BSideStudios blogs

Working with Daphne Aguilera

Corey — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:19:55 +0000

We now have the honor of working with famous comedian Andy Dick. We are proud to announce we will be unveiling a major cms platform for him within a month. Including such features like live episodes, tour dates and podcasts. Stick around to see more info.

CMS Battle Royale - Drupal/Wordpress/Joomla

Corey — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 18:37:32 +0000

Originally written Feb 2010

I'm often asked which of the three major free CMS's are worth a clients time. Truth be told, it most likely depends on their ultimate goal with the site. Wordpress currently is the most popular, but that doesn't mean it's the best nor the right choice for your website. Over the last few years all 3 CMS's have gained a lot of popularity.

As you can see, Drupal is the furthest behind while WP leads the way. This most likely is attributed to ease and usability rather than "which CMS fits the project best". If a developer knows how to do one over the other, the options are irrelevant and they will continue to push the (often incorrect) CMS onto clients. We will go over 8 aspects for each CMS (Ease/Usability, Community, Features, SEO, Scalability, Best Attribute, Worst Attribute) and hopefully make your next CMS choice an easy one.

Drupal

The little water drop that could! This CMS was developed by the infamous Dries Buytaert. Dries still to this day continues to play a major role in it's development, continually working with developers at conferences (DrupalCon) and other functions while still allowing the community to ultimately control it's fate. He is also the founder of Acquia, a successful venture providing commercial Drupal support. In 2001, the original project was a message board that was released as open source and has grown nearly exponentially since it's inception. Drupal is the least popular of the three but in my opinion can become the most powerful and popular with some more novice friendly implementations, Drupal is like learning martial arts, it takes a long time to learn but once you, do you can kick a lot of ass.

Ease/Usability: Drupal is notorious for it's steep learning curve and unfortunately, this is true. It's pretty difficult for a first time developer to understand how to hook into modules or even to drop some code in the proper place. The reason for this is because Drupal is also the most dynamic and flexible. This is achieved through a more abstract model where all content (pages, forum posts, invoices) is essentially created the same way, but is then processed differently by name. This allows your code to benefit from a very robust core API and will perpetually allow others to do the same with your code (This model really strives to prevent repetition). The understanding of this context will of course make it more difficult to learn. You could never develop a massive social network in Wordpress, but you could in Drupal, quite easily. For advanced users, Drupal is the choice. It's simply the most powerful of the three.

Designers often struggle with Drupal as well, there are a lot of areas that are themeable and not necessarily easily realized. Also to design a Drupal site properly you will need to know the core of the theming layer pretty well (which most designers do not have the time, skillset or will to learn).

The back end for the user could be a lot better as well, it lacks a core WYSIWYG (without a 3rd party module) and often provides "too many options". Clients sometimes find it difficult to even understand what a node is. The word on the Drupal street is that Drupal 7 will be a lot more user friendly but we shall wait and see.

Community: Absolutely the best community out of all three. It is fantastic, the amount of modules is overwhelming. The community ports nearly every cutting edge item available and is pretty up to date. Anything from SIFR to Lightbox is easily installed with a module. You would be hard up to find a function or ability that is not acheived with a Drupal module (which is easily found and quick to install). The templates they offer are really nothing to write home about, but they are improving. The community is very willing to help you and that goes a long way. They also have a lot of pride, I was at DrupalCon DC and I can say the pride amongst the users beats any other CMS hands down. They are very optimistic that this will be the only CMS that matters in the near future. It's almost like a cult movie, where when you "get it" you can't stop expressing your love and enjoy showing others.

Features: Drupal offers it's users thousands of modules that can do almost anything you would ever want. It also offers multiple content types, not just pages but forms, profiles and news articles. Once you can grasp how to create content types and do basic features you have the ability to develop elaborate sites with communities and social features in hours, not weeks. It also allows users to edit content and features via the front and back end, which is nice for new users. It offers threaded comments and search features built in. Drupal also comes with a layered permissions system centered around roles assigned to users, fantastic for sites with complex workflows.

SEO: A lot of what's built in is much better for SEO than the others. SEO Friendly URLs are implemented in core and are executed almost without thought as you create nodes/pages. Lots of modules are available to increase your SEO (including SEO Checklist) with no experience at all. Tagging systems are within each node and keywords are generated based on content providing good SEO. Even someone without any experience will find themselves with better ranks when ported into Drupal.

Scalability: It's scalability is a major issue that will not be resolved in the near future, a decent site can make up to 300 requests to the database per page. This is weak, everything is "joined at the hip" which is the centralized database, no clear cut resolutions other than caching, which can go a long way as long as you are serving static pages. This solution falls short for social networks and dynamic sites that require users to log in and view dynamic content.

Best Attribute: The community.

Worst Attribute: (I bite my lip not to say their logo) Usability/learning curve.

Joomla

The "all together" CMS solution was started by MasterCheif (Andrew Eddie) upon leaving the Mambo development team and starting OpenSourceMatters, a site to inform users of updates. In 2005, after much input from the user base- the name, logo and initial core were complete and have been promoting ever since. It has achieved a lot of popularity with it's presentation and usability. It currently at 24 on the Alexa ratings and 2nd place in popularity amongst the free CMS options.

Ease/Usability: This is what pushes Joomla ahead of Drupal. It's usability/user friendly interface for newcomers is essential to it's success. It is quite simple to add and edit pages. Built in WYSIWYG, easily understood navigation systems and basic features keep a novice from blowing his brains out.

The design layer is about the same as Drupal, they both don't have a lot of amazing designers developing templates and new designers find it slightly overwhelming to develop for on initial attempts. This often leads to block-y designs with often clear cut columns and little creativity. Most Joomla sites look the same.

There have been some complaints such as how pages have to be linked to a menu system (regardless of visibility) which can cause confusion but as a whole they execute a user friendly experience (while staying in the client realm of things you'd like to do). Also if you wish to do such dynamic sites like social networks with advanced features that may not be ready for you, PHP developers are discouraged at how hard it is to simply add a php snippet, this is attributed to it's limited modular capabilities, where modules have a hard time getting the rigid core to play nice.

Community: A large community, I don't view it as loyal or die hard as the Drupal developers but I do see it's popularity. It's support site is in the top 500 sites on the internet and that says a lot. Although it's documentation has been criticized, finding answers from other users should not present difficulty. There is constant communication amongst it's uses on the forum.

Features: It has a lot of things you'd come to expect (such as User Management, Contact Management, Polls and Search Features) and even some you wouldn't expect (Media Manager, Advertising Systems and Language Managers). Almost all easily understood and easily to implement on your site. Unfortunately though it lacks basic things such as a built in commenting system (upgradable) and SEO items like clean URLS. Also sometimes the plug-ins do not install properly and some are not free.. (this bothers me when dealing with such open source platforms).

SEO: With a lack of clean URLS and almost horribly unique url syntax like Component and Option (i.e. www.yoursite.com/component/_weblinks/catid,6/Itemid,15/), a Joomla site is easily identified. It really does not show near the care for SEO as Drupal or even WP. Hopefully this will be resolved in coming versions.

Scalability: It's scalability is essentially the same as Drupal, poor. With lots of database queries bogging down each page request it's difficult to see it being scalable and fast.

Best Attribute: Usability for beginners.

Worst Attribute: Flexibility

Wordpress

Now with 200 million sites and counting, Wordpress has become the leader in CMS development, it's massive template community and ease of use propelled this platform into every developers resume. Created by Matt Mullenweg as a fork of b2/cafelog in 2003, it's now one of the premier open source platforms and is synonymous with user-friendly workflow and plug-in rich development. When a user needs a small website or blog (and want CMS capabilities) only one option will always be mentioned, Wordpress.

Ease/Usability: When dealing with small sites with blogging in mind, there is no better solution. Wordpress's simplicity allows a user friendly back end which makes it the perfect solution for small websites and bloggers everywhere. To install a stunning base template, is extremely simple. It's a main contributer to what I call "developer guilt", when something is so easy you get nervous. The issue with Wordpress is the moment you want to do something outside of the blogging world. It's as flexible as a rock. It's so far from Drupal's capabilities, its often referred to as "barely a CMS platform".

Community: Wordpress has a great community for development and the best community for theming (even after Wordpress banned "sponsored themes" which were viewed as spam by the community). Amazing designers are completely in-touch with Wordpress's popularity and have tapped it and donated tons of great templates. Well written documentation, plentiful plug-ins and excellent base templates leave little to complain about when dealing with the Wordpress community.

Features: Everything you'd expect to have with a blog is here or can be downloaded in a heartbeat. Anything related to blogging (tag clouds, commenting, search features, indexing and revision systems are all in place) and it shows. Even the most basic WP sites usually have neat features attached. With the inclusion of more Javascript in recent history, the sites are looking better and better and providing users with a really good experience without having to spend thousands. Unfortunately one negative thing is it's lack of security. The community is continually trying to fix exploits and holes in the system. They have gotten better but it's still the weakest of the three.

SEO: With a phenomenal tagging, indexing and clean URL system, it's SEO is top notch.

Scalability: It's not very scalable and does not handle a lot of hits in a short amount of time well (although better than Drupal). There have been numerous issues when hit with a lot of traffic at one time or "the digg effect". When dealing with dynamic content, it will surely have issues when under fire, the only solution seems to be to cache as much as possible and/or present static html under the attack.

Best Attribute: Design/Plug-In Community

Worst Attribute: Flexibility

Hopefully these comparisons and brief overviews will help you when your next CMS project arrives.
Plan and accurately decide with your client. Which one suits you best? Which one makes the most sense for you?

Check out our new video for Panels

Corey — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 21:46:22 +0000

Every now and then you come across inspiration

Corey — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:32:12 +0000

I hope to bring this type of quality and incredible design to my clients one day....http://havenworks.com/

Previewing the Drupal 7 Interface

Antonio — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 02:14:44 +0000

Drupal 7 brings to the table a huge improvement in the user experience front, while still using the infamous garland theme as it's default theme. The release date for Drupal 7 is not set in stone since it's still in the Alpha 2 stage, there are about 143 critical bugs right now that need to be brought to zero before the project can move to the beta stage, critical bugs are the kind that break drupal core in really tragic ways. Dries (The creator of Drupal) is hoping to have a beta release by the second quarter of 2010. I'll show you a preview of the current D7 Alpha 2 release.

Installation

The installer uses the new d7 administration theme Seven. The installation process is pretty much the same except for a few options on the Configure Site stage.

Toolbar and Overlay Modules

The first and most significant addition to Drupal core is the Toolbar module, It uses the same top bar approach as the Administration Menu module. It provides a very easy to use toolbar with all the important areas only 1 click away. This is a huge improvement in user experience because a great majority of new Drupal users become frustrated at the lack of intuation the d5 and d6 interfaces have offered;

Everyone's favorite moment while mentoring a new drupal user:
"Yes you go to /admin, yes /admin on the address bar. [then figure out what all these abstract terms mean] yeah... Blocks, It's content that goes in regions, what are regions you say?"

Now that ficticious quote might make someone think that blocks are gone but they are not, in fact a lot of the same features are present. The categories on /admin are much more specific and a lot of items have been recategorized, for example content types is in structure now, not under content.

The toolbar and overlay modules working together to create a more "ajaxified" experience. Links opened from the toolbar open in an overlay, the + next to the overlay title lets you add that page to the shortcut bar (the gray bar on the toolbar) to maximize efficiency.

New Core Modules

Testing - Provides a framework for unit and functional testing.

Shortcut - Allows users to manage customizable lists of shortcut links.

RDF - Enriches your content with metadata to let other applications (e.g. search engines, aggregators) better understand its relationships and attributes.

Image - Provides image manipulation tools.

File - Defines a file field type.

Fuild UI - User Interface for the Field API.

Dashboard - Provides a dashboard page in the administrative interface for organizing administrative tasks and tracking information within your site

Contextual Links - Provides contextual links to perform actions related to elements on a page.

Have you tried out Drupal 7 yet?

Must-have Security Modules for Drupal - Part 1

Antonio — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:54:21 +0000

It's hard to tell how truly secure your website is. We personally consider Drupal to be very secure in comparisson to other Content Management Systems out there, and it can always be improved. I'm gonna go through a handful of modules that I always keep handy and often install. Know beforehand, some module settings or even modules might not be useful to specific projects, be discrete.

CAPTCHA (Module Page)

Most people already know what a captcha is, this is the primary CAPTCHA module for Drupal. It comes with an image challenge, which is the type of captcha you see all the time with swirling letters and such, and a math challenge, it asks you to solve a simple math problem like "2 + 4 = ___".

You can expand the module to use reCaptcha, I particularly think that the concept behind reCaptcha is pretty awesome.

reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. Check out our paper in Science about it (or read more below).

A strong captcha is good to keep your registration pages and/or anonymous comments relatively safe from spam bots. Spam bots are pretty contrived, they register and post everywhere possible on your page. The best approach to spam is to add different hurdles that would be relatively easy for a human to do but hard for an average spam bot to do, as opposed to the single undefeatable captcha that not even a human can read.

More spam prevention modules

Spam - numerous tools to auto-detect and deal with spam content
Antispam - similar to spam but using third party detection systems like Akismet
Mollom - Provides captchas and spam filtering.

This concept of this module is pretty straight forward; stopping anyone from trying to guess a password, either manually or via brute force attack. The settings are very flexible, you can choose to block a user or block a host altogether. You can set it to e-mail you after x amount of failed login attempts. This will keep the guessers abay.

Secure Password Hashes (Module Page)

Passwords are stored in the form of an MD5 hash in Drupal and most CMS'. When a hacker gains access to your database through an exploit or mysql injection. 9 out of 10 times, hackers attempt to view the contents of your user table.

In order to stop them from breaking into user accounts, passwords are encrypted using one way encryption (MD5). This means that if your password is "cool" the md5 hash will look like this b1f4f9a523e36fd969f4573e25af4540. Since it's a one way encryption, you can't decrypt the hash. This stopped hackers only for a little bit of time, the reasoning is that if cool always makes the same hash, you can create hashes out of all possible word combinations and then by comparisson figure out what the hash is conceiling.

phpass uses much more secure encryption methods, besides using stronger encryption methods, it has the ability to randomly "salt" passwords during encrpytion to create a more unique value and making the hash much harder to figure out.

Are there any modules that you know or would like to know about? Share it in the comments!

Internet Explorer 6 is almost dead! [Hooray!]

Antonio — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:42:59 +0000

Everyone that has ever worked with a website as an owner or developer knows, Internet Explorer 6 is the worst nightmare in town. Our story is no different; we try our best to drop support for it in hopes of constructing better layouts, easier. However, there's always the haunting charts showing you how "relevant" IE6 still is, regardless of the pandemic of headaches and overhead spending it causes.

We preemptively started dropping support for IE6 in October last year, we make sure our websites work in IE6 but we add "friendly" notifications reminding people that they are ruining someone's day by using that extremely outdated browser.

How was it solved?

It takes someone huge and influential to get things moving, this time around Google Docs is officially dropping support for IE6 on March 1st, Youtube (Owned by Google) will drop support March 13 and many will follow. Web Developers are so happy that there is a party being thrown for the occasion, RSVP at ie6funeral.com

From ie6funeral.com:

Internet Explorer Six, resident of the interwebs for over 8 years, died the morning of March 1, 2010 in Mountain View, California, as a result of a workplace injury sustained at the headquarters of Google, Inc. Internet Explorer Six, known to friends and family as "IE6," is survived by son Internet Explorer Seven, and grand-daughter Internet Explorer Eight.

It is a little distressing to know that this isn't the end of IE6's reign of chaos, but it is a huge step in the right direction. We invite everyone to embrace this movement in order for all of us to have a better web experience. The number of people using IE6 is decreasing rapidly (Currently at about 10%).

How you can help

The main route to take is to suggest all of your IE6 users to upgrade to any modern browser. If you have a drupal website you can use the IE6 Update Module to display a notice on top of the user's viewfinder suggesting that their browser might be getting a little old for this. If you're not using Drupal, you can easily add IE6 Update to any website, find the code at ie6update.com

Some people choose not to care about IE6 and let them look at broken sites out of pragmatism (or spite), some don't even serve pages to people using ie6!

Don't Believe The Hype: A Guide To Fake Reality

Corey — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:44:21 +0000

I'm depressed. I'm depressed at how pathetic people are and how the will to believe in something "cool" often derails intellectual debate (even within one's own head). Lately we've been flooded with new cool music, tv programming and movies, often marketed as reality. Unfortunately nearly everything marketed as so, is not. In fact, it's usually not even based in reality. Viral campaigns almost exclusively survive on the concept of it being real, in the moment and making the viewer feel as if he/she "discovered something". So our current generations perception of reality is completely skewed.

Television: Oh, there are so many instances on television it's hard to pinpoint one network as being the worst but i'll try... MTV, remember when you were witty, sarcastic and creative? Remember when your programming was legendary and your name actually stood for Music Television (they have recently dropped the music television from their branding)? Now we're being fed this false reality of Jersey Shore, My Life As Liz and nearly almost every other program on the channel. Let me hit you with some fun info!

(Referring to the fake show My Life As Liz) - Of course MTV doesn't claim that's it real and why would they? Giving viewers the illusion that is in indeed real creates more "credibility"; in and entertainment in the viewers mind. MTV has claimed that all the shows are scripted to a point (except for the Real World Series and the True Life series).

Only two of the 50 reality shows are not scripted. What's more disturbing is not this fact, but how many people believe Liz is just a cute nerd who hates the popular girls at her school. Not only is the acting embarrassingly bad but the plots are completely predictable and reek of "old man perception of highschool". TV is not alone in it's false reality marketing... not by a long shot.

Movies: Fortunately movies are almost always assumed fake so a few have to push the concept further with poor filming and dialogue to really sell it! Usually in the Found Footage genre, there have been several sinners in fake reality movies starting with items like Cannibal Holocaust and more recently with Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity, The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Incident in Lake County. Almost all these films experienced minor success virally and we're planned to do so. These seemingly underground movies have even gone so far as to omit credits in it's attempt to deceive the viewer. Some good advice, if it's on your local big screen- a lot of people had to fund and produce this, it's not real.

Internet: Now the biggest sinner of them all, but also the hardest to detect. The internet has hundreds of REAL viral breakouts (mostly on youtube) but every now and then there are complete fakes. The latest is this:

At first glance it's the coolest thing ever! Ironic rap, "interweb" lingo, and Napoleon Dynamite-esque persona's (out of touch and in their own reality). I've been shown this video several times already from eager friends showing the newest fad. I usually don't take issue with these trends and usually even laugh with everyone, but fake/planned/marketed viral video is not fun for me. If you can't tell, this group is completely a farce...
The original group "Max Normal TV" was a hailed as the Ali G of South Africa and not only have his tattoos been proven fake but the production and major label kind of bring up the question, who's behind this? Also the director of the in the moment video you saw before happens to be a major director for the likes of Coca Cola and other major brands. It's all playing into the idea of fake reality, viral marketing and "you saw it first" mentality. Die Antwoord are currently in talks for a major tour (with major cash)- the plan worked! So congrats, the club will be packed with eager naive hipsters believing they are part of the joke while in reality the joker is laughing at them.

As ironic Next Gen reality star Flava Flav once said (in his original and meaningful group Public Enemy), "Don't believe the hype". Start questioning what you believe in (media wise)- Question who you give your money to. Question what makes up your identity. They know their lifespan is short when using a gimmick, but they will milk you for everything you got before you can put it in the guilty pleasure (out of embarrassment) section of your brain.

[Know a Module #2] Pathauto

Antonio — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:22:02 +0000

Drupal core comes with the Path module included. Path provides readable URL's for your website, this helps your SEO, your image and how memorable a URL can be. This is an excerpt from Path's project page at Drupal.org:

For example, assume you want to post your resume for potential employers. Without the paths module enabled, the URL to view your resume would be something like yourdomain.com/node/view/26. Using this module, you could create a new URL to your resume such as yourdomain.com/my/resume or yourdomain.com/resume.html.

This module is extremely helpful for SEO, as it can include important keywords in the URL of your website. This is very important in order to place well in the search engine listings.

Let's say that you have a post "10 jquery slideshow plugins" and without path it would read yourdomain.com/node/154, nobody wants that, if you thought it didn't matter, now you know. If you're blogging, you want to include those important words in the URL, added to that, you want to include a reference to the date when your article was posted, for example: yourdomain.com/blog/02162010/10-jquery-slideshow-plugins. It can become very tricky to ensure that this pattern is always followed in sites where a lot of content is pushed in, specially by multiple users. Irregular patterns will produce irregular results, so the solution is simple, Pathauto.

Pathauto's nature is almost self-explanatory. You create URL patterns for each content type to ensure that the path for every post is nice and clean. A pattern uses replacement tokens (kindly provided by the token module). This means that when you are editing the pathauto pattern for your "article" content type, you can do articles/[mm][dd][yy]/[title-raw] and each time a post is created, it will fill in the blanks for you.

Cultivate Teams, Not Ideas

Antonio — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:11:32 +0000

How much is a good idea worth? According to Derek Sivers, not much:

It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.) To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.
To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until I see their execution.