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5 Excellent Open Source Content Management Systems To Start A Website

Joel Lee — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:31:19 +0000

After the dot-com boom in the ‘90s, the Internet has grown to be less of a novelty and more of a necessity. Whether you’re the CEO of a big corporation or just an everyday Joe Schmoe, it’s nearly impossible to live in complete isolation from the online world. According to Internet World Stats, over half of the Western world has regular access to the Internet. That means that Internet users are no longer in the minority and being online is slowly becoming a critical aspect of living in the West.

There are few examples that show this best than the sheer number of personalized websites, forums, and blogs that litter the online landscape. Every day, more and more people are building their own websites and leading their own communities. Soon, owning a website will be akin to owning a car or a house.

If you’re looking to start a website of your very own but don’t have much technological knowledge or experience, your best bet would be to get familiar with content management systems, or CMS’s. They are built to take care of all the backend programming and database maintenance, allowing you to focus on creating the website that you want.

Here are some of the most well-known free and open source content management systems that will help you get started.

WordPress

It’s impossible to talk about CMSs without mentioning WordPress. Even though WordPress started off as nothing more than a simple blog publishing product back in 2003, it has since evolved into something much more.

With such a large and passionate modding community behind it, WordPress has become one of the best CMSs on the market. By playing around with various plugins and widgets, you can transform an unremarkable WordPress blog into a beautiful, fully-functional website. In fact, if you weren’t aware, MakeUseOf runs on WordPress, and we have lots of WordPress tutorials for you to take advantage of.

WordPress is powered by PHP and MySQL.

Joomla

Joomla first came on the scene back in 2005 as a derivative of its predecessor, Mambo. Since then, Joomla has been downloaded over 23 million times and remains as one of the most popular CMSs in the world. Take a glance at any list of CMSs and you’ll always find Joomla in one of the top 3 spots.

The great thing about Joomla is that your website can be as lightweight or as heavyweight as you need it to be. There are hundreds of extensions available that will help you mold your website into doing exactly what you wish.

Joomla is powered by PHP and MySQL.

Drupal

In the world of CMSs, Drupal is one of the oldest contenders still around. It was initially released back in 2001, making it older than both of its biggest competitors, WordPress and Joomla. It wasn’t until 2007 that this CMS started booming in popularity.

Drupal is somewhat unique in that its continued survival is due in part to the huge community of volunteer contributors. The developers have embraced the open source aspect of Drupal, thus splitting the CMS into 2 main portions: the core, which is maintained by the developers, and the modules, which are maintained by community contributors. At this time, there are over 9,000 of these modules available for download.

Drupal is powered by PHP and any of the following databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, or MariaDB.

CMS Made Simple

CMS Made Simple has a pretty clever name. Its initials are CMS, which makes it recursive. For those of you that are tech-geeks, I know that you just smirked on the inside.

In the world of CMSs, CMS Made Simple is a late comer, having been introduced in 2009. However, despite its youth, this CMS has received millions of downloads already and has quickly burgeoned into popularity – and for good reason.

Unlike other CMSs, which encourage their users to fiddle around with code and programming, CMS Made Simple aims to provide its users with an easy road towards developing and customizing a website without having to deal with a lot of the technical mumbo-jumbo behind the scenes. If you don’t intend to hack around with the underlying code that powers your website, CMS Made Simple was made just for you.

CMS Made Simple is powered by PHP and MySQL or PostgreSQL.

b2evolution

Interestingly enough, b2evolution has the same roots as WordPress. In 2003, both CMSs branched off of a preceding blog system called b2/cafelog, of which WordPress became the official successor. While b2evolution isn’t as widely known or respected as WordPress, it does have its fair share of features that prove useful and worthwhile.

b2evolution is perhaps best known for its inherent support for multiple blogs, admins, and users under a single installation. Most other Content Management Systems would require some sort of extension or plugin to support these features – particularly the multi-blog feature. b2evolution handles it all straight out of the box.

And even though b2evolution has a unique feature set right from the get-go, the system can be extended by installing third-party plugins and skins.

b2evolution is powered by PHP and MySQL.

Have you ever used any of these open source CMSs? Tell us about your experiences with them.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

What’s New In WordPress 3.3 ?

James Bruce — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 18:30:27 +0000

If you haven’t logged into your dashboard lately, you probably should. WordPress 3.3 was released about a few weeks ago, and as a major release it brings some fairly significant changes which I’ll outline today. The underlying theme is accessibility for new users.

Admin Bar

The new look admin bar has been streamlined to focus on updates and comment moderation, along with a quick post button.

The admin menu was a greatly heralded addition to the WordPress 3.2 release, but a lot of the more extraneous buttons have now been removed. Some of the more useful menu items, like widgets or menus, have been moved to a sub menu item when you hover over the blog name (but these are only accessible when viewing the blog, not when in the admin dashboard).

Speaking of the admin dashboard, fairly big changes there too. The side menus no longer drop down, but rather pull out instead upon hover. To be quite honest, I hate them. I find myself clicking more than I’d like and the behavior is sporadic.

Tablet users needn’t despair though, as the entire admin interface has also been given a touchable overhaul to make the admin experience on tablet input devices a more pleasant experience.

Tooltips

With an overhauled API for plugins too, WordPress now allows you to create tooltip-like popups to display messages or provide walkthrough tours. It’s an interesting addition that should make using the more complicated plugins more accessible to everyone. Here’s hoping developers don’t get overzealous with them.

Drag and Drop Uploading and Single Media Insert Button:

Before you get all excited, the drag and drop uploading doesn’t work in the basic visual editor. Instead, you still have to open up the insert media dialog box, then drag and drop into there. This is a limitation of HTML5 though, so we can hardly blame WordPress.

Where there were previously 4 buttons for inserting various types of media, there’s now only one, and the uploaded auto detects the filetype. 90% of users won’t care about this, since most of us only ever used the insert picture button. Still, it’s nice to have less clutter.

Other than that, drag and drop uploading works well, and saves having navigate through a laborious Select File dialog. A welcome addition, and possibly worth upgrading for that alone if it means shaving a few seconds off of every image upload.

New Help Screens:

Following on the theme of accessibility for new users, the help screens have been given an overhaul. Now they’re actually helpful – which is obviously a good thing for help screens to be. The dashboard also gets a unique set of welcome messages when performing a new install, again designed to help new users get familiar with the system.

Other stuff … Tumblr importer anyone?

As well as a long list of bug fixes (though none security critical) and performance updates (new version of jQuery!), 3.3 also brings a Tumblr importer, which some of you might have been on the edge of your seats waiting for if you wanted to graduate from Tumblr to your own real blog. I’ll give this a go at some point in the future, as I’m currently running a single Tumblr blog purely to upload a stream of images to. For those of you ready to switch, may I suggest my free guide that covers everything from WordPress hosting considerations to SEO tactics and monetization?

Incompatibilities

As is inevitable with such major updates, some plugins and themes will have minor errors, and some will cease to function entirely or break when you blog. There is a master list over at the WordPress forums of known issues, but the most significant ones as far as I can see:

Atuhualpa breaks because of updated jQuery
WooThemes broke the new media uploaded (refresh your cache to fix)
Intense Debate shows mismatch of pending comments
Improved Page Permalinks causes new pages to give 404 error
Adblockers mess with the new visual editor (you shouldn’t be running them anyway)
Dodgy styles occurring in admin dashboard due to plugins using print_styles hook instead of enqueue_scripts hook.

So as always, I would strong suggest you perform a full backup of both files and database before performing this upgrade, and be ready to revert if you have problems. Upgrade any plugins you can first, then upgrade your core WordPress.

The critical question I guess is should you upgrade yet? I’d certainly take a close look at your plugins – if you’re running ten or more you’re bound to have trouble with at least one of them. Upgrade where possible, backup, and just give it a go. The new features are certainly a worthy addition – even though the majority are aimed at new users – but who doesn’t appreciate performance increases and bug fixes? A few seconds saved uploading images? Yes, please.

Have you upgraded yet? What do you think, are you liking it? Did you have any random errors from your plugins? Let us know in the comments!

Write Anonymous Blog Posts To Protect Your Identity Using Instablogg

Bakari Chavanu — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:01:06 +0000

It’s easy for anyone to create a blog site these days, but you may not have the time to maintain one on a regular basis, or there may be occasions when you might want to post content anonymously. This is where Instablogg comes in. This blogging service allows you to write anything you like and post it as a traditional looking blog entry. Each blog post is published individually with a unique URL, so you never have to maintain a dedicated site in order to blog.

Why Use It?

There are several reasons you might want to use anonymous blogging. I started a list of ideas for anonymous blogging using Instablogg. My list includes:

Post a blog to get something off your chest.
Criticize a public figure without using your personal blog.
Post a secret love letter.
Start a chain letter/blog.
Write an extended Twitter post.
Make a public confession.
Expose a wrongdoing at your job.
Organize a secret party (you can make a private post and send it to your friends for comments).
Turn an email message into a blog post.
Try out new marketing content and reactions to it.

As I will explain in the next section, Instablogg provides you with a way to edit your post, or allow others to contribute again, anonymously (click here to add to my post of ideas). If however you want to make an eponymous post, all you need to do is add contact information in your post.

How To Use It

Instablogg requires absolutely no sign-up or even sign-in to post content. It uses a familiar online WYSIWYG text editing client similar to WordPress or Microsoft Word. It allows you to not only write content, but also add photos (linked from a photo sharing site like ImageShack), videos, and links from other sites.

Remember though, what you’re writing is a one-time-only blog post. Your published post will receive a unique URL which you can share on Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere else you like. You also will receive an address which allows you to come back and edit your post at any time. If you prefer, you can share this address with others so they can add content to the post, or you can create a link to the address inside the post so others can open the post in the editor. However, anyone at any time can delete the post altogether if they have the editing address.

When you are done writing, you have the option to publish the blog entry publicly so anyone can view it, or privately (in which case the share link is removed and is not part of Instablogg’s Explorer). You can also enable or disable comments, as well as coming back and deleting the post altogether.

Who Reads It?

Since Instablogg is not a part of a large blogging community like WordPress or Tumblr, your post will only be read by people you send the link to, or randomly by anyone browsing the Instablogg site.

You probably shouldn’t expect to gain a significant audience using Instablogg and anonymous posts. However, if you have a large following on say Facebook, Twitter, or an online forum, you can easily post the link to your social networking stream and get readership that way.

In fact, Instablogg works great for writing quick and longer content that you start on Twitter. I can’t count how many times I’ve wanted to write an opinion piece about a current news issue (that would be out of place on my existing blog sites) and link it to my Twitter stream. Instablogg is the best solution for this.

If you’re planning on using Instablogg to write truly anonymous blogs you need to be very careful about protecting your anonymity. In this case you would not want to share the link on your social networking account, or through your personal e-mail account. You’ll need to find a way to get your blog post out without it being traced back to you.

Let us know what you think of Instablogg and how it might be useful. For other ideas about blogging, check out these MUO articles.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

10 Awesome & Inspiring Tumblrs To Perk Up Your Dashboard

Angela Alcorn — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 19:01:25 +0000

Tumblr is fast becoming one of the hottest communities on the web, having grown exponentially in the past year. But it’s not just for angsty teenagers. Although there are many of those, it’s also a great way to display blog posts visually and connect to like-minded people. Most of the best Tumblrs stick to their topic religiously, sticking to great photos, video and pithy quotes only so that audiences don’t get bored. Occasionally, a great Tumblr will also include longish essays in posts too, but that’s a less popular option.

Here are some great Tumblrs to get you thinking, laughing and loving life. If you’ve never tried Tumblr, it’s very easy to get set up. Check out our basic Tumblr guide and maybe a few advanced Tumblr tips to get yourself started. Then, come back and see some of the excellent Tumblrs you should follow to keep your dashboard interesting.

1. Awesome Stuff Women Did

Are you sick of being told about Marie Curie and want to find some other great women to look up to? Well, Awesome Stuff Women Did is a Tumblr dedicated to showing off some of the greatest women in history and the things they achieved. Perfect for girls of all ages.

2. F*!# Yeah Travel Inspirations

If you’ve ever had a case of wanderlust, the F*!# Yeah Travel Inspiration Tumblr will be dangerous to you. It’s full of gorgeous scenery that will have you itching for more.

3. The Lisa Simpson Book Club

Book geeks worldwide secretly love Lisa Simpson and her natural passion for learning and reading. The Lisa Simpson Book Club Tumblr collects photos of Lisa reading books and is actually compiling a book list of her favourites.

4. Science is Beauty

If you love science and fantastic photography, the Science Is Beauty Tumblr is a must. It showcases simple, elegant photos of beauty in science. It’s something you’re bound to appreciate.

5. Hungover Owls

If you’ve ever woken up on a Saturday morning with that horrible hungover feeling, you’ll appreciate the Hungover Owl Tumblr. The owl expressions in the photos are perfectly fitting and bound to elicit a wry grin.

6. All Things Europe

Here’s another dangerous one for the lovers of travel or photography (or both). All Things Europe features stunning photographs of European cities, beaches, festivals, buildings, countryside and more. It’s inspirational and beautiful.

7. STFU Parents

STFU Parents is a Tumblr for people who want to laugh at parents who really should STFU. You know you’ve seen them on Facebook and Twitter – the parents who think you need to know all about their child’s life in incredibly gory details. And no, I don’t mean just an overload of cute photos: these are stinky, vomit-inducing status updates that could turn a generation off parenthood for good. Or it might just make you laugh and feel glad that it’s not you.

8. Animal Blog

It’s a world of cute at the Animal Blog Tumblr. Domestic and wild animals feature in natural or odd poses, leaving readers both fascinated and squealing with delight.

9. Historical Non-Fiction

Full of random snippets of historical facts, the Historical NonFiction Tumblr will get you thinking and learning about our weird and wonderful past.

10. Delectable Food

Who honestly can overlook gorgeous food photos? Not me! The Delectable Food Tumblr is colourful and tasty!

More On Tumblr

If you’re just getting into Tumblr, you might appreciate these posts too:

Do you have a Tumblr worthy of being mentioned here? Add it to the comments!

5 Things You Might Not Have Known You Could Do With WordPress

James Bruce — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:01:41 +0000

Being the most versatile blogging system ever, it’s no surprise that developers have twisted and pulled WordPress into becoming so much more through the clever use of plugins. If you thought WordPress was only for blogging, think again. Here’s 5 others ways you can use the WordPress system, with free and premium choices where available.

E-Commerce – Your Own Online Shop

You might be surprised to learn that you can run an entire online store from WordPress, and more importantly you can do it for free.

WP eCommerce has been the standard for a long time and powers some really impressive sites like Icon Dock. With a free core feature set and premium upgrades (additional payment processors, affiliate managers, etc), it’s the choice of developers with easy to customise templates.

In terms of out-of-the-box ease of setup for non-technical users though, my favourite is JigoShop, with which you can have an attractive and fully functional shop up in minutes, fully compatible with the default twenty-eleven WordPress theme. Nice!

Classifieds & Job Listings

For local sites especially, providing classified ads can be a great resource, as can a jobs site. Be aware that with any systems like these though, you really need a strong initial boost of activity and new users to prevent the site becoming stale. It may be best to create the community first, instead of creating a classifieds or job site from scratch and expecting the users to naturally come.

For classifieds, the best contender by far is Classipress, a premium theme for $99 but feature rich and mature with full support. The same developers also make Jobroller, a respected job listing theme at a similar premium price.

On the free side, Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin is an impressive alternative with a good selection of basic features – including the ability to charge users for listings using Google Checkout or Paypal.

For free job listings, WordPress Job Manager does an admirable job, and the developer is always active in the support communities and project development. It integrates well, and has fantastic reviews on the plugin repository. If you’re looking to integrate it into your existing design and have the power to easily customise, Job Manager might be a better solution than a costly premium plugin.

Membership Subscriptions

It’s hard to believe that anyone would subscribe to a website in this age of physical newspapers sales declining and sentiment against paywalls running at an all-time high – but if you’ve got niche knowledge on a topic that doesn’t have the traffic pull for you to make money through regular forms of advertising, then a subscription model may be the way to go.

Membership is a well developed free plugin to handle every aspect of running a members-only site, compatible with the latest WordPress and a favourite of many.

On the premium front, Wishlist Member is widely regarded as the best there is by those who make a living out of this – but at $99 for a single domain you’d better be certain of a subscriber base. Luckily, a 30-day free trial lets you decide if it’s right for you. With a full set of training videos, sequential content delivery and integration with a number of payment processors, it really has an expansive feature set.

A Reviews Site

My own iPad Board Games site is a collaborative reviews site running on WordPress, and uses the fantastic (and free) GD Star Ratings plugin at the core allowing anyone to vote on the games. It is quite a complex plugin with various rating types – posts, comments, multi-rating blocks, stars or thumb-up/down – and to get the best of it you really need to read up on the vast templating options. Certainly worth the time involved though, I’m sure you’ll agree.

On the premium side, it hard to fault wpreviewsite in anything but price – $97 for a single site license, though it is feature rich and works well out of the box for those of you in a hurry.

ReviewIt is a significantly cheaper theme option at $40 and supports the community plugin BuddyPress as well, but I’m not a fan of fixed theme options as they tend to look quite cookie-cutter.

Discussion Forum

Simple:Press is my choice for any sites that need a fully integrated and WordPress-centric discussion forum. It works right into your existing theme and looks great even without customising it, featuring the full gamut of forum features you’d expect. A full WordPress integration, user accounts remain managed by WordPress, so for tying it to other parts of your site you couldn’t ask for more.

I hope you can see just how powerful WordPress is for rapid website development of a variety of site types – not just blogs – and perhaps even gained a little inspiration in the process.

Many of the plugins mentioned today are featured on our freshly published Best WordPress Plugins page, but be sure to check out the full archives of WordPress tutorials too for lots more general blogging tips and in-depth theme-customization tutorials.

Image Credit: ShutterStock

How To Set Up A Group Tumblr Blog

Angela Alcorn — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 21:31:39 +0000

You’ve no doubt heard about Tumblr before or during its incredible growth over the last year. Maybe you’ve tried using it – maybe not. But take it from the many millions of people who have – Tumblr is fun and generally really easy to get started with.

These are also some of the many reasons why Tumblr might be ideal for your group blogging platform. But some people just don’t realise how easy it is to create a group blog using Tumblr. So we’ll help you to get started with a few simple step-by-step instructions.

When looking for a blogging platform for group blogging, simplicity and style will usually come into the equation somewhat. But Tumblr now offers another great opportunity – a huge potential audience. Using some advanced Tumblr tips to ensure your posts get seen by multiple eyeballs, you’ll usually be able to get readers for your Tumblr blog pretty quickly.

1. Start Your Own Personal Tumblr

Tumblr is set up in such a way that the primary Tumblr blog you run is essentially your personal identity on Tumblr and your username. Each person who you wish to contribute to the group Tumblr blog should first register for their own personal Tumblr, including yourself. Collect all of their email login details so you can invite them to the group blog later.

2. Create The Group Tumblr

While you’re logged in as yourself, create a new Tumblr blog. There are two good reasons for this:

You will find it easy to manage your Tumblr blogs if they’re co-ordinated with the same login details.
You can’t add group members to a blog which is the primary Tumblr blog for an account.

To actually create the blog, navigate to the “My Blogs” list icon in the navigation links of your Tumblr Dashboard. At the bottom of your list of blogs, you’ll see a link to “Create a New Blog“.

As you choose the blog name, you may also choose to password protect the blog. This could be useful for families or other small groups who do not want to share content publicly.

3. Add Members To Your Blog

From the dashboard list of your blogs, choose the blog you wish to use as a group blog. This gets you into an administration page for that blog only.

On the right hand side you’ll see several links to Settings, Posts etc. Click on Members.

Each member needs to be invited individually using the same email address they used to create their own Tumblr account.

Any user can be promoted to an admin if you wish to give them rights to change the blog design. All regular members of the blog will have permission to post to the blog.

Note that if all members of the Tumblr blog leave, including yourself, the blog will be deleted.

4. Allowing Submissions

Another way of managing posts to a group Tumblr blog is to merely allow submissions of posts. This is perfect if you have built a following of people who are likely to see content online that might suit your Tumblr’s goal. For instance, a recipe Tumblr might be happy to accept submissions of new recipes which can then be approved by the members of the blog. A company blog, on the other hand, is less likely to appreciate input from the public.

There are so many great things you can do with a Tumblr blog. Here’s some of MakeUseOf’s best guides on Tumblr:

How do you use Tumblr? How do you think it rates compared to WordPress?

Blogilo – The Best Blogging App For Linux

Danny Stieben — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 17:30:10 +0000

No one can deny that blogging has brought plenty of personality to the Internet. Not only that, but some very popular sites today run on blogging software as their framework, in order to make creating and sharing content a lot easier.

These pieces of blogging software, such as WordPress, offer a great, intuitive interface of their own. However, some people, for whatever reason they may have, might like to use a blogging client on their computer rather than blogging straight in the browser.

There are options available for Windows and Mac, but what about Linux? No need to fear, Linux is covered too.

About Blogilo

Blogilo is a decent blogging app made for the KDE desktop, although it works just as well under GNOME. In case you’re wondering where the name comes from, Blogilo is “blog tool” in Esperanto. If you are running KDE, you should already have Blogilo installed. If not, or if you’re running a different desktop environment, you’ll need to look around in your package manager. Where Blogilo is located varies from distribution to distribution, but your best bet is to look for something called

kdepim-blogilo

or similar. However, Fedora users, for example, won’t find such a package, as Blogilo is combined with other programs into the single

kdepim

package.

Features

Once it’s sitting happily on your hard drive, you can go ahead and launch it. You’ll find it under your Internet category. When it’s launched, you’re greeted straight away by the main editing window. The layout is quite simple. At the top you have your menus and main buttons, including creating a New Post, Save Locally, Submit, a drop-down box of which configured blog you want to write for, and Opening the blog in a browser.

Below those buttons is the main window for where you write your post. Alongside your title, you have multiple necessary formatting buttons for your post, as you have by now come to expect. You can also choose between the Visual Editor, HTML Editor, and a Post Preview. However, the Post Preview may not always work, as I’ve come across an instance where it has not. Below the editing box you’ll see the “media list”, which lists any media files that you have inserted.

To the right of that you’ll see some more options. Under Blog Posts you’ll find a list of posts that you created, which you can choose from and edit. Under Post Categories you’ll find all categories that are configured on your blog, so you can select which category that post you’re currently writing should go to. In Post Options, you can choose the status of the post (if you have permission to do so), allow comments and trackbacks, modify the timestamp, and add a permalink (if you’re using WordPress) and summary. Finally, in Local Entries you’ll find all articles that you wrote using Blogilo.

Setting Up Your Blog

Writing a post is great, but you can’t do it without having a blog configured! Doing this is very simple, just go to Blog > Add Blog. Enter your blog’s base URL, your username, and your password. Blogilo will then automatically configure everything for you, even the blog API!

Options

You can also configure some settings, although there isn’t much to configure, and that is reflected by the amount of options available. One option I suggest that you enable is spell checking. Other than that and the fact that there is no word count, this piece of software is pretty much perfect.

Conclusion

If you’re an avid blogger and use KDE, I highly recommend that you try this out if you haven’t already. It’s clean design and ease of use make it a great choice. Also, being able to write a post without having to worry whether you’re connected to the internet in order to reach the editor is another great benefit. So try it out, I’m sure you’ll like it.

Are you a fan of blogging software rather than using the blog’s own editor? If so, which one do you prefer?

Some Advanced Tips For Those Starting Out Building A Tumblr Blog

Bakari Chavanu — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 18:30:29 +0000

About a week after I wrote my first list of Tumblr tips, the site made changes to its all pervasive Dashboard. The re-design was a welcome facelift for many members, while others lodged some major complaints. Nevertheless, the features of the Dashboard remain basically the same with a few enhancements.

If you’re hopping onto the Tumblr bandwagon—I recommend you do—here are some additional—perhaps advanced—tips you might be interested in after having set up your Tumblr blog and built a following. And don’t worry, none of these tips require that you get your hands dirty with code.

Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t set up your Tumblr blog yet, this article will show you how.

Pages and Tags

Let’s return to Tumblr’s Dashboard Preferences, for there are other little tools you might want to enable in there to enhance your blog. I covered few other Preferences features in the previous article.

Pages:

Similar to the WordPress.com, you can add stagnate pages in your Tumblr site. You’re not limited to just your home page. On the Dashboard page, click on the Customize button and select Pages > Add a page. You can add three types of pages: Standard, Custom Layout, and Redirect.

You can pretty much add anything you like to these pages. Here’s one idea you might find useful.

Tagged Post:

If you get in the habit in tagging your Tumblr blog posts, as discussed in the last article, you can create a page that will show all your posts with a specified tag. So for instance, you might want to highlight all your posts that are mini “essays.” Here’s how to set it up.

Select the “Redirect” page. Now copy and paste the URL for one of the tagged posts that you want inserted into your new page. It should look this—with the name of your blog, followed by “tagged,” and ending with exact name of the tagged posts you want filtered on the page.

http://sampleblog.tumblr.com/tagged/essay

Finally, be sure to select “Show a link to this page,” and type a name for it, which will show up in the menu bar of your homepage. When the page is clicked, it will show all your posts with that designated tag.

More Appearances

While we’re in Tumblr Preferences, let’s click on the Appearance tab and see a few other features that are not turned on by default.

Show Streampad

If you want to add some musical ambiance to your Tumblr homepage, click the Streampad box, and essentially the plug-in will play songs that have been uploaded to your Dashboard.

Depending on your Tumblr theme, the player should show up at the end of your homepage. If you want to further customize the player, click over to this Streampad page and follow the directions for making changes and adding the code.

Fixed Sidebar

If keeping visitors and readers focused on the sidebar content of your homepage is important to you, then check this box. It will keep the sidebar in a fixed position, even when readers scroll further down your page to browse all your awesome Tumblr posts.

Small Follow Box

When the “People I Follow” icons get long and unwieldy, clicking this box will put them into a smaller scrolling box for you.

Ask Me Widget

If you’re fairly new to Tumblr, you might often see the people you’re following posting a question to others on their Dashboard—in the form of a text box for responding to the question. It’s a great little feature, but it’s not quite obvious how to set it up.

To do so, simply create a Text post, and then type the question you want to ask. Be sure that the question ends in a “? “mark. When you do this, a little box, “Let people answer this”, will appear on the right side of the Dashboard. Click it and add your post like you normally would. The responses will show up in your Inbox. The checkbox will not appear until you put the question mark at the end of your question.

Mobile App

If you’re an iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry user, and a Tumblr addict, you will no doubt want to download the Tumblr app for your mobile device. I find the iPhone version (iTunes Store link) super easy to use. It allows you to both browse your Dashboard as well post Tumblr blogs.

Other third-party apps like Instagram include Tumblr support as well.

Well, that’s it for these round of tips. Tumblr is taking the lead as the fastest growing microblogging site, so many more features and upgrades are sure to be arrive in the coming months.

Let us know about other Tumblr tips that new bloggers should know about.

10 Useful Tumblr Tips That New Users Need To Know

Bakari Chavanu — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 17:31:03 +0000

I’m absolutely hooked on Tumblr. I found my way back there recently, and in two days I managed to post 45 blogs – some reblogs, some quotes, a few long form essays, and lots of image posts. I don’t know what the appeal to Tumblr is over other similar blogging sites such as Posterous or WordPress, but I’ve caught the Tumblr bug and I have learned some things that might not be so obvious to those who are new to the fastest growing microblogging site.

1. Following & Followers

When you blog on a site like Tumblr, you’re typically not there to talk to yourself. Tumblr is as much a social chatting site as Twitter is. After you’ve set up your blog, you will want to follow other bloggers and be followed back. What’s the quickest way to do that? Easy, click on the Dashboard and then click Explore.

On the Explore page you’ll find lots of popular topics that members are blogging about – everything from tattoos to food to architecture.

Nothing in the list appeals to you? Then search for a topic and see if you don’t find a minimum of ten people who are tumblr blogging about what you’re interested in.

2. Tag Your Searches

Another way to follow your various interests on Tumblr is to save your search tags. When you search for a topic, you can easily revisit that search by clicking the “Track this tag” button. The tags you track will appear on the right side of your Dashboard.

3. Re-Post & Ask Questions

When you are new to Tumblr, you will want to quickly start filling up your homepage with content. People will start following you when they see you have content. So one way to get some content on your page is to reblog posts by other members, as well as create your own.

On Tumblr there’s nothing shameful about reblogging. When you see a blog you like in the search list and you want to reblog it on your page, put your cursor over the upper-right corner of the post and click. Once the page downloads, you will see a small menu bar of four items that show on every blog post of Tumblr (unless the poster chooses to disable it).

Click the familiar little “Reblog” button to repost it on your blog. Or you can give a little love and simply click the heart button to let the poster know you like the post.

4. Leaving Comments

Leaving comments on Tumblr is different than on most other blogging sites. First off, you need to click Account > Preferences settings > Customize your blog. Next, click on Community and select one or both of the Replies tick boxes.

In order to deal with trolls and spammers, Tumblr only allows replies from people you follow. You can also select to only allow people to comment on your page after they have been following you for more than two weeks.

5. Submissions & RSS Feeds

Another interesting Tumblr feature is one that allows other bloggers to post submissions to your blog. I discovered a few Tumblr blogs that are totally made up of submissions by different bloggers. To use this feature, you also set it up in the Preferences section of your account.

You can also set up your Tumblr to accept blog posts from RSS feeds.

6. Deselect Twitter & Facebook?

Another preference setting you will want to think carefully about is if you want to have your posted Tumblr blogs immediately shared on your Twitter and Facebook accounts. This feature might be turned on by default.

If you find yourself posting a lot on Tumblr, sharing numerous posts might be a turn off to your followers on your other sites. So it’s something to carefully consider.

7. Customizing Background Colors

There are lots of great and free Tumblr themes to choose from. You no doubt spent some time looking for just the right theme for your blog. But even if you don’t know any CSS coding, you can still change the background and font colors of your selected Tumblr theme. Again, this is found in the Preferences section under Appearance.

8. Queued Up

If you catch the Tumblr bug and start posting a lot on your page, you might consider spreading out your posts so your followers can get a little time to appreciate all the content you’re sharing. In Tumblr you can put your posts in a queue or set a specific date for them to post.

I use this feature for working on several blog posts at a time, like daily challenges, which means I can write several blogs but not have them all post at once. Notice you can also save posts as Drafts and come back on work on them later.

9. Chat Post

One of the seven types of posts you can make on your Tumblr is called Chat. When you click it, it appears that it might be a way to hold a public chat with your followers or the people you’re following. But that’s not the case. The purpose of this feature is to copy and repost a chat (e.g., Instant Messsage, iChat) that you had online.

But one way to initiate a little public dialogue on Tumblr is ask and answer questions of your followers. In Preferences you just need to turn that feature on for your blog. This is also where you can change the “Ask me anything” line to anything you want, like “No question is too personal, so ask.”

10. Publish Your Blogs

When you post enough blogs, you might want to publish your Tumblr entries in book or PDF format. Feed Fabrik is set up to do that for you. After setting up your account, the site will import all your blog entries and create a book.

If you need some how-tos about getting set up on Tumblr, you can also check out How to Easily Create a Blog with Tumblr. Let us know what you think about Tumblr, and if there are tips and tricks for using the site that I overlooked.

Share More Than Just Photos With Zenphoto & The Zenpage CMS Plugin

Tim Brookes — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 21:31:13 +0000

Last week I took you on a walkthrough of Zenphoto, a free and highly extensible self-hosted photo gallery that should not be overlooked if you’ve got the photoblog bug. This week I’m going to show you how to get even more out of your gallery installation with the Zenpage CMS plugin.

Whilst Zenphoto at first appears to be an amazing tool for sharing photos, it can also take on a bit more responsibility than your run-of-the-mill gallery solution. The ability to theme and customize your gallery provides excellent scope for anyone requiring a media-oriented content management system (CMS).

Zenpage CMS

In order to make your Zenphoto a little more WordPress, you’re going to need a Zenphoto plugin called Zenpage CMS. It is an officially supported extension for the Zenphoto platform, and as you’d expect, it works well.

You’ll find the Zenpage plugin (amongst others) on the Plugins tab of your main admin panel. Scroll down to the bottom and find Zenpage, select it and hit Apply at the top of the page. It’ll take a few seconds for Zenpage to be installed, then you’re set.

The first thing you’ll probably notice are the two extra tabs now on your main navigation panel, Pages and News.

You’ll be pleased to know that there are now Pages and News shortcuts in the admin toolbox visible on your site’s front end. News posts are split into categories, whereas Pages are simply used as static pages (e.g. contact or about).

Adding a news post is a fairly simple task, compose an SEO-friendly title, some content, pick a category and hit Apply. Hit the Published checkbox whilst composing to publish straight away, or visit the articles page at a later date.

Before you’ll notice the difference on the frontend you’re going to need to enable a Zenpage CMS compatible theme. The default theme is just called Zenpage and provides a good starting place with a fairly blank layout for you to use and abuse.

Head over to the Themes tab and choose the default Zenpage theme, hit Apply and wait for your changes to take effect. You can change each theme’s options once it has been applied with the Set theme options link next to each offering.

If you intend on using the default theme then there’s a few options on the theme options page you might want to tweak. News on index page will replace the default gallery list view with your latest news stories, whilst Use custom menu requires the menu_manager plugin but gives you the ability to construct your own personal menus.

The image view page is fairly standard, with a few nice touches. Clicking on the image will open it in a larger lightbox and there’s an Image info button that opens EXIF data in a lightbox too.

After installing Zenpage CMS, the default theme and playing around with the options you’ll have yourself a great little gallery-cum-CMS that can handle all types of media.

Themes

All that Zenpage really does is add news and page elements to your website. There’s a couple of good compatible themes, but you’ve also got the option of building or converting your own if you’re the patient type.

As Zenphoto is written in PHP, the Zenpage CMS uses PHP functions to call the desired elements. If you really are interested in how to go about this then you’ll need this handy list of supported functions. An easy way of customizing the default Zenpage theme is by tweaking the style.css file in your /themes/zenpage directory.

If the very thought of this terrifies you, there’s a couple of themes you can install and use right now. Download, extract and upload the folder to the /themes directory of your Zenphoto install, then choose your theme on the Themes admin tab.

zpFocus

A light, airy and newspaper-esque theme that still places plenty of emphasis on your photography. The menu is attractively located atop the main page, with both latest news and latest albums featured on the index.

Even if you don’t like the colours (change them), there’s no denying it’s a well-designed and easy to follow layout.

zpArdoise

A dark theme that subtly integrates news and pages into the main menu without displacing your photos or dumbing down their impact. An excellent photo-oriented layout makes for a fantastic theme, you should probably give this one a go!

zpEnlighten

A perfect example of expanding upon the default theme, Enlighten doesn’t change an awful lot but the colour scheme. If you find light blues and pale greys more inviting than the default greens and blacks then it might suit out of the box.

For the rest of you it’s inspiration to rip up the CSS file and stamp your own mark on your site.

Conclusion

The Zenpage CMS plugin demonstrates what a powerful tool Zenphoto is. Adding news and pages to your site retains all the media goodness of Zenphoto whilst delivering a quality integrated blog and multimedia showcase website. If you’re not too sure about Zenphoto but are looking for a good photo blog then Pixelpost might be just what you’re looking for.

Have you tried Zenphoto? How about Zenpage CMS? Share your creations, photos and comments below.