The Umbraco 4.6 Beta release comes with a robust skinning engine that allows users to create customized skins easily.

Implementation of skinning in Umbraco:

There are multiple aspects of the skinning feature – i) Development of a new skin, ii) Making an application ready to wear different skins iii) Changing of skins. In order to make use of the skinning feature, the UI needs to use the skin template. One can navigate to the Settings section and select the Master Template. On clicking the Modify Template Skin button, Umbraco will launch the Skin Customization dialog in the Canvas Editing mode.

A skin changes only the CSS and related images and scripts for a site. In order to apply the skin, the user only needs to select the desired skin from the skin dashboard in the site’s settings section. 

How does it work?

A skin is located in a unique folder which contains all the required files. Skin CSS and skin script files are stored in the default Umbraco folder locations, /css/ and /scripts/respectively. Skins for Umbraco are zip files containing the following:
CSS Files
Javascript files
Images
A skin manifest
One or more .master template files

Skins provide a lot of flexibility for the developer to design the website whereas in conventional designing the developer has only limited control. Instead of specifying a style sheet for each component or page, a skin can be supplied for the entire application. The style specified in the skin is automatically used by all components. It is also easy to apply different skins to different pages. Skins also offer automatic support between changes in browsers. Skins could prove to be a little difficult to use in the beginning, but once we are used to it, we can find that it comes with a lot of advantages.

Let us briefly look at how a skin can be created and used in Umbraco.

Follow the steps described below for creating a simple skin for the Simple Starter Kit.

Install the Starter Kit Developer Package
Create a Stylesheet
Include Images – Create a dedicated folder for them under /css/.
Modify the Template HTML
Prepare and Package the Skin 

Copy the sample skin.xml file from the skin documentation to a new folder created under the /masterpages/ folder. It is necessary that this file be named skin.xml.

On navigating to the <install> section we can see that an ‘AddStyleSheet’ task is added to the list by default. Inorder for the Starterkit to get the new style sheet modify the style sheet name to the skin’s CSS file name. The skin is complete now.

 In order to allow a skin to be distributed again, it needs to be contained in a package containing the files and folders for the skin. 
On publishing a skin package, the skin can be downloaded as a .zip file that can be installed on any system, provided that it has a Starter kit installed.

Testing a Skin:

For testing a packaged skin, install it to an Umbraco instance with Starter Kit installed. Navigate to the content root of the Starterkit site and right-click the Homepage node, then select Edit in Canvas. Click the ‘Edit skin’ button on the tool bar for selecting the skin and installing it.

End user benefits of Umbraco skinning:

The user gets to customize the way the website looks to them according to their preferences making it more interactive and user friendly. Applying a skin changes a piece of website's look and feel, potentially making the website easier to use. That was about skinning in Umbraco. Stay connected for more such posts.

WordPress 3 theme

Kubrick has been shipped with WordPress since version 1.5 and it’s been around for five years since the default theme was changed. Back then, Kubrick was a thing of beauty with rounded corners and a pleasant feel to it. It wouldn't be surprising if some WP users thought that the bluish theme was developed by WordPress, which actually was contributed by Stanley Kubrick.
          
But WP 3.0 has brought a new theme called “2010” based on the theme Kirby. The theme looks cleaner, wider and brighter than Kubrick and is minimalist at the same time. The theme feel can be customized in many ways from the admin too.

WordPress 3 navigation

WP isn't popular for the customization of its navigation system, though lots of plugins   are available, and it was about time that they introduced some new feature.

The new navigation system was developed and integrated into WP by WooThemes, a WP theme development company. The navigation is very intuitive with support for adding, pages, posts, categories, external URLs, hierarchies, etc. Drag and drop makes creating menus a matter of minutes. Multiple menus are also supported.

WordPress and WordPress MU ( Mutli User)

WP MU is a fork of WP which is used to run multiple blogs using the same installation. WP 3.0 supports the integration of the two. WordPress.com actually runs on WP MU, which isn't hard to guess.

With 3.0, the codebases of the two will be merged, thus WP MU won't exist as a separate project. This means that, many features restricted to MU will be available with WP, such as BuddyPress and MU will get access to all the plugins available in the single user WP, all in all, making WP stronger, though more cluttered.

WordPress 3 custom Post Types(CPT)

Last, but not the least, the most important feature of WP 3.0. Though it may not be clear at first sight, this is the one that's going to change how people view WP. Till now WP was a blogging software with some bits thrown to accomplish a CMS with the help of pages, and of course lots of plug-ins which hack the core files for adding custom data blocks. But Custom Post Types makes WP more of an actual CMS like Drupal, or Joomla.
 
CPT can be appreciated with an example. Till 3.0 the only post types that were allowed in WP were posts and pages. Posts were used to add blog contents, while pages took care of the CMS. But pages were limited, because you had to enter all your data into a single content block inside the page. Plugins could fix this problem by providing more content blocks. But issues such as compatibility with other plugins, mainly editors like FCKEditor existed. Plug-ins wouldn't sometimes work when WP was upgraded.
 
So how does CPT solve such issues? With this feature, you can add any kind of content type. Suppose you have a website which reviews movies. Instead of adding movie details in a page, and then adding details such as name, duration, rating, etc. using custom fields, which is quite a hassle, you can create a new content type called Movie. There are functions to register the Movie content type, and some actual coding, which can be dealt in detail some other day.
 
Once you create the Movie post, you could have separate fields for entering data such as Movie-images, cast, duration, description. You could create a custom taxonomy for Movies such as Rating, instead of using the default Categories or Tags taxonomy of WP. This is just an example to show how CPT can be used to manage data more elegantly. Its use is limited only by your imagination.
 
With its new features WordPress 3.0 is in a position to take on the mighty Drupal as a proper CMS, and will help in shedding inhibitions developers might have about its CMS capabilities.

Our own website is done using WordPress and surely CPT is one feature we would be looking forward to!

WordPress Team @ Software Associates

Engagement Model

Facebook Applications

Content Management System

Drupal was also designed to allow new features and custom behavior to be added by third parties. For this reason, Drupal is sometimes described as a "Content Management Framework". Although Drupal offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic web site installation and administration. You can power many different types of websites with it without knowing any coding languages.

Read about our Drupal competencies here

Key reasons to choose Drupal as CMS platform:

• Fast! – Out of the box, Drupal is small in space and memory requirements, which this is the key to its speed. When it comes to web development, less is always more.

• Portable! – Drupal is built with standard technologies so it can be implemented on just about any server, and accessible from anywhere.

• Scalable! – Drupal supports the owner and website’s users, now and as the business grows.

• Modular! – Drupal is flexible. Limitless options and add-on functionality allow it to change seamlessly with the business.

• It's Popular (with the developers)! – Drupal is supported by a huge community of dedicated programmers who are constantly building new functionality.

General features

• Collaborative Book – The unique collaborative book feature lets you setup a "book" and then authorize other individuals to contribute content.
   
• Friendly URLs – Drupal uses Apache's mod_rewrite to enable customizable URLs that are both user and search engine friendly.
   
• Modules – The Drupal community has contributed many modules which provide functionality that extend Drupal core.
   
• Online help – Like many Open Source projects Drupal provides online help system built into the core help text.
   
• Open source – The source code of Drupal is freely available under the terms of the GNU General
   
• Public License 2 (GPL). Unlike proprietary blogging or content management systems, Drupal's feature set is fully available to extend or customize as needed.
   
• Personalization – A robust personalization environment is at the core of Drupal. Both the content and the presentation can be individualized based on user-defined preferences.
   
• Role based permission system – Drupal administrators don't have to tediously setup permissions for each user. Instead, they assign permissions to roles and then group like users into a role group.
   
• Searching – All content in Drupal is fully indexed and searchable at all times if you take advantage of the built in search module.

Content management

• Polls – Drupal comes with a poll module which enables admins and/or users to create polls and show them on various pages.

• Templating – Drupal's theme system separates content from presentation allowing you to control the look and feel of your

• Drupal site. Templates are created from standard HTML and PHP coding meaning that you don't have to learn a proprietary templating language.
   
• Threaded comments – Drupal provides a powerful threaded comment model for enabling discussion on published content. Comments are hierarchical as in a newsgroup or forum

Platform

• Apache or IIS, Unix / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X support – Drupal was designed from the start to be multi-platform. Not only can you use it with either Apache or Microsoft IIS but we also have Drupal running on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, and Mac OS X platforms

• Database independence Drupal is built on top of a database abstraction layer that enables to use Drupal with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Other SQL databases can be supported by writing a supporting database backend containing fourteen functions and creating a matching SQL database scheme.

• Multi-language – Drupal is designed to meet the requirements of an international audience and provides a full framework to create a multi-lingual website, blog, content management system or community application. All text can be translated using a graphical user interface, by importing existing translations, or by integrating with other translation tools such as the GNU gettext administration and analysis
   
• Analysis, tracking and statistics – Drupal can print browser-based reports with information about referrals, content popularity and how visitors navigate your site.
   
• Logging and reporting – All important activities and system events are captured in an event log to be reviewed by an administrator at a later time.
   
• Web based administration – Drupal can be administered entirely using a web browser, making it possible to access it from around the world and requires no additional software to be installed on your computer.

Linux servers

We jumped onto the Linux server operating system bandwagon during the late 90's. The scalability, stability and performance has been no doubt – legendary.

Relational Database – Firebird and DB2 Express C

Our experiments with a then unknown product called "Firebird" has paid rich dividends. It's rock solid performance, scalability and stability have allowed us to spread our application base worldwide.

PHP – web scripting

We are currently engaged in building a large social networking project for a client in USA using PHP 5 / PEAR standards. We have build many medium sized bespoke content management systems (CMS), portals, eCommerce engines and corporate websites for our global clientele.

Our IBM competency group works extensively under PHP ZEND DB2 Express C platform for OLAP and XML-based service-oriented architecture.