Hey folks, we have retired this blog and moved our ongoing activities over to our new company portal http://www.cnpintegrations.com. There are some great archives here but our new posts will be found at our CNP Team Blog at www.cnpintegrations.com/blog/. Thank you for your interest and hope you will continue to follow our blog and social chatter.

Sincerely, CN

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Building Community Websites With Joomla - Case Study: My Puget Sound

Presented by: Christopher Nielsen

http://youtu.be/3-MpXwMimWg

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When your website is live online you want it to always be perfect. In order to keep it that way you might consider making changes first on an offline version of your website. This gives you the opportunity to try out new things and not be overly concerned about breaking anything. When you make mistakes or really mess things up on your live website your stress level can go through the roof.

Having a sandbox copy of your website is a great way to work

Having a sandbox copy of your website to use for editing and trying out new things is a great way to work. A sandbox site is simply a copy of your website somewhere that is not accessible by the public. You can have this on your live server in a password protected directory. Another way of working offline is by using a virtual server environment on your computer.

If you want to work on a copy of your website on your computer there are software packages that make it really easy to set up a virtual server. There's simply no need to go through the pains of setting up a web server from scratch on your computer. For Apple computers there is a package called "MAMP" that you can use. MAMP is an acronym for Macintosh, Apache, mySQL & PHP. These are the main server side resources that are needed to run database driven websites like Joomla. On a PC there are virtual server packages with names such as XAMPP, and WAMP.

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In case you hadn’t heard, CNP Integrations has developed a new way to give webmasters, site administrators, and developers the ability to choose what CMS they want to use, and help sites easily migrate from Drupal to Joomla!. In this blog series, we’ll look at several aspects of migrating a Drupal; site to Joomla!, including looking at administrative aspects, the mechanics of the migration itself, and even some management tips for administrators looking at migrating. (Tip: if you just can’t wait for those posts to come out, join us this weekend at JoomlaDayNYC for a presentation focused on this topic!) But in this post I want to take just a minute to look at why would you consider migrating in the first place? What circumstances do people find themselves in when they contact us wanting to migrate?

CNP gets many requests and contacts with people looking at, or wanting to migrate their Drupal site to Joomla!. The reasons for why vary widely. Some are run by webmasters or administrators that are just more familiar and comfortable with Joomla!, so it makes sense for them to try to migrate to a platform and environment that they’re more familiar with. Others have just discovered Joomla!, and are liking the relative simplicity in management and development for someone that doesn’t write code and isn’t a programmer. And still others are looking for a specific feature set that Joomla! provides them - those are the ones I want to look at today. What features attract migrations from Drupal?

Stability

In the past few years Joomla! has put a lot of focus on seamless upgrade paths. Technology doesn’t stand still. But historically for enterprise or corporate software that has often meant painful upgrades and migrations to new versions of the same software they’ve been on for years. With a new focus on easing that process, Joomla! provides a platform that provides enormous flexibility and capability, with the promise that upgrades will be much easier, sometimes painless all-together.

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Web Security Stories to scare you in the right direction.

Recently, I presented a session on web security at Joomla Day Chicago and to prepare for this our PM team and I had the pleasure to meet with the mastermind developer of the SecureLive software and security specialist Jeff Brown as well as the acclaimed author of the “CMS Security Handbook” Tom Canavan. We shared many stories about client experiences and what our clients and their customers should be concerned with when it comes to security. I think the most important realization here was that there really needs to be more awareness on the amazing capabilities of hacker networks and the potential liability an average Joe website owner could be responsible for.

I want to share reasons for paying attention to web security that should scare you… because, it sure scares me and I am more fortunate than others to have folks on our team that are real security pros. The real life capabilities of some of the crafty hackers and what they actually can do is nothing less than amazing. In this article I want to help you identify where you can find good information on security and offer a couple solutions you can consider for protecting your Joomla CMS web portal as well as reducing risk to you and your company.

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