Rinenweb Development

How can a professional, properly constructed website stand out using one of the three most popular CMS in the world (Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress), in an era where the phenomenon of websites made "with two or three clicks" seems to be flourishing? What are their main security gaps, how can we address them and in what ways can we maximize the performance of these open source CMS?

To these questions I tried to give some answers at the 10th Open Software Communities Conference FOSSCOMM 2017 held at Harokopion University on the first weekend of November. FOSSCOMM (Free and Open Source Software Communities Meeting) is an annual Free Software conference organized by the Greek Free Software community in a different city every year. The purpose of the conference is to promote the idea of Free Software and strengthen its community relations.

Watch the video presentation:

 

During the workshop entitled "CMS Security & Optimization Tips" that I had the pleasure and honor to hold as part of the conference, some general security rules were initially presented regarding both the use of the infamous "Droomlapress" (i.e. Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress, which are consistently the most popular CMS in the world) as well as any other CMS built using PHP, HTML, CSS and Javascript. Then, some more specific tips were given for the security of these CMSs, such as the recommendation of a more complete and therefore safer .htaccess file, hiding the login page in the administration panel of each CMS and the correct, judicious use of plugins (modules, components , plugins etc) from third party developers (3rd party extensions).

At this point, some examples of "bad practices" from some "popular" websites on the Greek internet seemed particularly impressive, especially now bearing in mind how easy and quick it would have been to have these security gaps covered in the first place.

 

fosscomm 2017

Then the second but equally important part of the presentation was covered which was about CMS optimization tips so that a website built with Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress has a competitive edge against other, less "polished" websites with the same CMS. The ways, tools and best practices for creating websites that are friendly to search engines, social media and finally to the users themselves were mentioned. How to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) effectively and comprehensively, how to create a fast and efficient website that attracts visitors, how to optimize its performance on mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.), how to make it more accessible to a wider range of people (inclusive design), what are the tools that allow you to do all this and how do you use the feedback of all this work through the monitoring of statistics (analytics).

The presentation was made using Reveal.js, respecting the principles of Free Software/Open Source Software. Reveal.js is an open source tool that allows you to create a slide show using HTML, CSS and Javascript. Therefore, not only does it have the advantage of being free and accessible to everyone, but it also has the practicality of being able to be presented and shared directly over the internet, with the only requirement being a web browser.

See the full presentation at the following link:

CMS Security & Optimization Tips