Wiki

If you’re familiar with Wikipedia, then you have at least a rough idea of what a wiki is. Basically a wiki is a central repository for user-generated information on any topic. Public wikis include Wikipedia, Wikiquote, WikiTravel, and CookBookWiki. So what if you had your own wiki where you could document something you’re passionate about? Or perhaps something that you and a group of friends are doing, like a group vacation?

Softaculous has four different wiki software available including MediaWiki (which powers Wikipedia), DokuWiki (focused on document creation), PmWiki (focused on project management), and WikkaWiki. With just a few clicks and less than a minute to install, your own wiki could be up and running in no time!

Business

Business software? Absolutely. Don’t get me wrong – there are a lot of great tools available from lots of different companies all over the web to help you run your business. The downside? You have, quite literally, no control over them. You can input your data, you can often get your data back out, but you don’t have control over the web address, you typically have to pay for it on a per user basis, and that free trial runs out pretty quick if you’re not prepared to dive in right away.

Softaculous gives you easy access to 10 different business packages. Software like Vtiger CRM and SugarCRM which allow you to manage inventory, cultivate your customer and vendor relations, and so on. Or OrangeHRM, which gives you free software to manage your staff and their time. Not to mention two different invoicing, accounting, and corporate information management software.

The best part of all the software just mentioned is that they are all free. You need to put time into getting them set up the way you want, as you would with any piece of software that you get to customize at your whim. But there is no upfront cost. And for businesses that want to purchase support for the occasional time they need assistance, most offer paid support as well.

We would love to hear about your experience with Softaculous, and which software you used Softaculous to install!

We compiled these tips so that they address a variety of ways to help you increase site performance; these options are all easy to implement, and will keep your website in tip-top shape!

1. Disable Drupal’s built-in Statistics module. The Statistics module writes data to your database on every hit, causing unnecessary resource usage. Opt for using an external analytics solution instead.
2. Use an external cache service like CloudFlare, or Incapsula. Both services have free plans that include website performance enhancements and are easy to deploy.
3. If you have pages that include images below the fold — news articles, blog posts, or slideshows — use a module that will load images only when a visitor actually views it. Modules like Image Lazyloader and Lazyload will help you here.
4. Compress your Javascript and CSS files by using modules like Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation or Speedy.
5. Disable and delete modules your Drupal site is no longer using. If you are not sure which modules your site is no longer using, or have a hard time determining which are no longer in use, try the Missing Module module.

We would love to hear your comments and feedback on how the tips above worked for you.

For the average person, building a contact form can be difficult. 15 years ago when finding a talented web developer was far more difficult, building a form from scratch often involved using Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver’s built-in tools. If you were not fortunate enough to have a functioning WYSIWYG editor on-hand, you were stuck with Notepad and reading several tutorials trying to slap together what you wanted.

Ah, 1997. But we digress…

With how far things have come since that time, many people still have trouble with forms. And that’s okay! You’re a business owner. Or a graphic designer. Or a stay-at-home mom. You’re not a web developer, and you would much rather focus your time on great content, not on coding. If you use WordPress to power your website, you are in luck.

There is a wealth of contact form plugins out there, the most popular being Contact Form 7, Formstack, Gravity Forms, and Fast Secure Contact Form. Well there is a new kid on the block that’s making waves, and it is well worth a look.

Ninja Forms is slick. Really slick. It has a drag and drop editor to help you place your fields exactly where you want them, reusable fields, the ability to import/export both forms and data, and the ability to add custom styling.

That’s all well and good, but where most contact form plugins fall short for us is during the form creation process. Often things look out of place, the interface has a very high learning curve, and your form elements don’t actually end up where you want them to go. Ninja Forms’ interface makes that all disappear by being very clear about what does what, how to place fields where you want them, and providing all the extras like data validation, hidden fields, and file uploads.

As well as making it easy to build your form, the preview function is far, far easier to use than any other. With every other contact form plugin we have used we are always told to insert the shortcode into a page and then preview the page. Not so with Ninja Forms! There is a handy “Form Preview” link that will actually open the form in a new tab/window in your browser, no embedding necessary.

Beyond all that. it features integrations with many popular services like PayPal, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and Freshbooks. It’s a very handy tool that goes beyond simple contact forms. Try Ninja Forms out for yourself and let us know what you think in the comments!

If your website’s goal is to help you earn money or attention of some kind, it is imperative to know how many people are visiting your site. And not only how many people are visiting your site but how many are returning visitors, where they are coming from, how they are getting to your website, and so on.

That’s what analytics solutions do for you; they give you information about your visitors that, with a bit of time and analysis, you can act on. Any analytics solution will also help you figure out what promotional methods are working, and which aren’t, ensuring you don’t waste time and money on whatever isn’t working.

So how do you set up an analytics solution? Chances are your host offers something basic like AWstats or Logaholic. These are great for getting started with some basic stats like number of hits (web pages viewed), unique visitors, time of day, and so on. They cannot, however, give you insight about how visitors are interacting with your site.

The behemoth in this space is certainly Google Analytics. Google acquired a well-known solution called Urchin back in April 2005, which eventually became Google Analytics. It is very powerful and has a decent learning curve for the more advanced reports, but generally it’s easy to use and integrate into your site thanks to CMS plugins.

That’s great, but Google Analytics can also slow down your site. Since it has to load code from Google’s servers, Analytics is often the culprit of slower load times. You also lose a bit of a control over your data, and even if you can export it it’s not likely to be useful in other solutions.

Mixpanel is a hosted solution that, while fairly new, has been very well received so far. They have a free tier for sites up to 25,000 data points/events, and the costs quickly go up from there. If you’re aiming to be the next Airbnb or OpenTable though, it might be worth the cost.

Clicky is another hosted solution that focuses on two features: real-time statistics and heatmaps. Real-time is self-explanatory. Heatmaps refers to tracking how your customers interact with your site on a page-by-page basis, giving you insight into where your users click, how often, where their mouse (and likely their eyes) focus, and so on. It’s also much easier to drill down into a single user’s actions, giving you deeper insight if you know how to use it. There is a free tier available as well.

Example heatmap from Open Web Analytics.

Alternatively you can host your own analytics solution. For a long time Mint was the best alternative to Google Analytics. It has a one-time cost of $30 but you can see the money is well used to develop features and an interface that is very easy to use.

Piwik is a free, open source solution that gives you a lot of the power of Google Analytics and is very popular. The dashboard is entirely customizable, one instance can give you access to the stats for all the sites you’re tracking, and it gives you the vast majority of the stats you’ll need. It isn’t as helpful for e-commerce, but more than good enough for most sites.

Lastly, Open Web Analytics is in many ways a self-hosted, Google Analytics clone. It also features heatmaps, mouse tracking, and even some caching capabilities. If you adore Google Analytics but want to maintain full control over your data, and get access to some of the premium features without all the hassle, OWA is worth a look.

Suffice to say that many options are available, whether you want to offload the tracking to a third-party or maintain control over it. Happy testing and picking!

Whether you’re designing your first website, or redesigning your existing website, you have likely come to the realization that you need to make sure you take advantage of the exposure that social networks can give you, and want to make it extremely easy for your visitors to tweet, Like, +1, upvote, or share your content. You also understand that it’s important to make sure your visitors know where to find your brand on social networks. So what do you do?

Social Media Feather is a plugin that integrates with any WordPress theme to make it super easy for customers to follow your brand, while also giving them the tools to share your content with their networks. Some of the key features include:

• Support for all the most popular social networks in Canada
• Multiple skins available so that it feels like a natural part of your website
• Support for high resolution displays, like Apple’s Retina technology
• Full control over which social networks are enabled

With a quick copy and paste of a shortcode, you have enabled social sharing on your website. And you can easily show which social networks you’re on with a widget containing the logos of each, with links directly to your profile.

It doesn’t get much easier than that, especially if you’re using a WordPress theme that doesn’t include any social media features. There are other, similar plugins available, but we find Social Media Feather the easiest to use for website owners that need both the sharing and profile awareness pieces of this puzzle.

One area that benefits from this fervor is security. Multiple services and plugins exist to help you lock down your WordPress site, making it far more difficult to attackers to gain access to it. Today we’re going to take a look at two leading security plugins: WordFence and Better WP Security.

WordFence

The story of how WordFence got its start was new to us, but the reason is one we know well. The creator, Mark Maunder, is the person responsible for discovering a massive security hole in what was a very popular thumbnail plugin called TimThumb. He patched it, donated the code back to TimThumb, and then set about building his own security plugin to protect his WordPress-based website after it was exploited via TimThumb.

WordFence’s name is very appropriate; it effectively puts up a virtual fence around your WordPress site. We feel some of the most important features include:

• Scans of WordPress, theme files, and plugins
• Real-time views of hacking traffic
• Blocking fake search engine crawlers
• Tracking IP address to their source
• Scans for backdoors
• Blocking brute-force attacks

WordFence also offers a premium version of their plugin for $39 per year, which is likely worth the cost if you run a popular website. The premium version offers more frequent scans, two-factor authentication, and country blocking which can be highly useful for locally-focused websites.

Better WP Security

Better WP Security has been developed by multiple people, but development is now led by Chris Wiegman at iThemes. It attempts to take WordPress security best practices and package them all into a single plugin, which has led to features like:

• Removing or obscuring information about your WordPress install
• Removing the default “admin” account
• Vulnerability scans and fixes
• Banning bots and malicious agents
• Forcing SSL
• Monitoring the file system for changes

While the goals are the same, WordFence and Better WP Security do not overlap entirely. For example, Better WP Security helps prevent many potential vulnerabilities from becoming problems, even for unpatched WordPress installations, by obscuring information like the version of WordPress being used, which plugins and versions are installed, and changing several defaults to make it harder for attackers to even figure out what exploit to take advantage of. This helps deter attackers in the first place, and they will typically move on to an easier target.

WordFence, on the other hand, has a mix of proactive and reactive measures. It will block known bots, brute force attacks, scan your WordPress site for vulnerabilities and backdoors, and it takes advantage of machine learning capabilities to automatically block new types of attacks. The real-time view of attackers and crawlers could be a boon for those of you looking to identify a resource hog.

Regardless, both plugins are very good at what they do and will protect the average WordPress site extremely well. If you feel it’s worth the money, WordFence Premium is your best bet for features like country blocking, two-factor authentication, and remote scans. If you’re on a budget, install either plugin and get it configured. Regardless, in this day and age you must be taking advantage of the free, easily accessible security measures available to you.

Whether you have a personal or corporate blog, there are two things that really matter: engagement and spam.

One is something you want to increase (engagement), and the other is something no one wants (spam). While many content management systems (CMS) come with a built-in comments feature, or built-in spam reduction capabilities, no CMS includes the measures to achieve the right balance of high engagement with low (or no) spam.

The solution to this problem is actually authenticated comments. Your visitors still have the opportunity to use pseudonyms, which many people value, but those hoping to boost their own profile get a very easy way to authenticate themselves and use their real names.

What is this magical tool that can help solve your conundrum? None other than Disqus.

Disqus solves the issues above by doing a few things:

• Allowing your visitors to register for their own Disqus account, which is also usable on thousands of popular sites like Bloomberg, the London Free Press, and MobileSyrup.
• Allow your visitors to comment using their Facebook, Google+, or Twitter account which makes it much easier for them to engage, instead of registering for an account only for your website.
• Disqus lets users choose a pseudonym, allowing them to comment while also protecting their identity, thus increasing engagement.
• To cut down on spam, you can require visitors to log in to an account of some kind, whether it’s a Disqus, Facebook, Google+, or Twitter account. This means spambots have no way to access your website’s default commenting system, almost entirely eliminating spam as a potential issue.

We won’t talk about them here, but Disqus also gives you ways to monetize your content, promote your content, and automatically adapts its discussion system for mobile devices. You want your visitors to easily interact with your site no matter where they are, don’t you?

One great thing about Disqus is that they offer a slew of integration options, including native plugins for popular content management systems and platforms like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. Disqus can also update the comments in real-time, allowing discussions to flow fluidly, which can increase the amount of time people spend on your website.

There are other, similar solutions to Disqus, which we’ll take a look at another time. For now, just know that the default commenting systems can easily be replaced with something far more dynamic that can solve some real issues your for blog!

We wanted to take the time to post a recap of the year as well as add some insight as to what is coming in the new year.

2011 has been a great year! We built upon the groundwork put into place in 2010 and continued to offer premium web hosting at an exception value. Updates were performed to keep software versions current as well. We have expanded our staff tremendously so that we’re able to serve our clients when they need us!

Towards the end of 2010, we launched our new Affiliate Program! If you haven’t joined yet, jump on over and join today to start earning money!

There will be plenty to look forward to in 2012!

• For starters, we will be launching VPS hosting. This is an often requested service, and we’ll be launching multiple options to choose from.
• Currently, our servers are located in Montreal. We will be expanding to other cities as well – most likely Toronto and Vancouver. This will allow the selection of where a new account is located. Existing customers will be able to move their account to a different location if wanted as well!
• Our engineering team is currently writing a significant update to our billing system. The new version will provide for tighter integration with hosting accounts, add additional features, and more!

We hope 2011 has treated everyone well! We encourage feedback, so if you have any questions or comments, please post them here in the comments and we’ll be happy to answer them!

When it comes to great forum scripts, you have a lot of choices out there.  One forum script that is receiving a lot of great reviews is MyBB.  It is a free and open source alternative to other forum scripts such as vB, IPB, phpBBB, SMF and more.

Here is a little more about MyBB from the developers:

A lot of thought has gone into the MyBB interface to make it easy to use. MyBB uses a standard discussion board structure, so your visitors will feel familiar with the way MyBB works. Your visitors can use the MyBB user control panel to change the way they view discussions. They can also easily start and reply to discussions and markup their posts.

From square one, MyBB does a lot to give you an interface that is not just simply designed but is also familiar to use. You can change things extensively from within the administration panel.  The ability to edit the layout, options and behavior of the script is all located within that area. The MyBB forums are also very extendable.  It has a very advanced plugin system that allows you to tweak almost every aspect of how the forum works and feels to your users.

Already using another forum script?  Their MyBB Merge System will allow you to easily convert your posts from another forum script over to MyBB.  If you need more information, be sure to go check out mybb.com.

Flexible. Elegant. Easy to Use.  These are all phrases people have used to describe TextPatern.  In a day and time where WordPress, Joomla and others get the majority of the love – I am here to introduce you to a script that helps you easily get your content out to the masses.

TextPattern is definitely an easy to use script.  If you have installed any type of script, then you will find the installation process for TextPattern very familiar. If you ever run into any problems, just jump over to their forums – where the dev team is actively posting along with the users.

Getting down to the interface of TextPattern, it is very simple.  You can focus your attention on getting your articles written and edited very easily. You can even quickly convert plain text to valid XHTML with Textile.

Designers will find the TextPattern interface and back end organization very helpful.  There is no real limit to how you can style or layout the TextPattern powered websites.  Everything is standards compliant by default and the forums are also filled with other theme designers that will be willing to give you a helping hand if you get stuck.

TextPattern is a nice alternative to other blogging scripts like WordPress.  BlueFur would be more than happy to host it for you too. If you are looking for something that has a much simpler interface and is more focused on getting your articles and posts out there – TextPattern is well worth checking out.

You can pick it up at textpattern.com.