We’ve been using VPS.NET for a short time now and mid-june they introduced appliance images from TurnKey Linux. This makes deploying Drupal, WordPress, Rails and Apache servers amongst others quick and easy. Take a look at the following video from the guys at TurnKey Linux demonstrating how quickly VPS.NET can be used to launch Open Soruce appliances into the cloud.
Appliance features:
Auto-updated daily with latest security patches.
Webmin easy to use configuration console and web management interface
Minimal footprint (typically around 150MB) – each software appliance is carefully built from the ground up with the minimum components needed to serve its role with maximum efficiency and security.
Appliance list:
Core
Google App Engine SDK
Tomcat
phpBB
Wordpress
LAMP
LAPP
Ruby Rails
Joomla
MediaWiki
Drupal 5
Drupal 6
Django
MySQL
PostgreSQL
Overall we think this is a simple way to get applications running fast. When you are looking for something out of the box you can’t fail.
VPS.NET has data centres in the US and UK with billing in both currencies.
We’ve enjoyed working with Drupal and WordPress to provide a range of client websites. Both tools cover most of the requirements for content management (CMS) that you are ever likely to need. They are mature products and the community support is excellent.
Themes or templates (whatever you like to call them) usually take the most time and as a non-designer it can take even longer. I was excited to see recently the buzz surrounding a new product called Artisteer which made claims to easily generate themes for both Drupal and WordPress alongside the other well deployed CMS Joomla. I was a little skeptical as well if I am honest, having been a developer of websites for nearly 15 years I’ve tried many website generator products that simply failed to live up to the purpose they were designed for. It didn’t take long, 10 minutes and my faith had grown in Artisteer exponentially. It is suprisingly simple to use and does exactly what it says on the tin.
To get you started Artisteer lets you choose your CMS and then will automatically make a suggestion layout for you. You can then use the ‘Ideas’ menu to make some more quick suggestion changes to colours, fonts, layout and background. It then also has CMS specific suggestion options such as header, blocks, buttons, menus and so on.
Once you have a reasonable layout you can then delve deeper into the menu system to modify your base layout and brand a theme for your specific needs. I am not going to go into major detail as you can read about the features on the Artisteer website but you can trust me when I say that there isn’t much you can’t do with it.
With all the positives there are inevitably aspects of Artisteer that would stop someone with no experience completing the end result to a professional manner that all clients should expect. We are currently working on 7 themes and all so far have required a degree of manual intervention to make things work smoothly. Good skills in CSS are still required and because we have that we are getting some great end products.
Overall Artisteer can help a seasoned developer rapidly produce a theme that can be modified to suit far quicker than building one from scratch or using an existing theme as a starting block. This process can save many hours which in my opinion is well worth the $130 license fee.
Artisteer has become a instant friend of Intelligenta and being a stickler for the rules of the web I was pleased to see my first theme passed the W3C validators with flying colours….Impressive!
(We will update this post with examples as they are finished and signed off)
Our ‘Why?’ section says it all. This site is an attempt to move away from the traditional ‘list our products and services with far too much technical detail included’ website that don’t really offer prospective clients any useful information and often go as far as confusing them.
We at Intelligenta do not really feel the need to dazzle you with the wonders of technology as we’ve found most of our clients just want it to work. So let’s keep this simple and hopefully the benefits will be proven. We may even be able to pass on some useful ideas, products or services to like-minded individuals along the way.
Please feel free to comment, question or indeed contact us if you are interested in anything we have to say.
If you have read anything that is of interest to you then please feel free to contact us and arrange an informal chat about how Intelligenta can help you with technology.
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