Lacisoft's » wordpress

Why to use TYPO3 ?

lacisoft — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 12:14:16 +0000

From time to time this question pops up. So why would anyone use TYPO3 and not WordPress or Drupal ? I thought about writing an article on the subject until i found this article : An honest look at why we use TYPO3 written by Zach Davis.

I couldn’t write it better so i’m sharing the link and although its a long article, it is worth reading!

Some TYPO3 market share statistics

lacisoft — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 08:18:11 +0000

Have you ever wondered how much is TYPO3′s share in the CMS market? Well, i did. And if you didn’t know there are some websites that have these statistics and they update them near real time.

One of these sites is W3Techs , a website which monitor lots of things and among other things they also monitor CMS software market shares. According to them TYPO3 is in the 6th place

(source)

From this graph we can see that 75.9% of the websites aren’t using any CMS. From those who use CMS, TYPO3 has a market share of 2.5% (0.6% from the global share including non-CMS websites).

The leading CMS is WordPress with more then half of the CMS installations being on this platform. Second is Joomla, which surprises me, Joomla in my opinion isn’t a too bright CMS, being plagued by security holes and the lack of free modules for it is annoying.Drupal comes in 3rd place, which surprises me again, i’ve been expecting Drupal on the second place. Certainly in my point of view Drupal is better then Joomla at any task.

Place 4 is taken by vBulletin which as i know it is mostly used for forums (although it has some CMS functions added recently – i don’t hink people use it for that purpose) and its place in the CMS category is open for discussion. Place 5 goes to Google’s Blogger, which again can be considered a CMS but in reality is a blogging platform which is pushed hard by Google and which isn’t offered for the users to download, modify, use.

If we go forward and analyze TYPO3 further we will see that there are still 2.3% of websites wich use version 3.x of TYPO3. That version is so ancient that i wonder how these people manage to keep their website up and running. TYPO3′s versions greater then 4 are used by 97.7% of the TYPO3 users.

(source)

If we further analyze this breakdown and see how the 4.x branch is doing, then we will have some little surprises.

(source)

It seems that more then one third of the TYPO3 4.x branch is ruled by versions 4.2.x and about 21% for 4.3.x and 4.4.x. This is bad news because the 4.2 branch support is being discontinued this month when TYPO3 4.5 LTS (Long Term Support) appears. Users running TYPO3 4.2.x will need to upgrade soon in order to have their versions supported. This is also valid for the 14.5% who use TYPO3 4.1.x which is obsolete and not supported since last july and users of the 4.0.x branch which is not supported for more then a year. You can see the TYPO3 support matrix here

Overall TYPO3 could do better, and will do better. Version 4.5 will be Long Term Support and probably many people are just waiting for this version to appear and will be upgrading to it. Now that TYPO3 has an Introduction Package that makes learning TYPO3 easier and the availability of the TYPO3 Distributions should bolster the adoption among people who didn’t used it before.

Meantime i will be continuing to monitor TYPO3′s market share and plan to provide a report on this blog every six months about the TYPO3′s market share and the evolution of the market share.

What is your opinion on this data ? How do you think that TYPO3 usage can be increased ?

Weekly article batch 3

lacisoft — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:06:22 +0000

From this week i will try to resuscitate my weekly article batches.

Here is the most interesting articles from the last week:

Drupal 7 Vs. WordPress 3: Battle Of The New Features : an interesting read about the two highly anticipated open-source CMS releases of the year. You guessed correctly. Its about Drupal 7 and WordPress 3.
Wrapping up T3DD10 : interesting stuff happened at the latest TYPO3 Developers Days. Among other things the release date for TYPO3 4.5 was set. It is 26th of January 2011
PHP : the teenage years : PHP turned 15 this year. A nice post about PHP, its strengths, weaknesses and what are the challenges, what comes next.
Updated Cheat Sheets for CSS, HTML, jQuery, PHP and More : Cheat Sheets come handy sometimes. So take a good look at them and why not even save them ?
How to write a simple scraper in PHP without Regex : Didn’t you think ever about a PHP scraper ? I did. And here is a nice tutorial that shows you how to scrape with PHP without Regex.

Weekly article batch 2

lacisoft — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:09:08 +0000

Here is the second edition of my weekly “press review”

Interesting articles last week:

Gartner report on PHP – published by Danne Lundqvist on dotvoid.com – writes about a report by Gartner (here) that makes it clear that more and more companies discover the benefits of PHP and adoption is increasing among major companies.
A case for table-based design – published by Evert Pot on rooftopsolutions.nl – i could not agree more, table based designs are useful in some situations.
ASP.NET for PHP developers – published by Chris Taylor on net.tutsplus.com – does a great introduction to ASP.NET using C# for PHP developers. I’m even tempted to do a site in ASP.NET just for educational purpose
Why is reusable code so hard to secure ? – published on devcentral.f5.com – some aspects of this article are subject to debate but others do present us with a valid issue when developing reusable code
How to speed up your WordPress sites – published on devwebpro.com – as page speed is becoming a ranking factor for Google its nice to know what could i do with my blog if overnight would become hugely popular.
40+ essential Drupal Modules – published on nicklewis.org- well most of these should be familiar to every Drupal developer but its nice to have a place where to look up if you search for something specific and proven for the task at hand.

Weekly article batch. Edition 1

lacisoft — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:26:56 +0000

I read many articles and most times i don’t bookmark them even if they are fairly good articles and can be useful in some situations. I thought i should save them somewhere, but they are not so important to be added to bookmarks.

So starting with this year i will publish a post with these articles every week on thursday. This way i can find them when i need them and also maybe some of you can find something interesting to read among them.

The order is arbitrary and some of the articles may be older then one week. The fact is that i read them this week so they get mentioned here this week.

Interesting articles this week:

15 useful jQuery plugins and tutorials – published by designer-daily.com, contains a good selection of jQuery plugins and tutorials
Exception handling in PHP – published by devshed.com, we all come across this: exception handling, a nice overview on the topic
MySQL : Using IF in a WHERE clause – published by electrictoolbox.com, although not a good solution – an IF is possible in a WHERE clause and i post this here only for reference – i not recommend using such solutions
Dive into HTML 5 – published by diveintohtml5.org, HTML 5 is here and this is a fairly good intro in it
13 Useful Code Snippets for WordPress development, published by webdesignledger.com, WordPress in more and more a part of our life and this article can be handy if we want to customize some of the things in WordPress
Speed matters , published by Dries Buytaert on buytaert.net , increasing latency will drive your visitors away as one Google research paper points it out. So think twice before adding a feature that hurts performance

WordPress upgrade under 3 minutes without leaving admin interface

lacisoft — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:32:13 +0000

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.8 (Chet Baker). I think i never experienced such a smooth upgrade to a new version of a web application. When i logged in to the admin interface of my WordPress it just warned me that there is a new version and i should upgrade. Ok i clicked the warning entered the ftp password and after waiting around 3 minutes WordPress upgraded my blog to version 2.8. And this without ever leaving my admin backend or using any ftp program or something.

You may say that this is not such a big deal. And i may agree with you if we were talking about a desktop application. But for a web application it is important in my opinion. WordPress made running a blog a piece of cake and many people with no or little technical skills can run their own blog, upgrade it, install plugins and with version 2.8 they can install themes too without ever leaving their admin panel, without copying files, uploading to ftp and other things that usually discourage people.

Way to go. I’m waiting other CMS providers to take example from WordPress and come up with a similar solution.

5 articles you must read about WordPress

lacisoft — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:35:10 +0000

Working and publishing with WordPress is easy. But sometimes users can waste lots of times figuring out some more advanced tricks or features. Believe me i’ve been there myself. So i compiled a list of articles, tutorials and howtos that will certainly help you alot when dealing with WordPress.

1) WordPress as CMS tutorial - http://robertbasic.com/blog/wordpress-as-cms-tutorial/

This tutorial explains how to turn your WordPress installation into a powerful CMS, using only basic PHP and HTML skills.

2) Top 50 WordPress Tutorials - http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/web-roundups/top-50-wordpress-tutorials/

This is a collection of tutorials that cover everything from Basics to some more advanced tricks, including Themes, Plugins, Backend

3) 1o Useful RSS Tricks and Hacks for WordPress - http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/12/02/10-useful-rss-hacks-for-wordpress/

RSS is a must for every blog. This tutorial explains how to control your RSS feed down to the last byte of information

4) Best WordPress plugin for related posts - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-related-posts/

Matt Cutts writes about probably the best related posts plugin for WordPress. The plugin is called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) and it is very easy to install and configure.

5) 13 Great WordPress Speed Tips & Tricks for Max Performance - http://www.noupe.com/wordpress/13-great-wordpress-speed-tips-tricks-for-max-performance.html

Getting your WordPress up and running is easy. But what are you doing when your site is experiencing high traffic ?

I hope these articles will help you to get the most out of your WordPress installation.

The right CMS for the right job

lacisoft — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 14:44:08 +0000

I was trying different content management systems for a long time. And sometimes choosing one for a site is a difficult job. That is because we have plenty of packages to choose from. After a while i came to the conclusion that each of them is suited for different kinds of sites.

For example if it’s a blog then it must be WordPress. Although i like Typo3, Drupal and TikiWiki i wouldn’t recommend either of them for blogging. They are just way behind WordPress at this chapter. Off course WordPress is not suited for other kinds of applications like a highly customized, database driven site.

The other packages have other strenghts and weaknesses, it depends on the developer to correctly identify the right package. Sure, there is a learning curve for every CMS and associated framework, but sometimes it does not worth it to stick to one CMS at all cost.

Working with them in the past years i identified the strenghts and weaknesses of these packages and i come to the following conclusions:

Drupal

Suited for: community driven websites, publishing, presentation websites

TikiWiki

Suited for: wikis, collaborative/group publishing, resource sharing platforms

Typo3

Suited for: corporate websites, online shops/e-commerce, enterprise websites, publishing, sites where high customization is a must, presentation websites

WordPress

Suited for: blogging, publishing

Sure there are many more content management systems, but i use these, after trying many others. I found that these four can be used to build any type of PHP based website.

Running on WordPress 2.7

lacisoft — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:55:34 +0000

Following the release of WordPress 2.7 i upgraded quickly to this version. The famous quick install only took 3 minutes and i encountered no problems. After this i tought that i try the new live update functions of the application. So i installed a plugin for sharing posts with others without leaving the WordPress interface and without downloading any file.

Congrats, WordPress is becoming more and more robust and user friendly. Many others should take a notice!

A fresh look for my blog

lacisoft — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:24:01 +0000

I just put up a new wordpress theme for my blog. I like it although i am not a fan of colorful themes. Sure thing there are bugs here and there and if you find one i would appreciate reporting it to me by leaving a comment to this post.

An insight into me – meet my new personal blog