We have been pleased with our real-world usage of Radiant CMS. And now, we are pleased to announce Radiant CMS hosting and support options for your company. Radiant CMS hosting provides you with the setup, customization and maintenance services; along with uptime guarantees and daily backups.
To learn more, give us a call or send an email.
Often SEO is defined as the most important part of your website marketing efforts. If your website is found in a search engine results, it can turn prospects into sales leads. With search engine optimization, you can optimize your website to appear on the listings of search engines.
High ranking in search results without paying for ad placements is often referred to as organic search engine optimization. It is being listed in the top results naturally which will pay tremendous dividends in both end user perception and maximizing your marketing budget over time.
To understand the basics of search engine optimization technically, you might need to learn a bit of HTML. But, you don’t want to do that! It can be quite daunting to edit all pages of your website if you have a really big website. But, if you are using a content management system (CMS) to manage your content, then you should find SEO very easy. In fact, the SEO process might even come naturally to some CMS.
Silverstripe is considered one of the best open source CMS. It provides many facilities regarding search engine optimization. Page keywords and descriptions can easily be entered through a couple of text input boxes.
Everything in the Silverstrip content management system is designed for the ease of use. Search engine optimization features are now included in Silverstripe, so it is not a hard task anymore.
Silverstripe provides Gsitemap support to enhance the search engine optimization capabilities of the content management system. It can become very difficult to submit a XML sitemap file associated with every entry on the content management system to Google, Yahoo and/or MSN. Silverstripe’s functionality creates a gzipped sitemap XML file that is automatically submitted to Google. Some people need this facility to keep some pages away from the reach of Google bot as well. Excluding such pages from sitemap can provide the possible solution to this issue.
Silverstripe produces SEO friendly URLs. SEO friendly URLs are a critical component of organic search engine optimization. An example of SEO friendly URLs is a page name of /page.php?id=4 compared to /fishing-toys-for-kids.html. /fishing-toys-for-kids.html is going to enhance your SEO efforts to your Fishing Toys for Kids product line while page.php?id=4 will do nothing. With Silverstripe, SEO enhanced URLs are built in and do not require complicated configuration.
Of course, search engine marketing most often involves a CPC campaign(s) as well as organic result efforts. You can also use Google Adwords integration to enhance the SEO capabilities and advertising budget tracking of your website. All the campaigns can be easily tracked and managed within the content management system. So it is very easy to manage everything related to SEO in your content management system itself.
It is straightforward to achieve marketing results within Silverstripe CMS. You will feel very comfortable when implementing SEO for your website. Silverstripe provides a solid foundation for keeping content fresh and easily managed. But, as an added bonus, Silverstripe can be utilized in your search engine marketing efforts.
To develop your community, a website is required to provide flexible communication options and ease of use. These websites can contain blogs and polls as means of communication between different users.
The development process comprises of page designs and programming modules. This can prove a little bit hectic, but it is the basic need of every business. You can make this task easy by using content management systems. Content management systems can be used by a non-technical user.
Content is one of the basic requirements of membership website. So, we need a content management system to fulfill this basic requirement. One CMS which can provide these community building facilities is Drupal CMS.
Drupal has the power to provide an easy interface for a single user or community of users to publish content over a website. Drupal can be used to create a web portal or discussion websites for a community. Many people use Drupal to incorporate their business ideas. E-commerce websites and resource directories can also be created using Drupal CMS as well.
Drupal is based on a extensible framework. Core functions can be enhanced by adding modules in the CMS, so that it can work according to the user’s requests. Simple, clean theme designs are provided with this CMS and all the code is written in PHP. Further, software developers can tweak the code to introduce new functionality according to your requirements.
Although new functionality is not practically implemented by average users, nonetheless, the development option to enhance functionality is available within in the content management system. Best of all, the content management is open source. This means you do not have to spend a single dime on your website (except the hosting and domain name).
If you are looking for the best Ruby on Rails Content Management System (CMS), then Radiant should be on your short list of options. Radiant provides all the facilities of a content management system in a very easy and powerful way. It can help you by creating a nice, clean, organized website for personal or corporate purposes.
A content management system provides the foundation for an easy to maintain a website. Unlike most CMS, Radiant is not a PHP based CMS. Radiant is written in Ruby and utilizes the Ruby on Rails framework. As you would expect from a Ruby on Rails based solution, it is very efficient for developing websites.
Radiant fits well into projects that do not require document management or complex publishing workflow scenarios. In other words, Radiant is a great fit for the majority of websites.
A key factor in deciding which CMS to use should be the customization factor. When I say “customization factor”, I mean the how difficult it is to develop custom functionality particular to your project. Some CMS systems make this easy while others present more of a challenge. Based on my experience, a key element in the customization factor is the amount of out-of-box functionality. Out-of-box or default functionality is both a pro and a con. On the pro side, you might be able to take advantage of existing functionality. But, a con can be an environment/code base that is difficult to customize and maintain. This con presents a low customization factor.
Radiant makes adding custom functionality straightforward. Developers add additional functionality by adding what Radiant developers call Extensions. The Extension system enhances the functionality capabilities of the website. (Extensions is sometimes analogous to “plug-in” in other software) There are numerous Extensions already available and more appearing every day.
Extensions can also be used to customize the administration interface of the CMS. This is of particular interest to independent software vendors who choose to use Radiant as part of an overall solution.
Radiant includes all the features of a good content management system. A real strength of the software is simple, intuitive administrative interface. This makes the software easy to use for both seasoned CMS users and beginners alike.
The three key components of the administrative panel are Pages, Snippets and Layouts. It looks similar to three functions used in blog software, but it possesses more functionality and enhancements when compared to blog software. Different page content is managed through the “Pages” area. Common content, such as headers and footers is managed through “Snippet” area. And the overall website design templates are managed in the “Layout” area.
Radiant also comes with a macro language called Radius which works in the form of custom tags. It provides a variety of useful dynamic functionality; example: manage parent-child page relationships and inclusion of content from a snippet.
For those concerned about performance, page caching is also available in Radiant content management system.
With all these features, it is possible to create an easily maintainable and customized website. As it is open source, you can use the content management system without spending money on license fees. So, if you want to use a simple, extensible, easy to use, ruby based content management system, you should consider Radiant Content Management System.
When choosing the best content management system for your project, it is important to weigh both the technical and non-technical pros and cons. Both technical and non-technical reasons can ultimately affect the bottom line cost. Therefore, it is not recommended to simply choose a content management system based solely on technical language or feature set. In this article, we will take a look at an open source content management system called Radiant CMS.
Radiant is a Ruby on Rails based solution that works with a variety of databases. It has a few years of development and a couple noteworthy deployments. There are technical and non-technical reasons why Radiant CMS is a good choice for a content management system.
Technical Reasons to Choose Radiant CMS:
It’s Ruby on Rails based which can speed development by taking advantage of the convention over configuration paradigm. In addition, the Radiant code base has excellent automated coverage in unit tests. This means the code is well tested and robust. Unit test code coverage can be one aspect to measure when considering open source content management systems. In fact, we could suggest the amount of code covered by automated unit and integration tests should be considered when choosing any open source library and/or framework. It is an easy indicator to measure and compare. But, that is an entirely different conversation.
Radiant CMS also has an excellent extension system. This allows customizations required by your project to be made. When choosing a content management system, the ability to add and maintain any customizations should be an important factor. This point should be considered not only from the beginning, but how your customizations will evolve as upgrades and enhancements occur within your chosen content management system. In other words, if the core CMS is modified to provide the custom functionality, how can upgrades or patches from the core CMS developers be applied to your modified version. Radiant’s extension system provides this separation of concern.
The Radius tagging system of Radiant is fantastic for adding dynamic functionality. It is nice that tags can be added directly to page content rather than some kind of comment or special character sequence in order to indicate non-static content.
Non-Technical Reasons to Choose Radiant CMS:
Radiant has an elegant, intuitive administrative interface. It is not intimidating to the non-technical user. In fact, the design encourages people to embrace using the system, because they assume it is going to be easy to pick up and learn.
The lack of workflow functionality can be considered a feature in many cases. In competing CMS products, workflow can seem like an attractive feature at first, but is often hindrance to configure and work around for projects which require only a few administrators of content.
An additional, non-technical reason to choose Radiant CMS is cost. The project is open source and the community of ruby on rails developers and ruby on rails hosting providers is growing, so your cost risk of obtaining these resources is minimized.
Conclusion
From a technical perspective, the open source, Ruby on Rails based Radiant CMS makes an excellent choice. From a non-technical perspective, Radiant CMS makes an excellent choice as well. When combining both perspectives, we have had many positive project experiences and deployments using Radiant over the past year and a half.
Many of us think about building a customized community website, but we are back stepped due to lack of technical knowledge and web development skills. Well, it is easy with the help of a content management system. The website can be fully customized and be proven a valuable asset for the group to share their knowledge over a wide platform. And best of all, most CMS are open source and the cost of webspace and domain name is worth.
A little description of content management systems can give you a better idea on this matter. CMS provides a basic platform to manage website content. A content management system can give you an easy-to-use administrative panel to perform basic and advanced administrative tasks over a website. This way, maintenance of website is quite easy. You can choose Silverstripe CMS for making your community website.
Silverstripe CMS is a renowned name between webmasters. Silverstripe is used because it is simple, yet very powerful. It is built on a PHP MVC framework (known as Sapphire) that provides a flexible content management as well as easy editing to the source code. Since it is under BSD open source license, it is free to use.
Silverstripe satisfies all the basic needs of a website. Additional features can be added as modules to enhance its features and functionality. There is a long list of features that can be used in Silverstripe. Most common amongst these are blogs, forums, flickr gallery, youtube gallery and maps. You can also provide external authentication such as LDAP and AD.
One more important term that is associated with a CMS is a “Widget”. These are small features that can be dragged and dropped from the administrative panel into the website; advantageous widgets include featured videos, Digg and language translation.
Silverstripe provides all the features that you will need to build a good community website. You can share information or other piece of data and manage users within few clicks. Silverstripe is a recommended part of solution when building your community website.
There are many Java based content management systems available for use. Most open source Java CMS are free to use. However, many content management system users stick to a PHP based CMS. Java based content management systems are also easy to use and to rely on. An average internet user might not be able to see the technical aspects of a content management system, but he is able to see the simplicity and power by the interface. Therefore a content management system is judged by the amount of facilities with simple interfaces.
Amongst all Java based CMS, the best content management system is Magnolia. It is known for its power with simplicity. The best portion of its power can be seen on the administrative interface. A powerful administration is provided so as to make things happen very quickly and easily. It is based on Java content repository standard (JSR-170).
Magnolia combines the power of a Web content management system and document management (DMS). The whole system is managed by a single interface has some AJAX capabilities. This content management system provides enterprise architecture to satisfy all the needs of customer. Being open source, the content management system is updated and tested in a regular manner. A bug or problem regarding to any module can be eradicated within seconds.
SiteDesigner facility of Magnolia creates your website in a browser window within few clicks. Custom templates are not used in Magnolia SiteDesigner, so there is no stress involved while updating the website.
So if you are interested in an open source Java based content management system, then Magnolia should be top on your list of options.
