Website Development

I have heard a lot of webmasters rave about sNews so I decided to try it out. sNews aims to be a simple and minimalistic Content Management System (CMS). It tries to provide the 20% of features that people use 80% of the time.

What's it good at?

Lightweight- The project site boasts that sNews is based on just one php file. What this means is that its designed to take up very little disk space so you should have no trouble squeezing it into a minimal hosting account. The zipped up download is just 40KB . Unzipped it takes up a few hundred KB only. That is impressive given the feature list. It does require a mySQL database though.

The usual suspects - Basically you have all the essential features neccessary for a decent CMS:

• sNews allows you to add, remove publish articles. You can file articles into different categories and you change the order in which they appear.
• You can upload images and other files to insert into your articles.
• Users can add comments to your articles or use the contact form. They can search your site using a built in search form.
• The site admin can also create static pages.
• The site's contents can be syndicated using built in RSS feed generation.
• sNews will automatically create Search Engine Friendly URLs or you can specify your own. For the most part the SEF URLs are pretty good as they are based on your article title and you can see them generated as you type said title.
• And there's a password protected admin panel used to manage the site.
• Easy templating and loads of quality templates available. The chief developer is an excellent website designer and makes a lot of free templates.

What doesn't it do?

Simple installation - For a CMS that aims to be simple it sure doesn't have a simple point and click installer. The installation procedure is outlined in the included readme file. The user is instructed to use the included SQL queries to create a suitable database structure and then edit the main snews.php file to specify the mySQL db name and mySQL server login details. While this may see pretty straight forward for a technically adept user it is down right scary for a newbie.

Comment spam protection - Comment spam is a major problem these days and any live website that supports comments needs an appropriate anti-spam system. sNews has a pretty good feature set but one important thing it lacks in its default installation is anti-spam for comments. It does allow the admin to moderate all comments before they are approved but thats about it for the default installation. However, there are image and math captcha plugins available.

True WYSIWYG editor - The editor available to the site admin is rather simple. It features a few quick HTML tag insertion buttons but none of the features of a true What You See is What You Get editor are available in the default installation.

Sub-categories - You can't create a hierarchical set of categories since sNews only supports one level of categories.

Media management - Their is no media management system that allows the admin to add, remove, or generate thumbnails of images. There is a section that allows you to upload images and files but if you want to add those images to your articles you have to copy-paste the url manually.

Multiple Users - sNews is a single user system so no multiple users.

Who should use it?

I am indeed impressed by sNews' feature set. For such a lightweight system it does have a lot of features. The admin panel is also well designed and their are a number of good templates for sNews. But It seriously needs to bundle a comment anti spam solution with its default installation. Sub categories would also be nice but I guess they would add to the complexity of the system.

I think sNews is an excellent system for those looking to set up minisites. Its ideal for domainers to use to develop some of their domains. sNews is also great if you don't have much space on your hosting account or if you can only afford a small hosting account of say 10MB or less of space. sNews could also be used by newbies if they got somebody to do the installation for them. There are some fairly large sNews based sites such as free css templates .com.

Homepage

Download

Often when switching hosts or signing up at new host you'll have to set your domain's name servers to your new website host's name servers. This step is necessary because it allows your new host's servers to receive and serve requests for your website from your visitor's browsers. However the Domain Name System (DNS) is such that it takes time for this new mapping between your domain name and your host's servers to propagate across the Internet. Depending on your new host's DNS servers and your Internet Service Provider it can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days before you will be able to access your website via the domain name. If, in the meantime, you want to upload files to your website and test it you will need to edit your Windows HOSTS file to manually map your domain name to your web host's IP address.

The first step is finding out the IP address of your new host's servers. A lot of enlightened hosts include this information in the email they send you when you sign up with them. In that case you can skip to the next step. But if your host does not provide with this info then you will have to do an ns lookup:

• Go to http://www.kloth.net/services/nslookup.php
• Type in your domain name, your web host's DNS name server and make sure that the query field says ip address.
• Click on lookup and you should see your site's new ip address.

Next open up your windows HOSTS file using your favourite text editor such as notepad. You can open this file by copy pasting %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS into your editor's open file window. In most cases you can also try C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS . Keep in mind that the file has no extension.

Open up the file and on a new line type in your host's ip address followed by a space and your domain name. For ex:

208.113.192.208  websitetheme.com

You may also prefer to add the www version:

208.113.192.208 www.websitetheme.com

Save the file and try to access your site by typing in your domain name in your favourite browser. It should work now! To enable ftp access add another line with the ftp subdomain:

208.113.192.208 ftp.websitetheme.com

Using this technique you should be able to access your site while DNS is being propagated.

The world of web hosting can be a bit overwhelming. Website hosting companies almost scream about their fat hosting packages on their sites inorder to get people to spend money on hosting. But what is it that you really need to host a blog?

It is often neccessary for a web master to transfer files from one site to another. Whether it be to install open source software or to move a site, the ability to transfer a file directly from one web server to another can be a real time saver. This is where this PHP script comes into play. Once uploaded onto the destination server it should be accessed using your browser. It will display a form in which you can enter the details of the source file and server and it will download the file directly from the source file server onto your server.

Homepage

Download sst-2.1-php.zip

A cron job is a command that will run at a scheduled time. My website host allows me to set up cron jobs through the CPanel interface. Now I know I can use the serendipity backup plugin to do this but it only backups up the database to a directory on the server. IMO this does not serve much purpose since a backup should always be placed on a different system to the one being backed up. I think a simple approach is to email myself the backup. So I use a cron job to backup my database. Its a series of piped commands: