I’ve also begun a new series “How to WordPress” which covers beginning WordPress topics.

• WordCamp: Files & code from WordCamp presentations
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We hope to create a user group that will support leaning and promote WordPress in Ottawa.  The group is to address the needs of all levels of WordPress user from beginner to expert.  All types of users are expected form bloggers to plugin developers.

“The Ottawa WordPress Group is all about learning WordPress, for beginners and experts alike!

Do you want to learn about WordPress?  Do you have a WordPress blog or site, or use WordPress at work? Would you like to talk to others about WordPress?  Do you need to know more about how to run your site?

Attend our next meeting and meet other WordPress users, learn more about WordPress, learn best practices, share ideas, projects and other information.” – The Ottawa WordPress Group

You can join the group by joining our meetup group, additional resources can also be found at our website wpottawa.org.

Hope to see you at our next meeting.

R-Cubed is an Ottawa based design firm that provides affordable custom web applications, social networking and team collaboration solutions for businesses.  We work with many PHP Open Source systems including WordPress and Joomla!.

Our clients include: small and medium sized businesses, government and major institutions.

Our key to providing great results is assessing our clients’ true needs to guide them to the best solution for their applications. Our services include: multilingual sites, application integration, graphic design and training on open source systems.

Rick Radko

Rick is the owner and principle designer/developer at R-Cubed.  Rick is a creative, artistic, and entrepreneurial engineer with a passion for finding solutions to difficult design problems.

Developing solutions in hardware and software design for over 25 years, has given Rick extensive experience with leading-edge custom software applications, object-oriented languages, open source frameworks and content management systems (CMS’s) allowing him to forge unique, high quality, solutions for his clients.

Rick began building web sites and applications in 1996, using HTML and Perl. Since then, he has worked with many PHP/MySQL systems including Mambo, Joomla!, MediaWiki, and WordPress.

Rick specializes in developing custom applications, plugins, themes and multilingual WordPress sites. He is co-leader of the Ottawa WordPress Group (http://wpottawa.org), where he often speaks on WordPress topics.

We design, develop and deliver full custom solutions for your applications.

To reduce the design cycle, most applications and are built on open source frameworks or CMS systems.  Currently we use:

• Zend Framework, for building secure, reliable, and modern Web 2.0 applications & web services
• WordPress, a state-of-the-art publishing platform for websites or blogs
• Joomla, a Content Management System (CMS) providing award winning ease-of-use and extensibility

Contact us to develop your custom applications.

We can design all your print and digital graphics.

• Logos
• Web sites
• Business cards
• Business presentations
• Business graphics

Contact us for business graphics solutions.

We provide training and seminars for:

• open source web applications (Joomla, WordPress, MediWiki, LimeSurvey, and more….)
• web design
• social media and social networking
• programming

Contact us for your all your training needs.

Web Development and Design

Creative, custom Web Development solutions for your business.

Customized open source applications that go beyond what “came in the box”. 

WordPress Development and Design.

Multilingual WordPress sites!

Application Development

Completely custom Application Development solutions for unique projects.

Graphic Design

Custom Graphic Design for all your web and business graphics, designed to match your branding.

Technical Training, Professional Public Speaking

Training, general or tailored to your organization, for open source web applications, web design, social media, social networking, and programming.

We Deliver Projects in Ottawa or Almost Anywhere

We are based in Ottawa and we love to meet clients face to face whenever we can. But this is the age of the internet and we’re quite willing telecommute.

Contact Form

613-699-7613

We can be found:

on LinkedIn:  http://www.linkedin.com/company/2240968

on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/R-Cubed-Design-Forge/216108707657?sk=info

in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada (and worldwide)

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Remember to redirect all your domains to a common one (see www or not, just make sure you canonicalize it).  Once the DNS records are set-up you can use .htaccess to direct the incoming sub-domain to the location of the files for that sub-domain.

You’ll need something like this in your root .htaccess file.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sub\.domain\.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/location
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ location/$1 [L]

Even without a sub-domain, you can keep things tidy. I usually structure my sites with a hierarchy of folders. I put all my web applications in individual folders at the same level to keep everything separate so you can blow away an application and replace it without messing up the others.   If you install an application at the root you will have other installed application folders mixed in at it becomes much more of a challenge to upgrade/patch.   With everything in a folder you can even install major upgrades in parallel with your existing site, do testing in parallel and simple rename folders when you are ready to switch.

Regardless of the www or not decision, of more importance is URL canonicalization.  Say what?   How about a Wikipedia definition:  `In computer science, canonicalization is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation.’

So what does this mean for our web site?  As seen above we can choose domain.com or www.domain.com for our site.  Well how about those sites with blogs or CMS’s, they often have default pages at domain.com/index.php or www.domain.com/index.php.  So who cares?  We as human users we don’t really care as we equate all those URL’s as we are used to seeing them arrive at the same content, but search engines don’t see them as the same.  If you consider Google ranking, and you have not taken care to canonicalize your URL’s, your link popularity gets divided among these the URLs reducing your maximum possible pagerank.

To help avoid this issue redirect one of your URL’s to the other with a permanent (301) redirect.  This is easily done on apache servers by adding one of the groups of lines below to your root .htaccess (with the domain replaced of course):

RewriteEngine on

# no www to www version
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ “http\:\/\/www\.domain\.com/$1″ [R=301,L]

OR

RewriteEngine on

# www to no www version
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ “http\:\/\/domain\.com/$1″  [R=301,L]

or, on many hosts you can use set-up redirects using cPanel which modifies the .htaccess for you.

NOTE: there is a program called isapi_rewrite available for IIS servers to do the same things as .htaccess.

Google webmaster tools has an option to select a canonical URL for your site which will help your page rank issues, but still does not avoid the issue of having two addresses for your site, which can trip up things like locally installed versions of WordPress which have the URL coded in the settings.

But custom comes with a down side: maintenance.  Once you customize an open source project, it’s yours!  When an update/patch is released for the package, you now need to redo all the changes you made.  On a small plugin, that may not be a big deal, but on a large code base like it can be a major time investment.  When you consider that most of the major open source projects release new versions and or security patches 4-8 times a year, redo can become unmanageable.

My thought is that open source should be thought of as open for developers, closed for users (consumers) of published packages, like Joomla and WordPress, which are usually just installed and used.  Sometimes a rethink on usage is in order.  Many customizations I have been asked to do could be avoided by changing processes, requirements, or specs that don’t really impact the end result.  Rememeber, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should!

While it can make the initial customization more difficult, make sure that any custom work is done as a plugin/extension if you can’t change the specs.  That way it is likely that all except major upgrades will be painless.