Posted on April 10th, 2009 by Tom Arah

The Fantastico route to Web 2.0

Recently I upset a lot of web designers by saying that Dreamweaver is reaching the end of its dominance and that the future for website production (complete with essential web 2.0 functionality such as in-built commenting, RSS feeds and end user content contribution) belongs to the big three content management systems (cms): WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

Admittedly I’m biased on this, but I couldn’t help feeling that the responses were divided into two camps: those who had actually tried both approaches who largely agreed and those who hadn’t, who didn’t and who felt threatened by the suggestion and who wanted to close down the debate.

Between these two extremes I hope that there were plenty of more open-minded designers who were intrigued and ideally excited about the possibilities. After all, the cms approach doesn’t just offer more power, each of the cms solutions is open source and so free. That should mean that there’s nothing to stop you exploring both approaches and then making your mind up…

Unfortunately it’s not quite as simple as this. However, with a little help, it can be…

The problem hits immediately – installation. Visit the big three cms sites and you can quickly download the latest releases but you then have to set these up on your own hosting space. The ease with which this is done varies with each cms but suddenly you’re talking about MySQL databases, permissions, configuration files and so on and before you know it you’re reading through reams of baffling support pages discussing the finer points of table prefixes. This is frankly terrifying for your average page-based designer used to the simplicity of copying their local pages to their remote host.

It doesn’t have to be this way. To avoid such installation nightmares all you need is a host that provides decent cPanel support. This will provide you with a control panel that provides all the tools that you need to set up your database, ftp and unzip the cms files into position, back up your database, flush caches, manage table prefixes and so on…

Oh dear this is beginning to sound almost as bad. But it doesn’t have to be this way either.

Instead you can just click on your cPanel’s Fantastico button (the one with a nice smiley face) and take advantage of one-click installs. Within a minute or so you can have copies of each of the main three cms options up and running (and plenty of others too). It really is unbelievably simple and I strongly recommend that you give it a go – visit the Fantastico site and there’s a list of hosting partners offering Fantastico support for a pittance a month.

Fantastico is a huge step forward, but immediately I’ll put in two major caveats.

Firstly Fantastico isn’t foolproof. I remember first recommending it a couple of years ago for installing Drupal and, by the time the article came out, the current version simply didn’t work (due to a clash in table character set). I think the cms developers have now appreciated the importance of Fantastico to initial set up and first impressions and crucially, in its latest Fantastico Deluxe form, to encouraging prompt security fix updating complete with built in backup, so hopefully compatibility shouldn’t be an issue nowadays…

But in any case I’m not suggesting that you should rely on Fantastico. If you’re going to get serious about cms you have to realise just how fundamentally different it is to static page-based publishing and you have to get fully grips with how and why, and the implications.

Switching from Dreamweaver to cms-based publishing is not something you can do in a minute. Expect it to take at least a year (and don’t judge the possibilities on the default set-ups!) and in that time make sure that you do learn about MySQL and cms handling and in particular get to grips with installation, backup, migration and security updating without Fantastico. This is where all those other cPanel utilities like phpMyAdmin come in. Fantastico shouldn’t be seen as a replacement to these but as an addition.

Crucially what Fantastico does offer is the chance to freely and painlessly put your toe in the Web 2.0 cms water. Thanks to Fantastico there really is no excuse not to give content management systems a try.

In fact if your current host is cPanel-based you might well find that you already have access to Fantastico and could be exploring what WordPress, Joomla and Drupal – my favoured option – have to offer in a matter of minutes. If not, you could sign up for a month’s trial with an ISP that does provide Fantastico support for as little as $7. If you’re currently a static page-based Dreamweaver author, that could prove the best investment you ever make.

Tags: cms, cpanel, digital design, dreamweaver, drupal, fantastico, joomla, web 2.0, wordpress

Posted in: Real World Computing

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17 Responses to “ The Fantastico route to Web 2.0 ”

danreb Says:
April 11th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Many CMS comes with an ugly URL and take some time to load because of over killed javascript files, the pretty URL which is often does’nt activated yet when you installed the CMS and sometimes very hard to deal with. I see this as a factor and advantage of static html over dynamic, I also seen CMS easily hacked ( joomla ) is in the number 1 in list and secondly – wordpress. I admit , this is why i prefer not to go with these CMS.

How do you deal with this?
Tom Arah Says:
April 13th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Yes the default /? urls are a major turn-off to users and search engines alike. The good news is that they’re very easy to turn off assuming your host supports mod_rewrite and with a modern cpanel-fantastico based host I’d be very surprised if it isn’t.

As for security I agree that this is a major concern (not that other sites are immune). The argument for cms is that there’s a pool of developers always looking to close down holes and the handling is certainly getting better eg prominent reminders/warnings regarding latest releases. Another benefit of Fantastico is that it can make it simple and painless to apply these security fixes complete with rollback. Still this is an area that really needs to be focused on and built into core.
Nicl Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 9:29 am
The CMSs discussed (or at least drupal) offer ways to generate more user-friendly (and SE friendly) URLs. For example, check out the ‘PathAuto’ free module for Drupal which coupled with the in-built ‘clean-urls’ function, allows for sensible naming of URLs.
Tom Arah Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Yes PathAuto is one of the modules that won me round to Drupal – brilliant for automatically generating meaningful URLs based on tokens such as hierarchical key terms and author. Turns a major disadvantage into a huge plus – basically when its keywords are in the URL Google knows that’s what the page is about and is more likely to rank it ie built-in SEO.
Al Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 10:02 am
I would also recommend dot net nuke – dnn, not as cheap to run as the others (being asp.net MS-SQL) but well featured and strangely very ignored in the uk!
Clive Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 10:56 am
“Admittedly I?m biased on this, but I couldn?t help feeling that the responses were divided into two camps: those who had actually tried both approaches who largely agreed and those who hadn?t, who didn?t and who felt threatened by the suggestion and who wanted to close down the debate. ”

Oh come on! Are you really saying that anyone who disagrees with your view is insecure enough in their own position as to want to “close down the debate”?

Our own position here is that we’ve begun playing with CMS systems such as Wordpress (very much like its out-of-the-box simplicity) and ExpressionEngine (very much appreciate it’s potential in the hands of skilled developers, but wow! – fearsome learning curve) with a view to using them in a wider context. I really do think that such systems have a part to play in the broad scheme of things.

I fully accept and largely agree with your view that it’s the work of at least a full year to re-jig one’s mindset with regard to these systems and their completely differing methodologies. The issues that we’re currently examining here at this stage is whether, for the majority of our SME type clients, the extra effort is actually worth the journey at a practical day-to-day level. The stark reality is that not many of our client’s sites are text heavy, blog-like structures that demand endless continual updates and countless words being shovelled into them on a daily basis. For good or ill, they may only be updated a few times a month. For such clients, Contribute is plenty good enough, offering the benefits of utter simplicity and a workflow that is not too unlike that with which they are already familiar. I’d stress here, that I’m not a Contribute zealot; it’s simply a matter of horses for courses.

I’m a designer, primarily, and I’m personally excited about the potential for online CMS systems, I’d just offer the observation that I’ve made (of course, dear reader, I’m not saying that this is universally the case) that the sites that tend to use them do rather conform to a blog aesthetic and as such, look very much the same.

The other observation I’ve made in my admittedly limited use of WordPress and Drupal is that while it is reasonably simple to modify supplied/sourced templates, it seems a rather different matter in creating one from scratch. EE seems better in that regard, but I’m still waiting for the much vaunted ‘light bulb moment’ that so many of its forum users go on about when discussing the difficulty in ‘getting’ the way it works.

Summary. Agree in large parts with your premise. Disagree with the idea that anyone dissenting from your view is wrong.
Tom Arah Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Hi Clive. Not sure you’ve read all the comments here and elsewhere – ignorant, retard, liar etc – but I take your point. I should have put “some of whom…”

Having said that, I think you clearly fall into the tried-it-and-largely-agree camp. We’ve also heard plenty from the not-tried-it-but-why-should-that-stop-me-expressing-myself-robustly brigade. Significantly though there’s been very little comment from the tried-it-but-strongly-disagree camp which I think says a lot.

And yes totally agree that some sites will benefit more and that the default blog-style design is a major turn off. However you can get a cms to look good and completely blog-free (see my http://www.pcpro.co.uk/realworld/234927/web-20-day-2.html article for starters) but you can’t graft web 2.0 functionality onto a static html site. And the demands for these capabilities are only going to increase.
Simon Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
And still I say … I use CMSs AND Dreamweaver. I tried Drupal and nearly keeled over at the prospect of talking some of my clients through that one! I use either Wordpress or my own CMS depending on the site requirements.

For my own web site I use Wordpress (not much on the site though!). And I use Dreamweaver to design/redesign the CSS/HTML. It’s just so easy and saves me lots of time.

A pretty straight forward way with Wordpress is view the template/page/whatever with a browser, copy the resultant source code and paste in into, say, test.html and then edit that in Dreamweaver. Easy. Same with my own CMS.

Yes, you have to get your hands a bit grubby with the PHP code in order to structure things properly (although, personally, I love messing with PHP) unless you settle for the default setup. Don’t know if you can do that with Drupal. Once again, Dreamweaver is a real time saver, you can spot coding problems really simply just because of the colour coding in the scripts.

When I have time I will revisit Drupal because it seems more suited to web sites than Wordpress which seems more ‘blog-centric’.

Meanwhile, do I qualify as maybe someone who does fall in the middle of this one? I really like CMSs and I really like it that I can use Dreamweaver on them (well not on Drupal …. yet!).

Horses, for courses, no point in getting all fundamentalist about these things ….

Simon.
Tom Arah Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Absolutely. I’m not saying Dreamweaver is dead. Nor that it will disappear. I have been and remain a fan and still use it myself (though considerably less than I did). Dreamweaver still has an important support role to play in today’s cms-based authoring (and of course in custom web app development), but that’s very different from its current web dominance and its central role creating everything.

Moreover in the future I would expect the cms, or other free apps, to take over these template and css duties and for the cms’s in-built design quality/choice and customisability to radically improve, again reducing the need for an expensive and complex tool like Dreamweaver.

I’m not attacking, or even criticizing, Dreamweaver but I am saying that its great strength ie standalone page-based static publishing (and ground-up development) can’t compete with the scalability and functionality of a modern community-oriented, community-created cms-based approach.
Simon Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
I am pleased to read your last paragraph in particular Tom. My income dropped by approx 75% last year because (*I was stupid enough to teach) the design agency where I got most of my work from learned html/css!

So far this year I have picked up two new main contractors (design agencies) both of whom have html/css skills but none of the above have any scripting/database skills and already this year looks like it will be a successful one.

You appear to be correct, the demand for non-static sites is really taking off, at least in my back room office anyway!

cheers,

Simon.

*I can’t believe that I fell for the, “If you teach our designer (free of charge) html/css then we can supply you with better thought out designs,” line!
Clive Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
“…the Inline and Image Cache contributed modules. It’s more demanding to handle, so its use is limited to experts, but work is under way to extend the Inline contributed module into a more flexible core Drupal API that should enable all forms of binary content – images, videos, Flash and more – to be embedded much more easily.That’s for the future, but what about now? For a truly scalable Web 2.0 community site you need no-brainer image handling for all content contributors.”

Quite. This is one aspect of the CMS I’ve tried (Drupal, very little; WordPress, a bit; EE, a good bit more) that seems a positive step backwards in time. Frankly, the idea that the content contributor should have to jump through hoops simply to add a bit of Flash content, image or video is derisory in this day and age. I’ve re-read your article (from the link above) and I can’t help but feel that you are attempting to pass off these inadequacies as benefits by suggesting that it may not be such a wise idea in allowing contributors to do such wild and wacky things with images, such as, say, have them floated left. Or resize them. Or crop them. As long as the client is aware of the correct way to apply styles within the constraints of the style guides I’m personally all for them getting on with it. And what’s wrong with that?

We’ve come across similar problems with trying to get tabular data into CMS managed sites and then providing the capability of styling it accordingly in a way that is simple and intuitive for the client. In Contribute, this is a doddle, one can apply CSS styles to whole tables, table headers and table individual table cells if necessary with a click or two. How is this handled in Drupal?

This aspect of online CMSs – that they only really handle content well as long as it’s in the form of words – is, I believe – the current glaring weakness when compared to ‘traditional’ alternatives such as, say, Contribute.
Tom Arah Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Things have moved on quite a way since I wrote the article. In particular with Drupal’s CCK module and imagefield and embedded media extensions you can now easily add images, flash, video, third party content etc . With imagecache you can also enforce consistency through set sizes and automatically generate thumbnails and other sizes for galleries etc and with the imagefield crop module you can even provide your site’s end users with a simple onscreen cropping widget based on your set sizes. I’d definitely now add image/media handling to the cms plus column.

I haven’t really looked at tables but some of the wysiwyg editors offer pretty extensive end user control while some of the text input filters are designed specifically for table handling. And with CCK and templates you have total control over how preset tables such as end user ratings are styled.

And of course all this can be enabled for free for all users with the necessary permissions, including site visitors where desirable, in the browser itself rather than to a closed workgroup who have to pay for the proprietary Contribute.
Clive Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Thank you for the detailed reply, Tom. I have to confess that I’ve just spent some time re-reading this thread from its origins and it’s now just dawned on me that a key component in your thesis is the open-source aspect of CMS, rather than online CMS versus Dreamweaver debate per se. That will teach me to skim, so thank you for your patience with me.

In this regard (open versus proprietary) I’m agnostic-ish. I’m personally not technically savvy enough to understand the underlying open-source technologies and while I like the idea of Linux conquering the world (I even delivered a lecture to my design students back in ‘95 or ‘96, I think, in which I postulated that very scenario with regard the then nascient OS) I came to realise some time ago that digging around in archane open-source forums in the quest for answers to pressing practical problems was not an effective strategy for me. Clearly, it is a very effective and enjoyable strategy for some, but not for me yet, though I wish it well. Having said that, my browser of choice is Firefox and I also routinely use a number of open-source apps on a fairly regular basis.

I do like the idea of the one-stop-shop; I know where I stand. That’s as true of CMSs as it is of image processing apps. That’s probably why we’ve invested in EE and will likely settle upon it as our CMS of choice, rather than, say, Drupal or Wordpress.

I suspect that it is for this reason that until I can get Photoshop, Dreamweaver (yes, I still love it) Fireworks (my all time favourite app) and any of a number of other treasured proprietary apps on Linux then I’m unlikely to make the move away from Windows based systems. Not because I especially like Windows (or that I’m unreceptive to alternatives), but because 100% of my clients do.

Here’s a bit of crystal ball gazing – just for fun. In five years time the CMS of choice will be platform agnostic and will be Flash based. And it will be largely wysiwyg. And it will be proprietary.
Tom Arah Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Regarding the crystal ball gazing of course another advantage of data-driven cms as opposed to traditional static handling is that it should be easy to use as the basis of XML-based RIA handling whether that’s in Flash or Silverlight. But I think I’d better not open up another can of worms just yet
Yani Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 6:11 am
I’m so with Tom on this. I recently suggested to a couple of lads that their websites which failed validation were crap and they should use a CMS. And Drupal is excellent. It beats the hell out of securing a PHP site by hand.

But it’s so not all about Dreambeaver either. Dreambeaver by it’s very nature leads to site where tables are used for formatting and separation of content, style and code is mucked together. Being able to do a nice looking site in Dreambeaver does not a web professional make. That doesn’t mean it’s not a great editor if you actually have a handle on the theory of web standards. It just means that being able to use InDesign doesn’t mean buying Dreambeaver makes you a web professional. Or anything even close to it!

Tom I think you should do a review on this… Aptana — http://aptana.com/

The editor is based on Eclipse the Java standard bearer, the cloud is based on Mozilla JavaScript, the system is integrated and studio is FREE.

Nothing wrong with Dreambeaver but XHTML should be learned and anyone who thinks they can use a WYSIWYG editor to write XHTML hasn’t got what it’s about. And those of us that do get it are using a CMS and/or Ruby on Rails. We have written enough code to know that leveraging the work of others is that way to go.

Drupal is great stuff. jQuery is up there with must learns. PHP skills are essential. Dare I say… “get with the program lads”.
Gindylow Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Default install and default template and fantastico = average looking website with plenty of grunt.

Add in a user with knowledge of XHTML, CSS and either notepad, Visual Studio, Coffe Cup HTML or Dreamweaver and you can reach something incredible, and that’s before you get started on moo tools!

This article seems to be arguing that web 2 can be made incredible without skill. I would say it can be made run of the mill only, until you pep it all up with skill.
parkbenchbruce Says:
May 4th, 2009 at 2:57 am
I have enjoyed Tom views and Simons comments. I have been playing with Dreamweaver and Fantastico for many years. I think it is the style versus structure debate: style dreamweaver and structure fantastico.
Fantastico has had some problems with upgrades. I used CMS Moodle and Jommla and both were difficult to upgrade under Fantastico. Fantastico leaves such problems to you to solve. It requires getting the server team to roll back and adjust settings. This is getting better but was a big problem.
Dreamweaver gives me the Flash front end. So which one? Maybe both depending on the function of the website. I use a slider scale with style at one end and structure at the other.
I can live with both. I am setting up a new website for an online bookshop. Structure as the bak end needs to work. Then you get into shopping cart problems. I was looking at Wordpress and Ruby on Rails just to keep up to date but too hard to fit them on my simple scale.

As Simon say horses for courses.

Wikipedia: the defence

Feeling Remote

Posted on April 10th, 2009 by Tom Arah

The Fantastico route to Web 2.0

17 Responses to “ The Fantastico route to Web 2.0 ”

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