Media72 Hosting Articles and Tips

As soon as I posted about Rails Envy's first video I noticed they have created another one poking fun at PHP this time, now thats fast!

There are two more commercials to come in the series, but for now you can enjoy the second one.

If you're a Rails user and a Mac user you will undoubtedly love this Mac vs PC style video by the Rails Envy guys.

We have now completed upgrading all of our servers to cPanel 11. Aside from a few small teething problems the upgrade has gone smoothly. So, what does this upgrade mean for you the customer? There are a large number of upgrades and updates that will make things a lot easier, especially for Ruby on Rails account customers.

Security and Speed

Firstly some of the more boring features, cPanel 11 includes some nice security improvements that will help to keep everyones sites secure and running smoothly. The control panel interface has been speed up, so you will notice much faster load times. One of the biggest changes you will notice is the new interface, it has a better, more usable design. A lot of time has been spent on contextual help that will guide you through using the many features.

Improved Coding Support

For the coders there are also many improvements, you can now install your own ruby gems into your user space without the need to contact support! PHP users are not left out either with the ability to install PEAR packages right inside the control panel. And thats not it, PERL Modules can also be installed in the same manor.

More Manageable Domains

Another feature Ruby on Rails developers will be especially pleased about is the ability to choose the document root for your add-on and sub domains, this means you can point your domain directly to your rails public folder without the need to contact support or mess around with symbolic links.

Easy Custom Branding

The final feature I am going to talk about here is branding, you are now able to fully brand your control panel. You can change any image in the control panel to your own designs, as well as edit the CSS allowing you to fully customise your control panel within minutes.

Coming Up

Over the next few weeks we are going to talk about some of the new features in more depth and how to used them. If you are not already a Media72 customer you are missing out, why not try one of our Ruby on Rails or shared hosting packages to see the difference a Media72 hosting account could make for you?

A lot of readers, being designers and developers, will find this article extremely interesting and amusing. I found myself ticking off the various client types, chuckling, and nodding in agreement as I read this article. Well worth a read if you have a spare ten minutes, 12 Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them.

For all those people keeping tabs on the Zend Framework version 0.9.3 has just been released.

Some of the updates included in this release:

• Zend_Controller: Action helpers, rewritten documentation
• Zend_Db: support for sequences, natural keys, compound keys, and metadata caching
• Zend_Filter_Input: solution for validating arrays of valus (in incubator)
• Zend_Pdf: greatly reduced memory consumption
• Zend_Service: web services for Amazon, Yahoo!, and Flickr extensively tested and debugged

For a full list see the changelog. Interestingly this probably going to be the last release before a 1.0 release candidate. The most important thing to note about a 1.0 release is that all future releases of the framework will have to be backwards compatible. This will make the framework a lot more stable and I'm sure we will start to see greater take up after 1.0 is released.