I have recently started to roll out these CMS's to schools who want an up and running website that is easy to maintain. The nice thing about them is just that. The crap thing is that there doesn't seem to be an easy way "yet" to prevent the general public from registering as a user with your site, or setting various security levels to groups in the front-end/general public.
Of all the various Content Management Systems I have tried out, Joomla is by far the easiest to setup, operate, and give a crisp professional feel to it. If you are going to set up an interactive website, use Joomla.
Aside from that though, I will link to the two sites that have been cookie-cut with these solutions once they are completed.
Apparently over the last couple of months there was a shake down between Mambo programmers. This caused the birth of the Mambo foundation and Joomla. From what I gather, Mambo has been (or is going to be) completely rewritten and is now set out to make money from their efforts (nothing wrong with that). The programmers devoted to the OS ideologies have continued on as Joomla.
**Update 31/1/06
Some of what I wrote here is innacurate now. Here is a link to a more recent rundown of the dispute between Mambos parent company Miro International, and the old developers who have forked in to Joomla.
I know that as an implementor for low-budget organizations, I will continue to stay with the original code which has worked well in the past.
**Update 31/1/06
Hmmmm.... without the same sort of funding going to joomla, I wonder if they'll be able to keep up in terms of their rebuilding efforts and whether or not an ecommerce aspect will come of it etc.
http://www.joomla.org
This information may also be of use on Joomla's site:
http://www.joomla.org/index.php?Itemid=44&option=com_faq&catid=7
Lastly Everyone! If you find this software useful, please don't forget to donate!
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
MDaemon & World Client
One of the schools I support chose MDaemon as their email solution not long ago. It closely tries to emulate Exchange Server with a couple nice extras that one would normally pay BIG $/£ for with a "Connector" License. However, if your organization utilizes any pdas, blackberries etc, do yourself an your organization a favour and get Exchange. The amount of synchronization issues and incompatibilities with MDaemon eats into support hours very quickly!
BUT, if you do decide to use MDaemon or you are already blessed with the responsibility of administering one, you will no doubt come across product activation. It tends to work the same as MS's activation, where it is done automatically through the internet. When that doesn't work, a phonecall or email gets you the help you need to activate (You have a 30 day limit) within a day or two. Why am I going in to all this? If your NIC dies out, or you swap in a new NIC because you are upgrading, you will HAVE TO reactivate. What a pain yes. What I discovered in the process were some events that begun to appear in my DNS Logs afterwards.
If you are swapping this out on a domain controller, uninstall the old nic first. If you want to make sure the new NIC works first like me, you didn't do that. You ended up with two nics on the same box. This gets a bit tricky with DNS events 6701/2, bindings and static ip addresses, so do yourself a favour and uninstall the old nic first.
Once I had both NICS on the domain controller/mail server, I simply shut the server down and removed the old nic. The problem with that is the old nic settings stay hidden in the operating system hardware configuration. Any time you go to view your TCP/IP properties a pop-up dialgoue box alerts you to having two NICs with the same ip. If you didn't uninstall the old nic like you should have, you can do this by going to add/remove hardware, and ticking the "hidden" checkbox. You will now be able to remove your old invisible nic card, and avoid potential DNS issues and such.
BUT, if you do decide to use MDaemon or you are already blessed with the responsibility of administering one, you will no doubt come across product activation. It tends to work the same as MS's activation, where it is done automatically through the internet. When that doesn't work, a phonecall or email gets you the help you need to activate (You have a 30 day limit) within a day or two. Why am I going in to all this? If your NIC dies out, or you swap in a new NIC because you are upgrading, you will HAVE TO reactivate. What a pain yes. What I discovered in the process were some events that begun to appear in my DNS Logs afterwards.
If you are swapping this out on a domain controller, uninstall the old nic first. If you want to make sure the new NIC works first like me, you didn't do that. You ended up with two nics on the same box. This gets a bit tricky with DNS events 6701/2, bindings and static ip addresses, so do yourself a favour and uninstall the old nic first.
Once I had both NICS on the domain controller/mail server, I simply shut the server down and removed the old nic. The problem with that is the old nic settings stay hidden in the operating system hardware configuration. Any time you go to view your TCP/IP properties a pop-up dialgoue box alerts you to having two NICs with the same ip. If you didn't uninstall the old nic like you should have, you can do this by going to add/remove hardware, and ticking the "hidden" checkbox. You will now be able to remove your old invisible nic card, and avoid potential DNS issues and such.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Linux the lonely island
At one of the schools I support we have a *nix box running our filtering proxy as well as an internal website. Having an AD setup, I realized a bit of work needs to be done in order to get people to login to the website with their AD account. I came across a link on how to do just this step-by-step with Yast but not Mandrake/driva or any other flav. It involves using either samba with winbind or the kerberos client. I have no experience yet with the kerberos client so I think I'll have to try that out. The most recent samba rpm I can get for mandrake just doesn't want to do anymore than share the top parent folder in network neighborhood. Even worse, it will show the files, but not share them!
About this time last year I was running a complete linux domain with xp clients and roaming profiles. Once set up it all worked a charm BUT it all came back to TCO and SSO (single-sign-on). Some hardcore peeps out there will put it down to not doing it right or being out of my depth. Silliness. Always do what you can with what you have. There is no way to survive as a tech in schools/non-profits without accepting the politics from above that enforcea hodge-podge approach because of their impatience. The time it took to setup network apps and a single-point of admin for antivirus took weeks instead of several hours. I found afterwards that when a question or problem arose, I was no longer racking my brain for what the correct man page was to make a tweak to samba or wine etc. What our linux box has done awesome though is our filtering and website (squid w/dans guardian and apache) . If you attempt to set something like that up with limited experience, give this distro karoshi a try. It's aimed towards schools but approaches networks with a corporate lockdown perspective. I still use peices of that distro in various network setups and it runs great.
About this time last year I was running a complete linux domain with xp clients and roaming profiles. Once set up it all worked a charm BUT it all came back to TCO and SSO (single-sign-on). Some hardcore peeps out there will put it down to not doing it right or being out of my depth. Silliness. Always do what you can with what you have. There is no way to survive as a tech in schools/non-profits without accepting the politics from above that enforcea hodge-podge approach because of their impatience. The time it took to setup network apps and a single-point of admin for antivirus took weeks instead of several hours. I found afterwards that when a question or problem arose, I was no longer racking my brain for what the correct man page was to make a tweak to samba or wine etc. What our linux box has done awesome though is our filtering and website (squid w/dans guardian and apache) . If you attempt to set something like that up with limited experience, give this distro karoshi a try. It's aimed towards schools but approaches networks with a corporate lockdown perspective. I still use peices of that distro in various network setups and it runs great.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)