Integrate Magento with WordPress

Magento and WordPress are each dominant in their respective domains. Magento is the world’s most popular open source eCommerce platform, and WordPress the leading content management system. Each has its own strengths, but there are areas where those strengths don’t overlap. WordPress can be modified to function as an online store, and Magento can be used to some degree for content management, but neither is the ideal solution for the other platform’s areas of competence. There’s often a clear need for a business to use both products, and when that’s the case it can be very useful to have some degree of integration, especially when it comes to including aspects of a Magento store within a WordPress site. To that end, we’re going to have a look at a couple of alternatives that make integration simpler.

Magento WordPress Integration from James Kemp

One of the more popular solutions for integrating the two platforms comes from developer James Kemp. He has a suite of WordPress extensions that make including Magento content in a WordPress site fairly effortless. With the Magento WordPress Integration Plugin users can bring any default Magento blocks into their WordPress theme, as well as custom blocks. One of the most useful functions of this plugin comes as a paid addon that enables WordPress users to show Magento products on any WordPress post or page by using shortcodes. There’s also a widget addon that enables product categories to be shown on WordPress pages. Users of this plugin might also want to take a look at a Magento extension from the same developer for Single Sign-on for Magento and WordPress installations.

One drawback with this plugin (which seems to be common to most integration extensions) is that Magento and WordPress need to be installed on the same server, although it will work if they are served from different subdomains.
WordPress Integration from FishPig

If you’re interested in bringing a WordPress blog into your Magento store, rather than exporting Magento features to a WordPress blog, take a look at this Magento extension by the endearingly named FishPig. Integrating a blog into a Magento store can have significant SEO benefits. Among the features this plugin offers are the ability to use your Magento theme for the WordPress blog, 1-Click login to the WordPress admin panel from Magento, and the ability to quickly associate WordPress posts with Magento products. As with the first extension we looked at, there are a couple of paid addition that bring extra features, like WordPress Multisite Integration and Magento WordPress customer synchronization.

This content was originally posted  by "Corey" on "blog.nexcess.net"

WordPress vs Joomla – Review (revised)

Revised on 11 August 2013 - This is not a pro-contra review. In this article I try to give you some pointers to make it easy to chose between the two popular content management systems. The basic difference between WordPress and Joomla is that Joomla is a portal- or community type site while WordPress is a blog.  Both overlap each other in several areas and can be extended beyond their original purpose thanks to the use of plugins. You can find those plugins almost everywhere on the internet.  Both have a large user base with a lively community where tips and tricks are shared.  Both are free to use and many hosting providers have them as an option in their web tools section.  WP has a large community of volunteer developers, Joomla can count on many commercial add-ons by specialized professionals.

This topic is somewhat outside the scope of Miracle Tutorials, but the reason I thought it was important to publish is that it relates to the setup of video portals and which CMS to chose, so, here it is:

To Joomla or not to Joomla

If you want to create a community or a network with a membership area, newsroom, forums, articles, input from external authors etc… then Joomla is a good choice because it is made to be that way.  Creating a navigation structure is easy, once you understand how it works and it doesn’t require knowledge of html. You can set articles to expire after a time, activate dates, author name, breadcrumbs etc..

Thus, Joomla gives you a lot of power in your hands and that is noticeable in the admin section where there are so many options that you get dizzy the first time you go in. You really should get a good book on Joomla if you want to set it up fast. Otherwise you end up fiddling around and getting nowhere for days. You can find a whole range of books on this subject with Packt Publishing.

Adapting the look is simple if you are happy with changing some colors and the logo. Beyond that, you will find that Joomla has a complicated structure and even seasoned web developers have to go through a learning curve before they master the layout system, and that approach is different depending on the layout template you chose.

Joomla has multi-lingual capability built-in. This works very well but it is not that simple. You have to follow a certain order over actions to make it work, but it is very powerful. Luckily, there are many video tutorials available on YouTube. Just type “joomla multilingual” in the search box and you will find what you need.

If you do not want to get involved in the gritty work of stylesheets, you can buy professional layout templates for a reasonable price (between $35-$50) from JoomlaShack, for instance.  Or you could ask a developer to do it for you, but make sure they have references of Joomla sites or you might end up paying their learning curve and that is what you want to avoid.

Disadvantages of Joomla

Importing articles from one site to another is not easy. There are extensions for it, but moving from one version to the next can be problematic.

A remaining problem is that the core system is very complex which demands a lot of resources from the server. This has not improved in version 2.5, in fact, it got worse. No problem if you have 500 articles or so, but if it runs into thousands, you may want to check out this article: http://www.itoctopus.com/how-we-optimized-a-large-joomla-2-5-website-and-made-it-over-200-times-faster

Joomla now brings out new major upgrades on a regular basis. These upgrades break a lot of extensions and migrating from older versions is not an easy task, especially when you have a complex setup with membership system, forum etc… This is something the Joomla community really needs to address because moving to the latest version can be time consuming. We hope this will get better in future upgrades.
Simple updates between upgrades are easy to do with a click on a button, they seldom break anything.
In short:

Joomla’s strenght is in complexity.  Deep level navigation, sections in sections, categories etc… It has fixed pages and posts, posts Great for community sites, you can create a regular site with it but I would regard that as overkill.

To WordPress or not to WordPress

WordPress is basically a very user friendly blog system but it can be used as a regular site which you can update without any knowledge of html (the same goes for Joomla). You can create pages and posts, and with plugins, you can add a lot of functionality included standard in Joomla.  Because WordPress is a blog system, Google seems to love it.  So, from a marketing standpoint, WordPress is hard to resist.

The interface is easy to understand, you won’t need a book for it, although buying a “WordPress for Dummies” – book will save you some time if you have no experience with blog management at all. Adapting the look requires some knowledge of CSS, the style sheet language. Like with Joomla, if you select a template close to what you want, adapting the colors, logo etc.. is not that complicated but if you do not want to get involved with CSS, and you would like to re-arrange navigation elements as well, you might consider hiring a web developer. Since WordPress has a logical structure, it is easy for a developer to change things around, place ad banners etc…Again, give preference to a specialized developer used to work with WordPress.

It is setup very quickly and you can be listed in Google within 2 days.  I haven’t seen any other system doing that so far. For Joomla, it takes about 14 days, although you can push it by using SEO tools. A regular html site can take up to a month to get listed in Google, so this is something to take into account.  Anybody can learn enough in 2 hours to create content with WordPress right away, including using categories and sub pages.
WordPress has no multi-lingual capability but this can be managed with a plugin like Polylang, which is quite easy to use.

WordPress can handle tons of visitors.  It will not break down easily, even with loads of articles.
Major upgrades of WordPress are not as frequent as Joomla and they seldom require extra work. None of my plugins have broken between 3.1 – 3.6, which makes it a very stable platform.
Importing posts and pages from other WP sites is easy. There is built-in importer.
Disadvantages of WordPress:

For instance, adding or removing post dates, need to be changed in design mode and it requires knowledge of WP scripting. The navigational structure is determined by the layout template you chose. Changing that structure again requires knowledge of the WP scripting language and CSS.  With Joomla, you do not run into this problem because menus are controlled via the control panel and attributes like dates, author name etc, can be turned on and off per article or for the whole site in one go. In that sense, Joomla is much more a content management system.

Also, changing the order of categories or pages is rather cumbersome in WordPress.  It involves having to go into all of the categories and change the order by hand. The WP developers are working on it to fix it, but when is unpredictable.

Widgets can help compensate for the lack of a strong menu system like Joomla, but it is helps and it is quick to setup with the drag and drop feature.
In short:

WordPress is simple, you can see it as a blog or as a regular website.  It has fixed pages, posts and categories.

Through the use of plugins you can extend its functionality and let it grow as big and complicated as you want.  However, not every plugin is easy to understand, so it might be a good idea to have a specialized web developer in case of emergencies.

Security measures for both platforms
All popular opensource CMS systems are vulnerable for hackers because they know the system. Joomla and WordPress are both attacked on a regular basis.To minimize the threat, you at least should follow these measures:

Updating the site as soon as there is a security update is therefore important.
You also best install a firewall to block the most common attacks.
For Joomla, you can use AdminTools, for WordPress WordFence. Use the paid versions since the free ones only cover a part of the vulnerabilities.

There are many other firewall plugins and some can even be combined to strengthen your security.
If you work with members, force them to use strong, illogical passwords.

What do I need for my video channel?

You can add membership functionality in WordPress but Joomla will handle membership much better as it is really made for things like that.  So, let’s say, while presuming you do not want to tinker with scripting:

if you want members to access your videos on a subscription basis and have members in various levels of permission (depending on their subscription level), Joomla is your best bet.
If you simply want to show your videos on your site, or you only have 1 type of members and you want things to be simple and clean, WordPress will do nicely.

If you want to show off different types on videos on your home pages from different sections in your template, more or less like a magazine, again Joomla is better equipped for it.
If you want to create a video journal, WordPress makes life really easy for you.
Both platforms have responsive templates available.

If this little list doesn’t do you any good, you can always ask me a question by writing in the comment box below.  I will answer as soon as humanly possible to give you some advice.

Don’t panic!

The great thing is, that if you discover that you selected the wrong system in retrospect, you are not lost because it is always possible to adapt the system. Both systems are open source, which means they are adaptable in every direction.  Sometimes those changes will be costly, others peanuts.  It depends on what you need to add or adapt.  AND, there is a third way: Use them next to each other!
Have the best of both worlds if you want to.  Install one of the systems in a sub folder, match the layout more or less and there you have a super site with all the bells and whistles you can imagine.

Installation difficult?

Given the fact that these are powerful content management systems, installation is a dream, but don’t be fooled by this expression, if you do not know what a database is or what FTP means, you better rent web space with a provider that has the system of your preference in its package.  Dreamhost, GreenGeeks, Bluehost, Hostgator and others have both WP and Joomla available for you with the press of a button.

That said, shared hosting is generally slow. It is fine to start out with, but once you get serious traffic, move to a dedicated server or Virtual Private hosting.

This content was originally posted  by "Rudolf Boogerman" on "miracletutorials"

Some interesting features of Sitecore 7

I was just reading the Sitecore 7 preview by MVP Dan Solovay, and I think these are very interesting new features that I look forward to being able to use:

Datasources finally support GUIDs, which means that renderings won’t break when items are moved. This is wired into the LinkManager, which means that you will get a warning if you delete an item referenced in a datasource field.
Datasources can also be built on search queries. I’d like to see more details on this one, but it certainly feels as a step in the right direction.
Search providers are now a pluggable component, with support for enterprise-grade Solr in addition to Lucene, and with support for RESTful-based ElasticSearch on the way. Tim Ward stressed that while Lucene is an acceptable option for normal (fewer than 100 million documents) implementations, Solr offers compelling scalability features (such as support for multiple servers and auto sharding) and can handle billions of documents.
All configuration settings for Lucene are now exposed through Sitecore configuration. This gives the developer a number of new knobs to turn in optimizing search performance.
LinqToSitecore has been updated from LinqToBuckets by providing IQueryable interfaces to Lucene and Solr. Dan highlights the significance of this explaining that while IEnumerable simply provides an enumeration of items, forcing you to do filter logic in memory (clearly not scalable if you are dealing with large number of objects), an IQueryable implementation builds a query that is executed against an index. Dan also brings up an example, to better explain this: “for instance, suppose you wanted to write a query for all product items that have a price under $10, and let’s say you had a very large number of products. An IEnumerable query would force you to iterate over all of them to select the qualifying items, whereas IQueryable pushes this work to the index.“
You can reindex a small part of a content tree and you can configure an index to auto-swap, so that a new one is built in a temporary location so that a rebuild does not impact site functionality.
HTML caching can now be triggered by an index rebuild (“Clear on Index Update”). Again Dan clarifies the usefulness of this with an example: “This is helpful if your rendering uses index values, in the following scenario: You publish a change, the HTML cache is purged by the publish, but the index has not yet been updated. Bam, you are stuck with a stale value in cache until the next publish. This setting prevents that.“
Search indexing and retrieval performance is vastly improved. Tim Ward cited that rebuilding an index with 10 million items on Sitecore 6.6 took 27 hours, and this was reduced to 98 minutes on the same equipment with Sitecore 7. Simple retrieval searches time was slashed from 3.9 seconds to 0.3 seconds, and complex searches (sort, date, and wildcard) that produce .Net exceptions on Sitecore 6.6 now work and take the same 0.3 seconds as simple searches.

This content was originally posted  by "franz1999" on "1000linesofcode.wordpress.com"

Drupal vs Joomla vs WordPress: CMS Showdown

WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are the three most popular content management systems (CMS) online. All three are open source and built on PHP + MySQL. All three vary significantly in terms of features, capability, flexibility and ease of use. Below, we’ll take a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of each of these CMS solutions

Drupal: Pros and Cons

Drupal is the granddaddy of CMS systems on this list – it was first released in early 2001. Like WordPress and Joomla, Drupal too is open-source and based on PHP-MySQL. Drupal is extremely powerful and developer-friendly, which has made it a popular choice for feature rich, data-intensive websites like Whitehouse.gov and Data.gov.uk.

Let’s consider a few pros and cons of Drupal:

Advantages of Drupal

Extremely Flexible: Want a simple blog with a static front page? Drupal can handle that. Want a powerful backend that can support hundreds of thousands of pages and millions of users every month? Sure, Drupal can do that as well. The software is powerful and flexible – little wonder why it’s a favorite among developers.

Developer Friendly: The basic Drupal installation is fairly bare-bones. Developers are encouraged to create their own solutions. While this doesn’t make it very friendly for lay users, it promises a range of possibilities for developers.

Strong SEO Capabilities: Drupal was designed from the ground-up to be search engine friendly.

Enterprise Friendly: Strong version control and ACL capabilities make Drupal the CMS of choice for enterprise customers. The software can also handle hundreds of thousands of pages of content with ease.

Stability: Drupal scales effortlessly and is stable even when serving thousands of users simultaneously.

Disadvantages of Drupal

Steep Learning Curve: Moving from WordPress to Drupal can feel like walking from your car into a Boeing 747 cockpit – everything is just so complicated! Unless you have strong coding capabilities and like to read tons of technical papers, you’ll find Drupal extremely difficult to use for regular use.

Lack of Free Plugins: Plugins in Drupal are called ‘modules’. Because of its enterprise-first roots, most good modules are not free.

Lack of Themes: A barebones Drupal installation looks like a desert after a drought. The lack of themes doesn’t make things any better. You will have to find a good designer if you want your website to look anything other than a sad relic from 2002 when using Drupal.

Recommended Use
Drupal is a full-fledged, enterprise grade CMS. It’s recommended for large projects where stability, scalability and power are prioritized over ease of use and aesthetics.

Get an Introduction to Drupal with this course from Udemy!

Joomla: Pros and Cons
Joomla is an open-source content management software forked from Mambo. It is one of the most popular CMS solutions in the world and boasts over 30m downloads to date. Joomla powers such noteworthy sites as Cloud.com, Linux.com, etc.

Advantages of Joomla

User-Friendly: Joomla isn’t WordPress, but it’s still relatively easy to use. Those new to publishing will find its UI polished, flexible and powerful, although there is still a slight learning curve involved in figuring everything out.

Strong Developer Community: Like WordPress, Joomla too has a strong developer community. The plugin library (called ‘extensions’ in Joomla) is large with a ton of free to use, open source plugins.

Extension Variability: Joomla extensions are divided into five categories – components, plugins, templates, modules and languages. Each of these differs in function, power and capability. Components, for example, work as ‘mini-apps’ that can change the Joomla installation altogether. Modules, on the other hand, add minor capabilities like dynamic content, RSS feeds, and search function to a web page.

Strong Content Management Capabilities: Unlike WordPress, Joomla was originally designed as an enterprise-grade CMS. This makes it far more capable at handling a large volume of articles than WordPress.

Disadvantages of Joomla

Some Learning Involved: You can’t jump right into a Joomla installation and start hammering out new posts if you’re not familiar with the software. The learning curve isn’t steep, but it can be enough to intimidate casual users.

Lacks SEO Capabilities: Making WordPress SEO friendly is as easy as installing a free plugin. With Joomla, you’ll need a ton of work to get to the same level of search engine friendliness. Unless you have the budget to hire a SEO expert, you might want to look at alternative solutions.

Limited ACL Support: ACL (Access Control List) refers to a list of permissions that can be granted to specific users for specific pages. ACL is a vital component of any enterprise-grade CMS solution. Joomla started supporting ACL only after version 1.6. ACL support is still limited in the stable v2.5.1 release, making it unsuitable for enterprise customers.

Recommended use

Joomla enables you to build a site with more structural stability and content than WordPress, and has a fairly intuitive interface. If you want a standard website with standard capabilities – a blog, a static/dynamic front-end, a forum, etc. then use Joomla. Joomla is also a good option for small to mid-tier e-commerce stores. If you want something more powerful for enterprise use, consider Drupal.

Learn how to create a corporate website with Joomla in this course from Udemy!

WordPress: Pros and Cons

New York Times, CNN, Forbes and Reuters – the list of WordPress.com clients reads like publishing dream-team. More than 68 million websites use WordPress, making it the world’s favorite blogging software. It is flexible enough to power fortune 500 company blogs as well as sporadically updated personal journals.

Below, we take a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of using WordPress:

Advantages of WordPress
Multiple Authors: WordPress was built from the ground-up to accommodate multiple authors – a crucial feature for any serious publication.

Huge Plugin Library: WordPress’ is the poster-child of the open-source developer community, which has developed hundreds of thousands of plugins for it. There are few things WordPress can’t do with its extensive library of plugins.

User-Friendly: WordPress’ UI is easy to use and highly intuitive, even for first-time bloggers. You can drop a theme, add a few plugins, and start blogging within minutes. This course will teach you how to install and set up a WordPress blog .

Strong SEO Capabilities: With plugins like All in One SEO, you can start blogging straight away without worrying about on-page SEO.

Easy Customization: WordPress’ theming system is designed for easy-customization. Anyone with a little grasp of HTML and CSS can customize WordPress themes to fit his/her needs.

Flexibility: WordPress can be made to do virtually anything – run an e-commerce store, host a video site, serve as a portfolio or work as a company blog – thanks to plugins and customized themes.
 Disadvantages of WordPress

Security: As the category leading software with millions of installations, WordPress is often the target of hackers. The software itself isn’t very secure out of the box and you will have to install third-party plugins to boost your WordPress installation’s security.

Incompatibility with Older Plugins: The WordPress team constantly releases new updates to fix security loopholes and patch problems. These updates are often incompatible with older plugins. If your site relies on older plugins, you may have to hold off on updating (which makes your site all the more susceptible to hack attacks).

Limited Design Options: Even though WordPress is infinitely customizable, most WordPress installations still look like WordPress installations. Although recent updates and improvements in plugins/themes have rectified this problem somewhat, WordPress is still hampered by limited design options.

Limited Content Management Capabilities: WordPress was originally designed as a blogging platform. This has affected its ability to handle large amounts of content. If you plan to publish hundreds of blog posts per week (not uncommon for large publishers), you may find the default WordPress backend a little underwhelming for such high content volume.
Recommended Use
WordPress is often called a ‘mini CMS’. It isn’t nearly as powerful or capable as Drupal or Joomla, but is easy enough for any lay user. Use WordPress if you want a simple, easy to use blogging solution that looks good and can accommodate multiple authors easily.

Learn how to build a custom WordPress website from scratch in this amazing course!

Conclusion
Even though WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are built on the same technology stack, they vary heavily in features and capabilities. Hopefully, the above information will help you choose a CMS that fits your requirements.

This content was originally posted  by "kasiamikoluk" on "udemy"

Why choose Magento as an ecommerce platform?

If you follow our blog regularly you probably remember that my last post was dedicated to Sitecore CMS. This time I decided to represent for your review one more powerful at the same time arguable CMS – Magento. Magento as well as Sitecore CMS is meant to build big things but this time in the world of ecommerce: helps to create online stores.

As the field of ecommerce is tending to grow and develop continuously IT solutions try to meet the needs and offer the best solutions to make it extremely innovative, make the managing process easier for holders and of course attract as many customers as it is possible. There are many CMSs for this purpose like PrestaShop, OpenCart, osCommerce, phpShop, Spree, nopCommerce and others. The choice of CMS depends on what kind of eCommerce/business you intend to go on. You need to take into account such aspects as the size of your firm, whether you haveB2B, B2C or you’re retail, what management system you use or you will use ecommerce platform for that, connection of you websites with other sales channels, your programming skills: PHP, .NET, etc.

So as you may see there are many CMS available today, the choice depends on what type of business you have and type of software you use. Nevertheless, beyond the rich variety Magento is considered to be one of the front runners.

Almost all claims that Magento is rather complicated system as it is built on Zend framework; however has a lot positive aspects. Generally it is characterized as big, complicated and powerful CMS/platform that provide excellent and multiply options to grow you website.
Magento is also very serious CMS and there is no doubt that it is not for everybody. It is tool for professional rather than for amateur.

-It rather complicated to use and work on it for its coding style, so be prepared to spend/charge from your development team twice more hours than usual. Also if you’re not experienced in coding or working with this CMS we would offer to hire skillful developer/development team with proven past experience to help you with that. Based on our experience working with Magento you should be prepared that the development process could take much more time as you will need to learn all the curves that CMS has.

Magento is extremely powerful offering a wide range of customization options. It is easy-editable gives an opportunity to improve the code regularly by making updates and fixing bugs. And what is important here is that code itself doesn’t require any changes!
- One more aspect is the rich variety of features that makes Magento so flexible. Let’s now review the key features of Magento:

International support – multiple languages and currencies, list of allowed countries for registration, purchasing and shipping, localization;
Site Management – control of multiple web sites, multiple languages.
Catalog Browsing – easy navigation, advanced product filtering system, product comparison.
Catalog Management – inventory management, batch import and export of products, different tax rates per location, additional product attributes.
Analytics and Reporting – integration with Google Analytics and offers different reports.
Payment – different payment methods: credit cards, PayPal, Authorize.net, Google Checkout, ePay, etc.
Marketing Promotions and Tools – – coupons, discounts and different promotion options.
Encryption Key – security storage of the sensitive data in the script’s database.

It is also scalable and it grows with your business. That’s the point why it is mostly recommended for mid to large size vendors.

Additionally it should be said that Magento team offers 24/7 live support. Of course it is not super fast but at least it works and you never know when you will need immediate help. Moreover it has video tutorials, good knowledge base, webimars, user guides and support forum. As Magento has three versions the opportunities of each version differs: Community Edition (downloadable version, you will need to find hosting and security for your store), Magento Go (cloud based of hosted Magento CE, preferably for small retailers) and Enterprise one, the last is complete ecommerce solution, fully supported and it is not cheap. Here it should be noted about technical support: Community version has an access only to the forums that are not so active mainly because Magento is relatively new and don’t have yet many followers. So there is no guarantee that you get an advice you need.

And at last as Magento is open source CMS it is free and you don’t spend your money to download it. But you will need to invest if you want to have store live.
At the same time (there is always the other sideJ) there are gaps (that make this platform a bit vulnerable and look unfinished) that need to be improved too. We have a made a short list of them:

Slow – Many reports that the software is clunky and suffers from slow load times.
Expensive – Even it is open source and free it will end up costing you after you add up hosting, security, and developer fees.
No Customer Support – Magento CE users have no access to technical assistance with the exception of a forum.
Requires Coding Experience – it requires users to have technical skills and experience in order create and launch stores. It is not for amateurs or hobbyists.

Some more aspects to consider:

Confusing and hard to learn.
Difficult to implement templates.
Not much themes to choose.
Software updates don’t work always properly.

To use Magento or not?

In my opinion Magento is proved to take one of the leading positions and has potential to save it. It has many positive aspects and if your business is well developed and you have large list of items to put online, you need to consider Magento and invest money in it. But of course be prepared for serious work with all the curves if you don’t have much knowledge in programming or take care to choose the development team wisely. And certainly don’t forget about tech support, Magento CE don’t have it.
In case you still considering whether adopt Magento for your business or not, feel free to share your personal experience with us leaving your comments below or contact me directly if you need assistance with your ecommerce shop to discuss the details.

This content was originally posted  on "altabel.wordpress"