite unbelievable.

Fast forward 11 years and it’s predicted that 2 out of 3 households in the UK will have broadband by the end of the year, so I think we will be adding to our network capacity again fairly soon.

We have updated our Joomla installer to 1.5.1 today. We had been planning on moving to this version in the next few months anyway, but recently some serious security vulnerabilities have been identified in previous versions of Joomla, so we felt we should upgrade our copy now.

To install the new version log-in to your eXtend control panel and go to the CGI/PHP Scripts section.

An overview of Joomla 1.5 is available on the Joomla Website. If you are looking to upgrade your existing Joomla site then there is a helpful article on the Joomla Team Blog on how to do this.