There are many great content management systems on the Internet that are free and handle a specific task. Pligg we’ve already stated is great for digg clones and Drupal is great for a general purpose website or e-commerce solution. The big blogging management comes directly from wordpress and their awesome CMS.

Not everyone needs these great content management systems or they’ve got a different direction to go. For instance, a site like pownce is a specialized site that I highly respect because of its simple yet clean design.

What do you do when you just want something simple, yet extensible? Or, perhaps you just want to expand your skills and learn some new stuff without having to use a “crutch” like a full CMS.

The answer is a two pronged attack using Template Lite and EZ SQL. Say what?

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As the wide world of the web continues to grow, companies are looking harder and harder at transparent user interfaces across many content management systems (CMS). One does not simply want a WordPress blog anymore, they want a blog, a forum, a social networking site, a digg-clone and many other things all tied together.

Why? Because not very many CMS’s can handle all the work of the many that exist. Although you can work Drupal to do a lot of powerful things, you cannot simply make it a full time blog as great as WordPress while maintaining a great forum experience like VBulletin and a digg clone like Pligg. Every content management system has its strengths and weaknesses but many designers want only the strengths.

How do you gain such a power? By integrating them all together of course! This, however, isn’t a task to be taken lightly. You must handle a lot of user data and rely on a single password record for all of the CMSs. Typically, the way I tackle this is to take the hardest user database and use that as the core of the authentication. The other option, which is very important, is to use the database with the most users as the core.

Integration and seemless design is important for this type of site ‘network’ and we’re seeing this occur more and more on the web. Rather than having a Drupal developer build modules (or install modules) to simulate the perfect storm of websites they’re integrating all the sites together with a common design so the user doesn’t even know they’ve moved from a Pligg site to a VBulletin forum because it all looks the same to them.

There is also the concept of “single sign-on,” which is another rough point if you’re using obscure content management software. In the perfect world we want to user to register and sign into one of the sites and have total access to all the sites in the network without re-authenticating. A project in and of itself!

We’re finding this is the way to go in many situations. Users of Drupal have commented that the forum module leaves much to be desired in terms of functionality and Wordpress makes a great blog with some neat plugins to extend the blogs functionality but it’s not an E-Commerce solution either. Pligg, on the other hand, is really only good at digg-clones sites and doesn’t build a huge friends network or a social circle site, you’ve got to find other software solutions for this.

In the end, what everyone wants is to tie it all together into a “solution.” Much like Microsoft Office is a set of unrelated products brought together and forced to relate seemlessly to the user, the future of the CMS may be much the same. Plug-ins to build one site into another. You can see this already forming with some Drupal modules to plug into PhpBB and other forum software because users know “you just can’t beat a focused product” that does one thing great.

So I got an email today from an awesome reader of the blog. Just read…

Hi guys, just thought I would let you know about this. I recently saw someone placing my own site design in their personal portfolio as something they made and in the comments section of my blog entry on the subject someone noted that one of your designs is in there as well.

You can find the link and details on my blog entry, http://joshuabryant.com/asinne

First of all, we just want to say thanks to josh for taking the time to warn us of this INSANELY BLATANT copy of our work. It’s really cool to know that designers will actually take care of one another and not allow shady wanna-bes to steal their work without asking. It fact, it was really nice to find out from josh, simply because we think his site and work is bad ass and had not seen it before his email. I guess some good can come out of this right?

In the end though what is a designer to do? Well, it looks like someone (probably josh) sent them over some emails letting them know that stealing wasn’t cool. Now when you head over to http://inclinationstudio.com/ (the people that ripped off our work) all you get is a coming soon. So let that be a lesson to all you fakers, thieves, and con artist. Eventually we are going to find our own work and if not, another designer will. The design community knows how to watch the backs of it’s fellow members. So just do what we did. Work hard, and come up with your own ideas and skills. Your client will thank you.

thanks josh.

As a software developer I’m constantly challenged with avoiding annoying spammers. I easily spend 30% of my time working against people that serve no purpose but to bother me. The challenge isn’t simply blocking bots and spammers on development projects, it’s balancing the blockage with the loss of real users.

A good test case, the techdiversions.com mailing list. The concept is simple, a side-panel area where visitors can sign up for our mailing list to receive industry news, video game promotions and game release dates. The mailing list, from a business perspective, keeps users remembering who you are so they come back next time to buy from you and not your competition.

Enter the spam bot. This little bot comes along each day and causes endless headaches for my wife, the store owner, when she wants to manage her mailing list and user-base. This bot, for whatever reason, signs up for the mailing list with bogus e-mail addresses five times a day with ten new sign-ups each vist. Thats around 50 new sign-ups a day!

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So yesterday we were on digg for our recent launch of client site SimplyFired.com. Obviously we are really proud of the work we did for them and don’t mind the attention, but what is with the Digg user base? Don’t get me wrong, it is nice to see that some people actually read our little article and hopefully other small design and development firms can take something away from it, but the vast majority of comments seem to be from people that don’t even click over to read.

I suppose this is all due to use of social voting that was implemented into the site via Pligg, but that is only a small part of the site as a whole. What about the design, the blog, the implementation of code and project management? In reality, that was the point of article which apparently went unnoticed. I also wonder how much of a fuss would have been thrown if users had no idea it was pligg. I suspect there still would have been some groans, but nothing to the degree of some users we saw.

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