At present, any person with minimum computer knowledge is able to build his / her own web page for several purposes such as promoting a business, sharing personal opinions and sharing photos, etc…

In order to create such web pages, there are various web applications are available on Internet, such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Blogger. Now, imagine a user who decides to build his own website, blog or photo gallery and decides to hire a web hosting service provider.

Well, in order to install WordPress CMS, the first point you need to bear in mind is the selection of a web hosting provider that can suffice your requirements. No doubt, this is one of the essential points that need to be considered, as a bad choice can affect the quality of your service, security of website or blog, etc…

Since there are so many web hosting companies in the market that offer these services, making a proper selection is very confusing task for beginners. To make it easier, I have listed some of the web hosting aspects; a selection criteria which should be considered when selecting a suitable WordPress hosting provider.

Selection Criteria to Choose a Quality WordPress Hosting Provider

Provider’s Reputation – Certainly, this parameter is individual, however is very important to look for providers that offers guarantees and whose reputation is really good. In order to know the reputation of a hosting provider, you may consult with other people on forums, visit reviews sites or ask other companies that are hosting their websites with the particular hosting provider. It can be a good way to know their reputation for reliability.

Type of Hosting (Service Architecture) – Majority of providers offers two types of hosting platform: Windows & Linux. For compatibility reasons WordPress, Joomla and Drupal perform much better on Linux platform. Although Windows platform may also be a good option for hosting such sites, however issues related updates, functionalities, etc… may arise in future. Generally, in order to install Joomla, the service provider needs to have components like PHP, MySQL and Apache.

In short, for these types of content management systems it is recommended to opt for a Linux-based hosting solution. You may opt for a free web hosting provider as an alternative if your purpose is just “Testing”. However, free hosting solutions are not recommended as most of the times it doesn’t cover essentials like “Uptime Guarantee” and “Backups”.

Disk Space and Bandwidth – This is another important aspect of web hosting service. You must select a hosting provider that suffices your needs in terms of storage space and bandwidth. You should put a special attention to those who offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Remember that, terms like “unlimited” doesn’t exist. If you read web hosting provider’s fine print of “Terms of Service”, you will get to know that in actual it is far different than unlimited.

Technical Support – You must know what kind of support the hosting company provides if any technical issues due to server crash occur. Also, check out what is their response time to the issue as well as what kind of tone the support persons use when responding.

Technical Elements – Usually most of the web hosting providers offers same or similar tools to facilitate the user for website management. See, if they offer cPanel, phpMyAdmin, etc… as these can greatly help in WordPress installation as well as managing databases.

Security – Ask the web hosting provider, what policies are applied to protect your data from potential security issues as well as backups generation frequency.

Other aspects to consider would be the price, discounts and some sort of package which can benefit you.

Based on the above selection criteria you can choose a suitable WordPress hosting provider to build a website or blog.

Logically, the high level of breach and enormous use of WordPress have made it a potential target for cyber criminal. Due to this reason, I have decided to provide some effective tips on WordPress security. Don’t forget to check out my next blog post “How to Improve Your WordPress Security”. It will cover a set of security recommendations and steps to increase security of your WordPress based website / blog.

History of WordPress CMS

Since year 2000, there have been various technological revolutions that have taken great importance in the evolution of Information Technology (IT) and the Internet. However, in the year 2004, the revolution took a shape that had begun to take shape several years ago, and it was finally known as the Web 2.0 revolution, a concept that was created in 2004 by one of the co-founders Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly Media, referring to the remarkable changes that were creating Internet and the World Wide Web.

Historically, most of the web content on Internet is created by companies and organizations having various websites and much more minority of enthusiastic users of the Internet. They possessed the necessary knowledge and used the web as a way of to share information. But content generation or Internet publication remained complicated and many users simply used the Internet and the Web to consult and seek information.

Around the early 2000s, companies began to appear who developed web services with a different philosophy, based on participation and ability to share information that users created. This phenomenon can be found in the services such as Bloggers, who had explosive growth. The success was tremendous and any user could create their own website in minutes and start publishing content that was available for other Internet users. One of the most successful services related to the creation of Blogs was the Blogger, which was created by Pyra Labs, a tiny company in San Francisco and was acquired by Google in 2003.

At that time and in parallel with the creation of multiple services and platforms, development of the WordPress web application began, which was an incredible success with the launch of its first version in May 2003.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open source software and known as the most successful content management system and a blogging software written in PHP and based on MySQL database for creating blogs and websites for all kinds of organizations, companies and millions of individuals. The WordPress software is also the origin of the service WordPress.com and is available to download for free under the terms of GNU GPL. In the contest of Best CMS which was held in 2007, WordPress got 1st place in the category of “Best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System”.

WordPress lets multiple authors to issue tickets, which are classified according to date and category. Also, it consists of external links management, trackbacks, and a fine management reviews. Moreover, to that of the more minor such as typographic filters, multilingual interface and a system of permanent links are possible. WordPress has an ability and capability to import bulk content from many other CMS such as Blogger, Movable Type and Textpattern and also allows export of syndication feeds in RSS format. In addition, WordPress totally respects web standards XHTML and CSS and have utilized it in the development of WordPress.

The simplicity of WordPress, ability to grow and improve its functionality easily, as well as other features like template system, its robustness, the use of standards and continuous improvement are the things that fueled the growth of WordPress. Also, the versions that are published regularly, along with a community of developers and a company that supports and carry out maintenance are also a part of the WordPress growth.

Because of the many features it offers, it has become blogging software for more advanced users, with less knowledge of content management systems. Despite its clear interface, the large amount of menus and options in configuration may put off the novice users. It can help advanced users to improve the functionality of their blogs and convert them into a real e-commerce shop, a portfolio, a brochure site, through optimization, etc.

Today, the WordPress community has become so active that it has a growing number of resources such as themes and plugins ready for use, documentation and translation software.

The real achievement of WordPress is based on an application developed from the usability, design and functionality that can extend completely through its 24,573 plugins including free and paid. Currently, WordPress is offered in two different ways, it is offered as a service via its wordpress.org site, in which users can create their own blog in minutes. On the other hand, it is offered as a web application which is downloadable on a web server with any web host.

In the following image, you can see a graph of Google Trends of WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal along with Blogger.

As shown in the graph above, as Joomla, Drupal, and Blogger have stopped growing since late 2009, but WordPress has continued to increase and is still increasing rapidly.

On the official website of WordPress.com you can view statistics of WordPress service, which indicates that there are currently over 63,906,962 websites running on WordPress on their own mode of service.

Following are some data derived from the official WordPress site, which will give you an idea of the current use of WordPress and its rate of evolution:

• Over 64 million websites running on WordPress.
• Over 377 million people view more than 4.1 billion pages each month.
• WordPress.com users produce about 49.3 million new posts and 50.7 million new comments each month.
• Provides around 1,747 themes and 24,573 plugins ready to use.
• Leading websites running on WordPress: TechCrunch, TED, CNN, National Football League, NBC Sports, Gigaom, CBS Radio and many more!
• WordPress blogs written in over 120 languages. Top 10 languages are listed below:

1. English 66%
2. Spanish 8.7%
3. Portuguese 6.5%
4. Indonesian 3.5%
5. Italian 2%
6. German 1.8%
7. French 1.4%
8. Russian 1.1%
9. Vietnamese 1.1%
10. Swedish 1.0%

Today, WordPress have become one of the best management systems most importantly for content, which is used by millions of individuals as well as all types of organizations and companies, be it a small or large.

WordPress is the best CMS, but when it comes to build a website it becomes harder for a beginner to choose the best WordPress hosting service provider. Hence, in order to facilitate the beginners I have created a post: Criteria for Selecting the Best WordPress Hosting Provider.

If you are a beginner, make sure you take advantage of the information provided and choose that best suits to your requirements.

History of Joomla CMS

On the origins of the WWW or World Wide Web, pages that were designed were static in nature and really simple, the language on which HTML2 rested, did not allow much to do. If you had to make any changes, you were required to edit the code for each page individually. Given this, it is possible to get an idea of the work that would modify such sixty pages. Many developers and manufacturers identified this problem and create the 90 programming languages “server side” as ASP 3 or PHP4, which together with the use of data bases that would allow the dynamic generation of web pages. This opened a way for the development of the first content management systems or CMS (Content Management System).

Using a CMS then is sued by companies or organizations that need a high volume of publications and web content updates as magazines, newspapers, etc… As far as the mid-90s begin to appear, the first managers of commercial content and in some cases, custom designed for each organization and that, because of cost, were only accessible by large companies or businesses.

Since 2000, with the evolution of the WWW into portals with more and more need for user interaction, the proliferation of content management becomes more noticeable and in addition to existing commercial solutions begin to appear as the first content managers of open source (Open Source) GPL5 licensed as PHP or Mambo7, Nuke6 and many others.

Well, on September 22, 2005 after a conflict of interest related to the type of license of Mambo, the first version of Joomla 1.0 was released as a re-branded release of Mambo 4.5.2.3 which included various bugs and security fixes. After then, Joomla started gaining popularity and acquired one of the best places among top CMS under GNU General Public License.

What is Joomla?

Joomla is one of the top widely used and an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build a website as well as creating powerful online applications. The simplicity of use, both in the installation and management of Joomla has been one of the key factors for diffusion, especially when implementing portals for both large companies and individual users. It is an open source solution which is available for download to anyone.

The main asset of Joomla is that it easily permits you to edit the content of a website. Joomla is an open source application developed mostly in PHP under a GPL license. The Joomla CMS can work on work on Internet, intranet and need a MySQL database and an Apache HTTP server to function.

The management of the project Joomla is delegated to the main group (“Core Team”). All the members of this Core Team work together and are committed to lead Joomla within the open source movement. This group is a combination of various profiles, with different experiences and a diverse array of disciplines.

The “Core Team” group was established when the rapid growth of Joomla in 2005 was experienced. The main group is more to an assembly of developers, and their main responsibility lies in the organization regarding its functional structure and not just in developing the content management system.

Today, the Joomla project is made up of several groups that are formed to enhance the knowledge that Joomla offers. Each group has their own aim and focuses on a specific aspect of Joomla, which is essential for the expansion and development. The main group cannot be involved in a discussion of these issues; hence there is an alternate leader in each of these groups who needs to communicate directly with the main group.

There is an essential communication channel provided by the working groups for the large communities of Joomla and the main group so that to bring all the concerns to light involved by changes and extension of information.

Joomla – Related Industry

Open Source Matters Inc. (OSM) is a non-profit organization formed under the United States and New York state law providing organizational, legal and financial support to the Joomla! open-source project. It has been incorporated as a non-profit organization in New York in order to make sure that the Joomla and its future projects persist to exist beyond the involvement of individual volunteers.

Joomla Project

For the group of Open Source solutions, Joomla is free software available for the development of the multiple fronts which is using different forms of communication such as: meetings via IRC, forums, mailing lists, Wikis and blogs.

The Joomla guidelines are set with its core focus to resolve the requirements of all those who participate in one form or another in the project.

Supported Platforms

Since Joomla is based on PHP and MySQL, you can install and run it on any platform and server supporting PHP and MySQL such as Linux and Windows.

What can be done with Joomla Software?

Today, Joomla is used all over the world and is fit to build various types and sizes of websites and applications. Following are some of the real examples of what Joomla! can do.

• Corporate Web sites or portals
• Corporate intranets and extranets
• Online magazines, newspapers, and publications
• E-commerce and online reservations
• Government applications
• Small business Web sites
• Non-profit and organizational Web sites
• Community-based portals
• School and church Web sites
• Personal or family homepages

Type of addons, web developers can create with Joomla:

• Inventory control systems
• Data reporting tools
• Application bridges
• Custom product catalogs
• Integrated e-commerce systems
• Complex business directories
• Reservation systems
• Communication tools

Like many others, Joomla CMS has one more potential and that is the large number of extensions programmed and developed by its user community. This helps to increase the possibilities of Joomla with new features that can be effortlessly integrated into it. Currently, Joomla is serving 6192 extensions to their community users.

Some of the Top Rated and Popular Joomla Extensions are:

• VirtueMart
• Googlemaps Plugin
• Akeeba Backup
• AcyMailing Starter
• Attachments
• Admin Tools
• jQuery Easy
• Modules Anywhere
• Tabs
• Component Creator
• JFBAlbum
• Latestweets
• Asynchronous Google Analytics Plugin
• Custom CSS

Types of Joomla Extensions

These extensions are further divided into five different types, which are:

• Components
• Modules
• Templates
• Plug ins
• Languages

Popular sites running on Joomla CMS:

• MTV Networks Quizilla (Social networking)
• IHOP (Restaurant chain)
• Harvard University (Educational)

There were many new content management systems available in the market, however in comparison with Drupal and Blogger, a rapid growth of Joomla was seen in the trends. Below is the graph of Google Trends for Joomla, Drupal and Blogger.

As shown in the graph above, Joomla CMS is one of the most widely used content management system as compare to Drupal and Blogger.

Similar to many other popular web applications, you can run Joomla on a LAMP stack. Today, many web hosts offers Joomla Hosting with an easy-to-use control panels such as cPanel for Linux and Plesk for Windows that allow for automatic installation of Joomla script.

Joomla enjoys great support on the web from web hosting providers that specialize in or support it. There are many resources available on Internet, which offers information on installing and maintaining Joomla sites. BODHost blog is one of those best resources for various information about Joomla CMS.

Easy, simple, and professional, DotNetNuke 7.0 is getting stronger.  Those who do not know this solution yet, should try at-least once.

Content management systems are an important part of the Internet world and DotNetNuke (DNN) is a product available under BSD open source license. So this is the great opportunity for those webmasters, who are looking for Windows based CMS platform.

Menu, a completely redesigned control panel, which is capable of  managing the content and a rich text editor functions, backup and automatic update (with display differences). Furthermore it also has  the ability to share content between multiple instances CMS, etc..

CMS For Professionals

The presence of a simplified system installation and improvements in CSS support is specially specified for administrators and developers. In addition to this a layer of abstraction that facilitate access to data, a framework to simplify the creation of web services accessing DNN 7.0 and support for the new Razor Microsoft.

Integration with Microsoft solutions is in progress. Users will be able to connect to the CMS via their Active Directory credentials. DotNetNuke Enterprise Edition will also easily publish documents on SharePoint CMS, via a dedicated connector.

An affordable product

“We are very pleased with the enthusiasm of our latest version, because we have worked hard to provide the best value to our community and our commercial customers”, said Shaun Walker , Co-founder and CTO of DotNetNuke.

“With 7.0 DNN, we offer an user friendly interface that we believe is more intuitive and affordable. At the same time, we carried out an upgrade to offer web designers and application developers our platform of development which is the most modern and most advanced to date.

The Following 25 tips will help you to optimize your wordpress blog in the right manner.

1. To speed up your blog you need to install WP super cache with GZIP enabled.
2. If possible then move .htaccess directives to your server config and disable .htaccess parsing.
3. Make sure you combine all the CSS files into one large CSS file. The same goes for JavaScript which should be loaded in the footer.
4. CSS sprites need to be used. If you are not familiar with this then take assistance from any professional web developer.
5. Include a PHP opcode cache. Choose one, all are better than having nothing.
6. Remove unnecessary Plugins and Widgets.
7. For SEO benefits, set appropriate Permalinks.
8. Give Robots the direction … make sure you disallow search engines bots to index wp-admin, log in, and register page.
9. Use All in one SEO pack.
10. Write a descriptive meta description. Do not auto generate them.
11. A proper pagination is essential. wp-pagenavi plugin for wordpress is available on the official site of WordPress.
12. Continuously moderate blog comments. Do not disable comment option due to only spamming issue. You can install Akismet to detect spammers. In terms SEO and traffic, relevant comments on your blog gives extra benefits.
13. Don’t forget to take a backup of your database once in a week.
14. Also optimize database once in a week. Several plugins are available to optimize wp database but manual database optimization is highly recommended.
15. Use Pingdom to track uptime.
16. Delete unnecessary meta information. Take the help of a professional web developer if you are new to this.
17. Get in touch with your regular blog readers.
18. Add Google+ button.
19. Use commentluv plugin to allow visitors to comment on your blog posts.
20. Promote your blog through social media sites like FaceBook, Twitter, and Google+.
21. Analyze, your blog traffic through Google Analytics.
22. Create a RSS feed url so visitors can subscribe to it.
23. Use canonical URLs so your analytic doesn’t interface with your SEO.
24. Track your blog subscribers.
25. Start analyzing which promotional method leads to more blog subscribers.