DevPress is Giving Away Free Memberships to WordCamp Attendees

This past weekend DevPress announced that they would like to give away free memberships to WordCamp organizers to distribute to any of their attendees. The DevPress team simply loves WordPress and WordCamps and wants to show their support by hooking up hardcore WordPress fans with free memberships. If you’re organizing a WordCamp, make sure to get in touch with DevPress!

What do you get with a DevPress Membership?
The DevPress Club membership package includes a beautiful array of themes and plugins, created by stellar, well-respected members of the WordPress community. It also includes support through the DevPress community forums and access to all current and future products.

With an already ridiculously affordable membership cost of $5/year, there’s no reason to wait until WordCamp to get a membership. This fantastic WordPress resource is accessible to WordPress users on even the smallest budget. Go sign up today!

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Open Source CMS No Stranger on IBM i

There are a lot of options available to IBM i shops looking for a software package that allows them to run a website on their favorite box. But one class of tools that seems to be gaining lots of traction these days is the group of open source, PHP-based content management systems (CMS). The big three in this category include Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, and you might be surprised to learn about some of the prominent IBM i industry websites that are using these systems.

The rise of the open source CMS on the IBM i server is directly tied to the increasing prominence of PHP as a Web application programming language, and the hard work that Zend Technology and IBM have done to make PHP a fully vetted and integrated environment on the platform.

The work of these partners opened the door to running all sorts of packaged enterprise applications, such as SugarCRM. We hear a lot about SugarCRM, since it's a profit-making software company with a big marketing budget and a modern management style. The popular PHP-based CRM system was even made into an official IBM i Solution Edition, putting it on a podium alongside the world's largest ERP vendors.

But there's a lot of IBM i-PHP activity occurring below the marketing radar, where a fast and free download of an open source product trumps official IBM ordering forms. This is where you discover that today's IBM i pros are increasingly willing to experiment with the open source model, which eschews paid hand-holding in favor of volunteerism and sharing what worked.

And although there are no IBM i Solution Editions for Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, IBM i pros at some point realized there's nothing stopping them from running these popular LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP)-based applications on their IBM i servers. All that's required is Zend's PHP environment and the MySQL database, which can be obtained at very low costs.

These CMS systems provide the basic underpinnings required to publish and manage a website. WordPress is generally regarded as the easiest (but most limited) of the three to use, while Drupal seems to get credit for advanced functionality (as well as the associated complexity). Joomla seems falls somewhere in the middle.

Focus on Joomla

Two members of the Joomla community--Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a not-for-profit organization created to help the Joomla project, and Mark Dexter, a member of the Joomla Production Leadership Team, recently briefed IT Jungle on the state of open source CMS, and the recent enhancements to Joomla.

The Joomla project is focused on providing a relatively small set of core functionality that's handled by the CMS, such as managing users, files, menus, language encoding, search functions, archiving, and (most importantly) page appearance. The core CMS comes out of the box with the capacity to run polls, enable voting, handle links, use RSS newsfeeds, share postings with friends via email, and manage banners (ads or otherwise).

Advanced functionality--such as a payment system for an ecommerce website--is handled by add-ons written by third parties. "Most real-life sites will need more stuff, such as events, calendars, forums, or ecommerce functionality. That's where the extensions community comes in," Dexter says.
More than 8,000 Joomla extensions are currently available, and nearly one-quarter of them work with Joomla version 1.6, a major revision released six months ago. Extensions can be found at the Joomla extensions directory, while Joomla services offered by for-profit companies can be found elsewhere.

Joomla is becoming quite popular at the moment. While WordPress has a much bigger footprint (owning to its focus on blogging), Joomla accounts for nearly 3 percent of the world's websites, according to Ozimek. "We've got a new release cycle, and we're seeing a lot of good energy moving forward with Joomla, and we're really excited to see where we're going," he says. In July, Joomla announced version 1.7, which separates the Joomla CMS from the Joomla Platform application framework, and also institutes a new six-month release cycle.

Open source CMS is not just for hobbyists anymore, as many of the world's biggest companies run open source CMS. Joomla counts International House of Pancakes and a major Citibank website as Joomla-run websites. In the IBM i world, COMMON's website at www.common.org and the Wisconsin Midrange Computer Professional Association's website at www.wmcpa.org are hosted on Joomla running on IBM i backends. The Young i Professional's website at www.youngiprofessionals.com is done with Joomla. You'll also find instructions
for loading Joomla onto IBM i on the YiPS site.
"We're targeting ease of use on the one hand, but delivering scalable and powerful functionality on the other hand," Dexter says. "We don't think we have to do one or the other. Joomla sites are running websites for everything from small churches and mom and pop stores up to companies like McDonalds and eBay. It's a full spectrum of users."

Integration with MySQL is a blessing and a curse for Joomla. On the one hand, the capability to integrate DB2/400 data with Joomla's data housed in MySQL via the DB2 Storage Engine from IBM can be used for all sorts of good stuff--such as serving as a backup. One the other hand, support issues loom. Oracle's decision to end support for MySQL on IBM i late last year has put the kibosh on some IBM i professionals' plans to give Joomla on IBM i a shot.

But the open source CMS kimono has been opened, and the software is getting more sophisticated every day. In the end, IBM i shops will likely find a pre-built package that suits them.


source: ITJungle

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8 Excellent WordPress Caching Plugins to Speed Up Your Site

If you use WordPress as your publishing platform and are concerned about speeding up your website, caching will help you. The faster a web page loads, the better the user experience is.

This is how WordPress caching works: it generates a copy of your web pages and stores them in your server as static files (i.e. as HTML documents) and/or cached database queries. Afterwards, when a site visitor arrives at a particular page, the server gives them the cached page rather than re-querying your database and dynamically generating it, thus speeding up page response times and potentially reducing the server resources required for generating and serving a web page.


For WordPress users, the easiest and quickest way to implement a caching system is by the use of a WordPress plugin.

There are several WordPress cache plugins out there, and below, you’ll find the most popular, highly recommended ones.

1. DB Cache Reloaded Fix

DB Cache Reloaded Fix is a modified version of DB Cache Reloaded, patched for WordPress 3.1 compatibility. DB Cache Reloaded Fix caches the MySQL queries performed on your database to optimize the site’s speed.

While database query caching should suffice for most websites, and the plugin performs fairly well, it’s one of the newer WordPress caching plugins out there, so it hasn’t been field-tested by WordPress users as much as the other older plugins.

2. Hyper Cache Extended

Hyper Cache Extended, as its name implies, is an extended version of the popular Hyper Cache WordPress plugin.

This plugin offers numerous features, such as 404-error-page caching, support for mobile devices, and various compression options.

For mobile device support, I tried it on my testing site using a phone running Opera Mini and an iPhone, and the site loaded up in a snap in both mobile devices (almost thrice as fast as before.)

Hyper Cache Extended has a satisfied user base, as evidenced by the ratings at WordPress.org. In addition, the creator, Mapto Lazarov, encourages users of the plugin to email him issues and feedback — a reassuring sign that the plugin is, at present, well maintained by an enthusiastic and helpful web developer.

3. Quick Cache

Quick Cache is a WordPress caching plugin designed by Primo Themes. It’s lightweight and has user-friendliness as one of its selling points. The admin interface itself outlines each option in fine detail so that you know exactly what each option does.

Quick Cache has an impressive list of useful options, including the ability to disable caching for logged-in users and users who have just posted a comment so they can see new comments right away, which is helpful if your site is very active.

4. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is the most popularly known caching plugin for WordPress. It’s used by several leading WordPress-powered blogs such as Mashable and Smashing Magazine.

W3 Total Cache claims that your blog can load 10 times faster once the plugin is installed. Personally, I’ve seen the plugin drastically improve load times for older posts and static pages.

W3 Total Cache offers a plethora of options and provides you with other site optimization features such as source code minification and integration with your content delivery network (CDN).

If you’re uncomfortable with the admin interface (it can seem confusing for beginners), just leave the settings untouched because the plugin operates well at default settings.

5. WP-Cache

WP-Cache is one of the first WordPress caching plugins, made available on WordPress.org in 2007 — so it has a relatively long track record. It gives you the ability to specify which posts, pages and files shouldn’t be cached.

The plugin operates well, but its update frequency is comparatively lower than the other plugins.

6. WP File Cache

WP File Cache has a slightly different approach to WordPress caching: Instead of caching an entire web page, it only caches parts of it (usually parts that remain static for long periods of time).

Naturally, WP File Cache will not improve the performance and page load time of the website as much as the plugins that don’t require dynamic page generation and is best suited for high-traffic sites that frequently update web pages and WordPress users that would like to control which portions of a web page should (and shouldn’t) be cached.

7. WP Simple Cache

WP Simple Cache generates static HTML files of a WordPress site’s content. You can specify the timeout settings for cached pages and the auto-clean frequency of cache files. Other than that, as you can probably surmise from the plugin’s name, there aren’t many other options to tweak.

The plugin’s home page is in Turkish, so, unless you know Turkish, you shouldn’t expect plenty of documentation at your service.

8. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache shows static HTML pages to most of your website’s visitors. The plugin developers claim that if your website gets a large amount of traffic and you’re on an underpowered web server, the plugin works wonders.

WP Super Cache can also cache certain WordPress plugins, which can also aid in improving site performance.


source: Six Revisions

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WPMU DEV Google Maps gets a Major Update

Our developers have been working hard recently to improve the WPMU DEV Google Maps plugin. There have been a number of significant improvements, some of which are user requests and which have really enhanced the plugin.

Custom Fields / Geolocation

Our maps plugin now reads custom fields. This means that you can now integrate it with the WordPress geolocation plugin. You can geotag posts and this will insert a new map. Once it’s inserted you have all of the flexibility of the Google Maps plugin at your fingertips.

Default Map Zoom
You can now set the default zoom for your map. This means that you can decide whether your map appears as Earth, Continent, Region, Nearby City, City Plan and Details. Any newly created map will appear at the default zoom level.

Panoramia Images Overlay
Panoramia is a community which shares photographs of places and then these photographs appear on Google Earth. You can use the WPMU DEV Google Maps plugin to show these images overlaid on your map. You can filter what images you want. In the image below, for example, I have filtered for bridges.

Save with Street View
You can now save your maps with street view switched on. Just zoom in, add your pegman (little orange guy) and rotate to the position you are happy with.

Add Custom CSS
On the Plugin setting page there is a new box that lets you insert custom CSS to style your maps however you want to.

And, of course, there’s all of these great features:

• Simple to embed maps from the visual editor
• Map widget
• Advanced settings

more at WPMU

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WordPress 3.2.1

After more than a million downloads of WordPress 3.2, we’re now releasing WordPress 3.2.1 into the wild. This maintenance release fixes a server incompatibility related to JSON that’s unfortunately affected some of you, as well as a few other fixes in the new dashboard design and the Twenty Eleven theme. If you’ve already updated to 3.2, then this update will be even faster than usual, thanks to the new feature in 3.2 that only updates files that have been changed, rather than replacing all the files in your installation.



more at WordPress News

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