Cloud Hosting Blog

Many Top Hosting Center customers prefer using free and popular frameworks for their website needs. From blog platforms such as WordPress, to image galleries such as Gallery 2 and Coppermine, and from online community forums like phpBB and Simple Machines Forum, to online help platform like MediaWiki – all these web applications have 3 similarities: (1) they are popular, (2) they are free, and (3) they all run well on Top Hosting Center’s cloud hosting and cloud server plans.

Today we’ll discuss about Drupal, its features and ability to run smoothly on cloud hosting.

Drupal as its official website explains, “is a free software package that allows an individual, a community of users, or an enterprise to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.” By “variety” it means that Drupal can be tailored to any website a user likes to build. It is a content management system (CMS) that can be used to create the following types of sites:

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate websites
• Intranet applications
• Personal website and blog
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce websites
• Resource directories and
• Social networking sites

By the looks of its capabilities, it appears that it directly competes with another popular CMS called Joomla. And like Joomla, it supports add-ons and plugins to extend its functionality.

Drupal has a minimal installation disk space requirement of 3MB and approximately from 40 MB to 60 MB for usual installation including custom themes and plugins. Drupal also has been deployed successfully on both Apache and IIS web servers, which means it can run on any cloud hosting or cloud server package offered by Top Hosting Center regardless of the operating system installed on them. For its database server, Drupal can be powered by the most popular database platforms such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle – with MySQL being the most recommended engine that the Top Hosting Center supports.

Just like most free web software, Drupal’s basic requirements reveal that it can run quite well on all Top Hosting Center cloud hosting and cloud server plans. For new users, the Cloud CPanel Shared Hosting plans offer the easiest path as CPanel includes one-click automatic software installer called “Fantastico.” However, this is only recommended for users who are planning to build personal websites as Drupal recommends a manual installation for websites concerning production, business and security.

Top Hosting Center’s brilliant 24×7 support team assists customers who want to do a manual Drupal installation. The latest stable versions of the software as of this writing are Drupal 6.19 and 5.23.

Two weeks ago, we wrote about Gallery 2, a web gallery platform that runs flawlessly on Top Hosting Center’s cloud hosting plans. Today we’re going to introduce Coppermine – a photo gallery software worth checking for those who don’t like Gallery 2. Coppermine, like Gallery 2, offers highly sophisticated features for those who want to build, collect or sell images on their cloud hosting plans and on the Web.

Let’s explore that out.

Coppermine is multi-purpose and fully-featured web gallery software written in PHP and uses GD and ImageMagick as image library. It can run on any good web server (preferably Apache) and supports the latest version of MySQL database engine as its backend. All these requirements are successfully met by Top Hosting Center’s cloud shared hosting plans including Cloud Sites plans – so customers can opt to install this script should they want to have an image gallery integrated on their cloud websites.

Aside from the script’s zippy performance, Coppermine photo album is easy to implement and boasts the following specific features:

• arrangement of pictures in categories and albums
• picture information stored in database
• web interface or FTP upload methods
• full multimedia and thumbnailing support
• integrated search and advanced search modules
• last added and random photos
• user registration
• user management (private galleries and group permissions)
• tight integration of user management with various forum scripts such as phpBB, YaBB, Simple Machine Forums, Invisionboard and vbulletin
• searchable image meta information (caption, title, description, and user-defined fields)
• Multilanguage support
• User comments and e-cards feature
• Plugins API (allows e-commerce functionality) and themes
• Password-protected albums

Top Hosting Center customers who want to use this script may send a request to the support department to have the script installed on their website. For advanced users, a copy of the script can be downloaded directly from Coppermine’s website located at: http://coppermine-gallery.net/

The latest stable version of Coppermine as of this writing is version 1.5.8.