WordPress developers are gearing the reputable blog platform into a full pledge CMS. The beta release of WordPress 3 show many new functionality that are long stable in CMS like Drupal and Joomla. Most notable are the following: Multi-site, Taxonomy, Menu, and Content Type. Pardon me WordPress fanatics, I am more inclined with Drupal and I cannot help but compare WordPress 3 to it. My aim is to discuss my points, not to make a comparison between the two. If I will make a comparison here, that is the way I clear my throat.

I already talked about the real cost of running a blog in one of my previous posts. I discuss why the real cost of running a blog is not about money but time, knowledge, effort, and heart. The monetary cost is actually the last in the row because the money involve in running a blog is very minimal. In this post I will present to you the breakdown of the amount you need to start your own blog.

If you notice, most of the websites are with www as prefix of the domain, i.e., www.rtfverterra.com and www.mathalino.com. This prefix of www for your domain name is not actually necessary for your domain name to work properly, meaning, you can go without the www prefix for your website. Check your website now, type www.example.com and example.com (replace example with your domain name of course) in different browser windows, make sure that you will not select any stored address in the address bar. If your website is accessible from two different address (with and without www), your site is not good for search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine will actually see this two address as two different websites, worst if your site will get penalize because of this. To avoid being penalize by search engine, all you need to do is to redirect one to the other. Here are the ways on how to do it.

You can read many articles about Drupal vs. WordPress when you try to Google it. They've been there for quiet a long time, but this "blah blah blah" is far from over because there are more and more people to eagerly try both CMS and write their experience about it. I am neither a developer nor a blogger. I develop website, yes, but it doesn't mean I'm a developer. I have my own personal blog, yes, but it doesn't mean I am a blogger. I played basketball, yes, but it doesn't mean I am a basketball player. Blogging is my hobby and web development is my passion, this post will try to compare my personal experiences among these two CMS.

In my previous post, I talked about the cost of running a small website. The cost calculated in that post is for small e-commerce site that accepts online payments and for website owners who don't have any technical knowledge in building a website. This post will focus about the cost of running a blog. Then you may ask, "What is a blog? Isn't that a blog is a website?". This post is not about blog and blogging, this is about the cost of running one, so here is a link to Wikipedia if you want to know what is a blog.

Choosing which Content Management System (CMS) to use is as daunting as choosing which web hosting to go. Taking a pause and think for a while will pay off in the future. If you are going to search the web, this issue is almost as old as dot com era. Web developers, web designers, and online business owners, will need to choose for a platform to run a particular website. There are many discussion out there talking about this issue, and here am I adding a page in the web, hoping someone will be rightly directed.

In my previous post, I discuss how to set up a local web server using XAMPP. Now that we have the local server running, we are now ready to install any web platform called Content Management System (CMS) to our local computer. There are tons of CMS available out in the internet. You can purchase one if you like but there are thousands or maybe millions that are free. We have DotNetNuke, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, PHP-Nuke, phpBB, Moodle, and MediaWiki to name a few. The most popular so far is Joomla. You can download them all if you want and try them all 'til you drop. But if you want to become a professional developer, master only one of the above because you have no enough lifetime to master all CMS.

This "how to" is intended for beginners and for those who want to learn to set up a website but don't have a professional web server. This is also useful for web developers, but this post is not for them, in fact I learned this from them. Some developers used local web server to develop a website and upload it when finished. This is also used by web designers in creating a new theme. You do not need this if you have no desire to learn beyond HTML.

About local web server

Web server is a computer that runs a program that accepts hypertext transfer protocol (http). To make these things simple, try to write in the address bar of your browser the address "rtfverterra.com" without the quote and noticed that it is automatically prefixed with http and the one you typed turned into http://rtfverterra.com/. Local web server resides in your local machine (your computer) with or without internet connection. You can have your own website, but this website is not available in the internet. It has an address of http://localhost/yourwebsite; the "yourwebsite" in the address can be any name.