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Tutorials and analyzes about web design, CMS and digital marketing in Switzerland and elsewhere. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
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Infomaniak is an internet services provider with a significant infrastructure in Switzerland and customers across Europe. Its main shareholder is a public interest foundation, which guarantees its independence from major players in the digital economy.
It offers shared web hosting and Managed Cloud Server hosting, both designed to meet environmental standards and benefit from Switzerland's strict data protection legislation. This article compares the two offerings based on my own experience maintaining CMS platforms such as Joomla and WordPress at Infomaniak — including this very website.
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In the age of AI, having an effective and well-organised conversion tracking system on your website is crucial. Visitors are becoming fewer and more qualified, so you need to be able to determine the best performing online advertising channels or campaigns with certainty. To achieve this, you should install a global tracking code like Google Analytics code and various specific conversion tracking codes.
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The question of migrating your Wordpress site to Joomla may seem incongruous given the large market share enjoyed by Automattic's CMS. However, for several years, Wordpress has been converting all its source code from PHP to React (a Javascript framework popularized by Facebook), which changes the habits of many users and will eventually require the complete rewriting of more than 50'000 plugins, a result far from being guaranteed in a increasingly balkanized system and controlled by a company operating in a market skimming strategy.
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There are many solutions on the market for managing events or services on a website. Amelia Booking is a plugin that installs on the WordPress CMS and offers a turnkey booking system for beginners while also offering advanced features for developers.
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Content management systems (CMS) such as Joomla or Wordpress are among the most popular open source solutions when you want to design a site by controlling the technical part of your platform in order to benefit from maximum flexibility and autonomy. Both CMS have existed since the 2000s and have evolved to adapt to current requirements.
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Cookies are small files stored on your computer and created by websites during the user's journey on the web. For example, a website must determine if you are logged in to your user account. Delete the cookie on your computer and you will be instantly logged out. Other cookies, called third-party cookies, are dropped by web services for advertising targeting purposes and are more problematic because they allow them to track the user's journey on the internet.
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Yootheme Pro is a template creation system and a web page builder (pagebuilder) produced by a German company which is installed on Joomla or Wordpress CMS (Content Management System). Before installing a pagebuilder, you must understand that the point of a CMS is to separate the content from the structure of the website, which is different from the process of creating a static HTML page.
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Many professional websites still work with the Joomla 3 CMS (source), which has not been updated since August 2023 and there's even older versions. This situation presents security risks and lost opportunities regarding web performances.
Should we update to Joomla 6, or even migrate to Wordpress as recommended by aficionados of this platform?
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The new versions of Joomla are very successful and have helped renew interest in the platform in the highly competitive CMS market. This is why it is time to update your site without further delay to this more modern and more efficient version. This process called mini-migration by Joomla is relatively simple if you don't use too many third-party extensions. In the latter case, it will be necessary to examine each extension and check its compatibility with the update component present in Joomla 3.10 and with the Joomla extensions directory. Obsolete extensions can also be replaced by using Joomla custom fields, native methods or simpler extensions.
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Although there are many extensions to improve the SEO of a site, they are generally limited to adding additional fields for SEO tags to CMS, but do not take into account the final rendering of the pages which may be different once the HTML code is rendered and sent to the browser. Screaming Frog allows you to index (crawl) a site like a search engine spider by collecting important technical information on the pages visited such as the status of links, images, SEO titles, meta descriptions, page loading speed, http headers, even spelling or any custom character strings.
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After using different solutions in the past to monitor information on the web and read RSS feeds, I finally opted for DEVONthink Pro (DTPro).
DEVONthink is an exceptional Mac software that I have used for many years as a knowledge base. Its main function is to collect heterogeneous information and offer a range of scripts and filters to automate their classification or find them. It also has the advantage of not being an online service, which allows you to maintain total control over your data and to be able to export your database at any time in different formats.
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When used well, JavaScript is an essential language when you want to optimise a PHP-based CMS like Joomla. For example, it is possible to build a calculator (BMI, quote estimator, etc.) in PHP, but integrating it into the CMS via JavaScript will avoid a full page reload or limit interaction to loading an Ajax data stream.
JavaScript is of course already used by the CMS core and by all kinds of extensions or features to produce image slideshows, article filters, or animation effects. On a large site, this accumulation of code can quickly turn a CMS into an unwieldy mess if it is poorly managed.
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This is a question that sometimes comes to the surface. When the site has a lot of pages, users who do not know Joomla well may have difficulty finding out how to edit certain content. Indeed, the pages are created dynamically in a logic of separation of content and presentation, which is important if the site has many pages or if its structure must be able to grow.
However, this process can be complex due to the integration of data in different database tables: articles, modules, plugins, custom fields, menus, templates, translation strings, files, which can belong to different types of components and not to mention that a CMS is a collaborative tool with permissions that change between users and in several languages.
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An indisputable strength of Joomla and Wordpress CMS (Content Management System) is the ability to easily update their source code and that of their extensions by simply clicking a button in the backend. Wordpress allows you to perform minor and major updates of the CMS core automatically. Joomla performs minor updates automatically and sends notification emails by email. Automatic updating can be disabled by the webmaster who prefers to choose the right time to do it. There are also external services to perform all updates automatically or on multiple websites at the same time.
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Gantry 5 is an open-source platform shared by the Grav, Joomla and WordPress CMS, currently developed by Tiger 12, which makes it possible to create highly flexible themes with excellent visual quality. It is built on the Twig templating language (popularised by Drupal and Symfony), brought to WordPress through the Timber library, which maps CMS functions to Twig.
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Many people confuse a CMS content editor (also called an HTML editor or WYSIWYG editor) with a website creation tool. The CMS content editor allows writers with different technical levels to modify the articles of a website designed and maintained by a webmaster. Knowing how the HTML editor of a CMS works increases productivity when managing a professional site that may require handling hundreds of pages written by authors who are not web designers.
