I wanted to put together a quick poll to find out from everybody which CMS you are more interested in me featuring more posts on. Is it Wordpress? Is it Drupal? How about Joomla? Or maybe you would like me to feature more posts on some of the up and coming content management systems such as Serendipity. Take just a quick second and vote on this poll so that I can have a better idea of what type of articles will most help you guys! Thanks.

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Have you ever been on a social networking site, let’s say Facebook for example, and it gave you an option to invite all your friends from your gmail or yahoo email account? You ever wondered how you would build something like that on your own social site? Maybe on your blog or maybe your own social network? OpenInviter is an open source php class written in PHP5 that does just that. It allows users to import contacts from most of the well known email providers and social networks.

Right now OpenInviter currently supports these providers:

• Gmail
• Windows Live
• Yahoo
• Mail.com
• Facebook
• Friendster
• hi5
• Linkedin
• Twitter
• Myspace & more..

And here’s the great part for many of you readers out there. There is already integration support for Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla!!! Check it out and download it and start using it! Why not? Especially if you have a Wordpress or Drupal blog and want to try and build a community around your blog. Makes sense. Use this link because WebmasterResources has direct links at the bottom of his article for a demo and download page.

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I’m finding more and more of these every week. Premium plugins at a price for the open source Wordpress content management system!  What are my thoughts on this? Do I like or dislike the fact that people other than the Wordpress people themselves are making money off an open source project? I’ve put alot of thought into it lately. Because I don’t have a problem at all with Premium Wordpress Themes, as long as they are original. The problem comes from people who steal open source themes, make a few minor changes, then sell those themes at a cost.

The same thing could be happening with Wordpress plugins! For example, I came across this premium plugin recently, it’s called AutoBlogged and it’s a paid plugin that gives you feed aggregation capabilities. It has a lot of cool additional features on top of it as well. But what’s the difference between it and the free plugin WP-O-Matic? Well a quick glance at the two homepages will tell you some minor feature differences between the two. But overall they are pretty much the same.

Now i’m not accusing AutoBlogged of copying or stealing it’s code from WP-O-Matic. But i’m not saying it’s entirely not likely either. And it’s also likely that there are instances of this code hijacking of Wordpress plugins all over the web. If it’s happening with Wordpress Themes, chances are it’s happening with Plugins as well.

This is What Turned Me Away From Joomla!

What turned me away from Joomla, was that every time I would look for a “Component” for my Joomla cms I would run into “Paid Components” and I could never find a good quality component for free. This made no sense to me since Joomla itself was free.

Overall I must say that I do not like premium Wordpress plugins. I think they dampen the spirit of open source and the great community that exists around Wordpress! SOS. Software as a service. Go sell your services of Wordpress skills. Don’t sell us cheap little plugins and bind us to proprietary software tactics. The only reason Wordpress is around today is because it’s Open Source! Just remember that!

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The author over at Top Notch Themes recently put together a cool blog post where he talked about Ubercart and why you should use it for your ecommerce solution. I personally am using Ubercart for my own ecommerce sites as well as all of my clients. I think it’s a great cart system and because it is made for the Drupal CMS it’s even better. Here are the 7 reasons that Steph listed in the article:

1) Big names are using it

Prominent companies such as AOL and Warner Brothers Records has been using Ubercart for a while. More recently, Lullabot launched an Ubercart site for their conference registration.

2) Stable release for Drupal 5, significant progress on Drupal 6 version

Ubercart for Drupal 5 has been at a stable 1.x branch since the beginning of June. While it’s not yet stable, there is a dev version out for Drupal 6, and I know of at least one brave soul using it on a live site already. This is a testament to the active development community of Ubercart.

3) Ubercart is highly represented at Drupal events

There have been sessions on Ubercart at the last three Drupalcons, numerous local Drupal camps, FrOScon, etc. Ubercart even held their own Ubercamp this summer, for developers and interested parties to get together for a weekend of coding and planning.

4) Very active community

Dozens of new forum posts a day from its 3500 registered users, numerous code commits every week, and several community-contributed modules added or updated each week. The support time for issues and forum posts is very quick.

5) High visibility outside of the Drupalsphere

This is nearly unheard of for Drupal modules, but given Ubercart’s high visibility, it’s actually been a big draw for users coming into Drupal itself for the first time. They also recently had a mention in PC Magazine.

6) Full time developers with commercial backing

While the Drupal project itself has been proof that full time, funded developers aren’t needed to create a great product, in the world of e-commerce, it’s certainly helped. There are currently two (soon to be three) full time Ubercart developers, and an estimated dozen or so more from other organizations who also do only Ubercart development.

7) Focus on being user friendly

The Ubercart developers don’t want you to have to be a developer to set up an online store. There are a million settings and configuration possibilities for creating an online store, but they’ve put a strong focus on the UI, simple checkout, and intelligent defaults. This goes a long way in deploying a site right the first time, that looks great.

All these and many more are reasons that you should jump on the Ubercart bandwagon now if you have not already! An important thing to mention, especially for all the Joomla and Wordpress fanatics is that Ubercart is not some “plugin” like other CMS projects have for ecommerce. It’s clear that Ubercart is seperating itself as it’s own ecommerce platform entirely that integrates perfectly with the Drupal CMS

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Are you needing to build a website for a Real Estate agent? Or, are you actually a real estate agent yourself and are looking for a content management system that gives you specific tools for real estate? The Joomla open source content management system has 2 specific extensions that are open source that you could use.

CMS Realty Joomla Extension

This extension integrates your Joomla CMS with the Open Realty 2 open source php script. This component will allow you to integrate Open-Realty 2 into Joomla and have users syncronized between the 2 scripts. The Open-Realty admin area is incorporated into the Joomla admin area and it can also be accessed through the Joomla front end if desired. The component has most of the Open-Realty links pre-defined making it east to create Joomla menu items to each page. Custom parameters can also be set to allow direct linking to specific search terms and other items.

Open Realty features include easy installation, highly customizable templates, virtual tour support, advanced search capabilities, and many other features. A demo of this working with Joomla can be found here.

Estate Agent Improved Joomla Extension

Real Estate Component with Frond-end administration, Front-end templating, Print page feature, RSS Feed, Flexible search for any language, Easy edit objects via front-end (similar to joomla content), Gallery with mov mp4 mpeg swf streaming media support, contact form and mail to friend from with security code (Captcha’s), Support translation through backend AND front end using joomfish. Full GoogleMaps support with automatic (geocoded) or manual coordinates insertion, separately for each object.

You can find the demo for this extension here. This extension has many many features that make it very appealing.
* Unlimited Depth in Category Tree
* Secondary categorization of properties by listing type (single – multi sales/rentals type).
* WYSIWYG editor support
* Easy configuration area, allows you to easily control how component looks and works
* Reset hits functionality
* Object access privileges support
* Site members can check and add objects via the front-end .
* Easy edit objects via front-end (similar to joomla content)
* Print page feature
* Hot properties listings.
* Flexible search filter
* Front-end templating .
* Front-end pagination and changeable display numbers per page.
* Mortgage calculator.
* Check-in and Check-out for objects
* Sorting and filtering at the administration, both at frontend and at the backend.

Main Things You Need

With most real estate sites, the main thing you need is to be able to display your real estate listings, and be able to display details on each property. Other features such as Google Maps for each listing as well as a photo gallery for each listing are nice to have as well. The rest of the features you need for your Real Estate website should already be included in your Joomla CMS. Things like writng pages and blog posts etc. A combination of the two systems can be very powerful and can give the Real Estate agent an edge over his/her competition.

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Which content management system do you prefer? Leave a comment to this post and let me know which CMS you prefer and if you have a second why. I want to do a poll and put the numbers/percentages together for you. I also want to write an article based on all the response that I get. It will be interesting to note what the rest of us out there are using. So again, leave an answer to the following question:

Which content management system do you prefer, Drupal or Joomla? And why?

Your feedback is very much appreciated. Thanks

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