Web Developer Toolbar in IE

From time to time we are all curious on how other people do their web design. Unfortunately it is not always easy to read the code and find what you need.

Are there anything we can do about this?

Yes it is! I believe there are many tools out there that can assist you. I have looked into two tools that I found interesting.

IE WebDeveloper	US$115 (non-commercial).
Microsoft Developer Toolbar	Freeware.

IE WebDeveloper

This is the tool from the same guys that gave you HTTP Analyzer. I have talked about this tool in a previous article.

Anyway. After I installed this tool Internet Explorer started to crash all the time. But from what I could see it seems like a good product - easy to find the information you are looking for.

Developer Toolbar

Given it's price it is priceless. Not as good to work with, seems to lack some features in WebDeveloper. But given the price this is what I am going to use.

Looking into HTTP traffic with Internet Explorer

I work a lot with web applications and from time to time I need to look in to the HTTP session - what headers are sent back and forth and what web page elements takes time to load.

I have found two products that does this well. I will cover these in details below.

HttpWatch

HttpWatch from Simtec Limited. This product seems to be the most mature of these two. It have cool features, the most important one is beeing able to show you what the web client spends it time on; DNS lookup, TCP session setup, or the data transfer.

You can look into HTTPS traffic.

The major drawback is the price. It cost $295 for a one user license. As a result I did not test this product any further.

IE Inspector

IE Inspector from IEInspector Software is a nice application. It works much like HttpWatch above, but is much cheaper. It lacks the capability to show what a page spends it time on doing; you just get the end result.

You can look in to the HTTP headers sent to the web server and what HTTP headers are received. You can see detailed cache information about Internet Explorer cached elements.

You can also purchase a module that analyzes other applications that uses HTTP. This is nice if you want to test other applications communicating over HTTP.

You can look into HTTPS traffic only if you use the Internet Explorer integrated decoder.

If you buy both modules as a non-commercial license you end up with US$99. If you happen to be commercial the price is $129. Either way it is much cheaper than HttpWatch.

Ethereal

Ethereal is the Swiss army knife of packet decoding. You can't live without it. The tools mentioned above presents HTTP traffic in an easy way. But Ethereal gives you a lot more - if you learn how to use it.

It is open source. And we can't dislike open source!

Hosting Umbraco at GoDaddy

I love good products. And when I can use two products together it is even better! I earlier wrote about my experiences with GoDaddy as a hosting provider and I have also written about Umbraco CMS.

My question is simple: can I host Umbraco at GoDaddy? The answer is yes, I can!

The cheapest hosting option at GoDaddy is sufficient. You need to create an MSSQL database and then create some directories on your site with read/write permissions.

External links:

• Umbraco homepage.
• Wikibooks Umbraco FAQ.

WAN optimization with Riverbed

Today I had a chance to work with a product for WAN optimization for the first time. I ran a live demo at a customers site.

	It works. At least if your network traffic is predictable and repetitive. Most networks are, as clients tend to do much of the same.
	It is too expensive for most customers. It is really hard to justify the cost and more importantly the return of investment.

Acceleration of SSL traffic

Rivedbed promised to support SSL in version 4 of their software. I can't wait to try this one out. It only requires you to install your private key on the box inside your datacenter.

Steelhead appliances now accelerate encrypted (SSL) traffic, using all of Riverbed's algorithms to deliver LAN-like performance for those key business applications.

Of course this won't work for external web sites as you don't have access to private keys. But for intranet applications this is cool!

Exchange 2007

Exchange 2007 supports encrypted MAPI connections. Much details on this issue is not known at this point.

Based on our testing, we've found that the encrypted connections that appear by default in an Exchange 2007 environment with Outlook 2007 clients are a proprietary "MAPI encryption", not SSL.

Impression

Riverbed Steelhead appliances are easy to set up and work without the need to do much. Just make sure the traffic is unencrypted and leave the rest to Riverbed.

RiOS 4.0

I will do a new lab with RiOS 4.0 when it is released and do tests on Exchange, Sharepoint and web traffic. All SSL encrypted. If you are curious about this, please leave me a note.

A peek at GoDaddy

Shared hosting at GoDaddy is cheap, but are they any good?

Earlier I talked about web hosting options, now I will look more in depth on GoDaddy, as they seemed most promising.

Their shared hosting starts at US$3.99 and gives you either Linux or Windows based hosting. With MSSQL (on Windows) and MySQL database access. They charge you monthly instead of yearly as many competitors do. And they don't require you to transfer the domain to them to host the site.

We're the affordable, reliable place to host your site

Linux and Windows plans compared

You can see all details here. Below you can find the most important differences.

Linux	Windows
MySQL databases	MySQL and MSSQL databases
PHP, SSI, FrontPage extensions, Java, ColdFusion, Python, Perl, Ruby	ASP and .NET (1.1 or 2.0), ASP.NET Ajax, ColdFusion, FrontPage extensions
Apache	IIS

Access to databases

You can access databases through a web interface. The interface is easy to use, but simple. You need to understand how to use databases. With MySQL you got an option to dump the database to file. But you cannot do so with MSSQL. There is no easy way for you to move the database in case you want to change hosting provider.

Changes to your configuration

You only have a few options you can tweak on your site. You can add subsites (subsite.domain.com) and set directory permissions (on Windows). All changes to your configuration takes up to 24 hours to complete.

You should not be in a hurry when you want to do changes as it takes time to do changes. When I created a database it took about one hour before it was ready for use. The web interface is always slow - GoDaddy can do this better. It takes a few seconds to load each page.

Access to your files

All files are accessible via FTP. GoDaddy have some limitations on the FTP access, at least on the economy and deluxe plans. You can only have two FTP sessions active at any time, and the speed is limited to 40kB/sec.

In short it takes time to transfer data to/from GoDaddy. If you have 10GB of data it takes at least 72 hours to transfer data off the site. And with small files it takes even longer because of the overhead involved with setting up file transfers.

Uptime and access times

What is uptime? I see uptime as when my website is available on the net. Uptime is hard to measure, as many different factors are involved. To monitor uptime and access times I have used ipMonitor and configured a probe that download a static file every 300 second.

With GoDaddy I have 99.7908% availability the last day on my Linux account (this blog). This is also the average. I have never had 100%. In comparison, the same measurement on Blogspot gives me 100% availability.

Both sites are located in the US, and access times are much higher than in Europe. Speed do not seem to be a problem. On large files you get the bandwidth you expect.

Conclusion

I like GoDaddy. They are cheap, and their products fits me. I just wish I could find a comparable solution in Europe. Until I find this, I will stay on GoDaddy.

A site that is not IE compatible

I few years back we all had sites optimized for Netscape. I find it fun to see that we now have pages that are optimized for Firefox and not Internet Explorer compatible.

Web hosting options

In my search for a good web hosting company, I have compiled a list of vendors I have found that can be usable.

Most companies require you to transfer the domain to them. And most of them also deliver email as part of their hosting services.

These are my thoughts after a quick look. As time goes by my requirements will probably be more accurate.

Database backup. Offline that is. Only one vendor seems to let me have access to the database and get a backup when I need it. Also check how you can work with the database directly. Raw log files are usually not accessible for me. Many provide (at extra cost?) access to the logs in a parsed form.

Shopping web hosting I believe that when you buy hosting from a company where you do not get personal interaction or service you get no loyalty to them. As so, you probably will switch hosting provider more often. The best way for a hosting company to keep their customers is to make it hard to leave. They can do so by making it hard for you to get your data back. Have you ever tried to export your address book in Hotmail or Gmail?

Company	Comment
GoDaddy	Lots of options. Can host both Linux and Windows based sites. You do not get access to log files, and backup of SQL Servers seems to be difficult. They do not require DNS hosting to host a web site.
DiscountASP	A pure Microsoft hosting environment. Lots of options for .NET developers. Seems interesting, as they understand and adapt better to .NET developers than the other hosting companies I have found.
One	A Linux hosting company. Cheap hosting, but you need to transfer the domain to them. No download limit, but they do not allow downloads of content (hit) larger than 1MB.
Webhuset	Offers both Windows and Linux based hosting. It is a Norwegian company and their web pages are in Nowegeian.
Active24	Hosting company based in Europe. Offers both Linux and Windows hosting. You can also buy SharePoint hosting and hosted Exchange. (For Windows mobile.)
Layered Tehcnologies	This hosting company delivers only dedicated servers, both on Linux and Windows. But firewall seems to cost extra.
Cliche	A Norwegian web hosting company with low prices.

Adding graphics to your blogs

Adding graphics to your blogs is not an easy task. At least if you care about copyright. I've been looking into this issue for some time and looked at the various options.

It costs money. Most photo stock libraries charge you by the picture - and from what I have seen the price is > $50/image. At least if I not ask for a quote. But for personal use - the prices scare you off.

That why I am glad I have found a site called clipart.com - a site that is subscription based. From how I read the license terms I can download up to a 1000 pictures each day and use on my web page, presentations and emails. Given their license I can not use their images on new stuff after I terminate the subscription but existing blogs created during my subscription are allowed to display the downloaded images.

I have searched a little on their site and usually I find art I can use if I want to write about something.

All art on this page is downloaded from clipart.com and scaled down to the right size using Microsoft Office Picture Manager. As you understand the two last pictures have nothing to do with this article - I just added them for fun.

A good laugh

Finally bloggers have gotten their own comic.

I am exited to follow them in the future.

<<blaugh_en.htm>>

IE7 and pishing filter works

It is good to see that that technology works for you. I got this warning today when I opened an email that I knew was spam.

Unfortunately I did not get this warning before I tried to log in with my username "fuck" and password "you". But better late than never I say. At least you know if you screwed up...

Tags: pishing, IE7

Google blogs

Google is the company everyone loves - and hates. It is tough to be a big company. There are lots of people watching everything you do and whatever you do someone will always disagree with you.

I really like lots of what Google do for you. They have lots of cool products and some of them are good as well.

I have found a few blogs (in addition of Google's own blogs) that you should look at. Some of them are positive and writes about what Google can do you you, and some are more skeptic and tell the story Google don't want you to read.

I believe in making my own mind and try to read up on both sides on a story before I decide on something.

Some blogs

• Gevil.org - this is a new site and they seem to be very skeptic about Google.
• http://www.google-watch.org - also a site that is skeptic.
• Google Operating System - a blog that really knows what happens at Google. You can read about new features and so here.

My sources

I use Google Reader myself and you can see what I read from my shared tags.

• Google official blogs - I try to follow up on as many of them as possible. These are the ones I have found.
• Google related blogs - those I read.
• Google search - search on Google's own blogsearch for the past month.
• Google tag at Technorati. Google is a hot tag so it can be hard to find useful information.

The importance of choosing the right SSL certificate issuer

In a previous post I have talked a little about where I prefer to buy SSL certificates. Comodo Group have this site called www.instantssl.com that is

• Cheap.
• Fast.
• Good service.

I renewed my company's certificate for our mail server yesterday. This is a trivial task and I could not see any challenges with this task.

Oh I was wrong. Our Windows Mobile cell phones did not handle this so well.

How does certificates work?

A certificate is a proof of something. All certificates needs to be issued by a known authority. Common well-known certificates are:

• Drivers license.
• Passport.
• Your identity card.

But how do you validate certificates you do not know? In the computer world we have something called a root certificate store. This store is a list of all issuers that we trust. Unfortunately, this list is maintained separately by each application or vendor. Here are some examples of different applications:

• Opera web browser
• Nokia cell phones
• Sony Ericsson cell phones
• FireFox browser
• Internet Explorer
• Windows CE (with variations; Windows Mobile and SmartPhone). CE does not share root certificate store with Windows. And it can be hard to add new root certificates.

A root certificate is the same as the certificate authority or issuing certificate.

The root certificate store in Microsoft Windows is updated by Windows Update and contains lots of issuers. Some applications, many from Microsoft, are using Microsoft Cryptography Services and benefit from the same root store.

Why the certificate issuer is important

The issuer of the certificate is important, because you need that issuer supported on your target device. On most devices you can add a new root certificate yourself, but if you have 100 devices from 10 vendors this task is time-consuming. And many SmartPhones are restricted from doing so. I came across some HTC phones the other day shipped from Dangaard. If I want to add my own root certificate they have to sign a deployment file. And they will charge me about €500 for the job. Easy money? :)

You should check your target applications for compatibility before you purchase a certificate!

Comodo and InstantSSL

Comodo does not have their own root certificate. Or at least - they are not using it.  But they have access to many root certificates via their own intermediate issuing certificates. In the past Comodo have issued certificates from GTE CyberTrust Global Root, but recently they have changed to AddTrust External CA Root. They claim to have 99.3% browser compatibility.

AddTrust is not support out of the box on Windows CE, and we have lots cell phones based on this operating system...

I called their technical support and asked what to do. They told me to create a support ticket on the web and make a new CSR. I did so and within a few hours they gave me a new certificate with GTE CyberTrust Global Root as the issuing certificate. This is the first time I used their support but it worked out well in the end!

References

• Information about Windows CE (and smartphone, Pocket PC).
• Tags: SSL, InstantSSL, Windows CE

Semantic webs

We all know about Technorati by now, and we see lots of blogs now using tags. I found an old article talking about metaweb and the changes to come. Metawebs are in short webs that describe themselves in a way that computers can understand the content better and provide better search results among other things. Metawebs are also called semantic webs.

This article was written in December 2003, and he expected to see changes 3-5 years in the future.

Tags: semantic web, web 2.0

Google Reader as an blog reader

Lately I've been looking into Google Reader and I have to say that I am impressed. This is one very useful tool.

For a while ago I wrote an article where I talked about syndication of feeds. Google Reader is one product that is really good at collecting and presentation. A few key features are:

• Mobile reader that is fast.
• GUI for Windows that is readable and easy to use.
• You can share good articles easily by sharing them or give them a star.
• You can share folders (tags) so you can collect and republish blogs that your group (work, hobbies etc) find interesting.

Sharing specific articles

There are two ways to do so. With Google Reader you can give an article an star, or you can share it. You can see my shared page here or you can embed it into your webpage as seen below.

The GUI

The web page looks nice and is easy to work with. You can find screen shots at Wikipedia.

Mobile access

It's to work with and fast as well. For me, I can read whenever I got a spare minute now.

Republish folders

Or tags, as Google chooses to call them. Look at my development folder here. This is all news, not the articles I found interesting as mentioned above. You can also embed this into your page if you want.

Links

Tags: google reader, syndication, aggregation, web 2.0

Extended Validation Certificates

EV SSL: An introduction

Extended Validation certificate is a new type of expensive SSL certificate coming to a browser 7 near you before the end of January 2007 if you are using Internet Explorer. When, if or how other browsers are going to support EV certificates are not known at this time. Microsoft, Opera, Mozilla and KDE(not a browser, but...) are all members of CA/Browser forum and will - eventually - provide web browsers that can highlight websites with EV certificates.

What is the difference between today's certificate and EV certificates?

This comparison chart shows the differences between the two types of certificates.

Feature	Today's cert	EV cert
Price	You can get certificates all in all price ranges.	Will cost more as this the new, hot and secure certificate.
Validity of certificate	From one to three years.	Max 27 months, but the specification recommends 12 months validity.
Verification of certificate owner	Not much. You just need to document that you own the domain you request a certificate for.	There is a common procedure all EV certificate authorities need to comply to before issuing a certificate. The procedure seems to be somewhat vague at this point so there is a chance that there will be different procedure for each issuer.
Browser compatibility	You can get 99%-99.99% compatibility from most issuers.	EV certificates will use existing root certificates. At this point no there is no way to tell what root certificate the various issuers will use and compatibility is therefore now known at this time. There are requirements to be met for the root certificate, and these requirements are defined in the guidelines from CA/Browser Forum.
Wildcard certificates	Supported by many issuers.	Not supported. This is a requirement from CA/Brower Forum.

Pictures of EV SSL sites

I found some pictures from Verisign with some pictures showing how IE will look on a site with a EV certificate. The pictures had to be sized down to display properly on this page, so you can click on the image to get it in full size.

And a site without EV certificate:

External links

• http://www.instantssl.com/ssl-certificate-products/addsupport/ssl-evssl-twoyearpromo.html

• CA/Browser Forum.
• InstantSSL - my favorite issuer.
• Offer on EV certificates from InstantSSL.
• Tags: SSL, encryption, IE7, security.

EDNS - DNS extension

EDNS - DNS extension

I recently became aware of an extension to DNS called EDNS. As I work a lot with DNS I not quite sure how I could have missed this extension until now.

EDNS is an extension of the DNS protocol which allows more flags, label types and return codes to be defined, and enhances the transport of DNS data in UDP packets. The version of EDNS specified by RFC 2671 is known as EDNS0.

Wikipedia

EDNS - why?

According to the specifications of DNS, UDP packets should be no longer than 512 bytes in length. There are not any space left for additional flags in the header. For normal use this is  no problem at all, but to implement new features in DNS, such as DNSSEC, changes were needed.

EDNS uses a pseudo resource record called OPT to identify this extension. More links are found in the links section below.

Our firewall, a Fortigate FG-500A from Fortinet, logs oversized packets as a potential vulnerability in the IPS module. At the same time, it only logs the packet as bad, but it does not drop the packet. So it can't be that bad :)

EDNS - what you should know!

This extension is almost invincible for system administrators. Windows 2003 supports this extension by default, but I have never seen any problems as a result of this until today.

• Legacy DNS servers that don't know anything about EDNS will just ignore the OPT resource sent from the other side.
• DNS clients (such as computers) usually never use this option as it do not need to send packets greater than 512 bytes. Most DNS packets are between 150 and 200 bytes.
• There is an hotfix available for Windows 2000 to solve issues related to EDNS queries.
• Window 2003 DNS server do not announce itself as an EDNS capable server to other servers. But it replies to other hosts as EDNS capable when asked to do so.
• Newer versions of BIND seems to advertise itself as EDNS capable.
• EDNS usually adds as little as 10-15 bytes extra data into an UDP packet. In most queries you are still way below the limit of 512 bytes. Some intrusion prevention systems, firewalls or DNS servers may drop packets because of invalid options in the packet. Except for old Windows 2000 implementations (see above) and some Cisco PIX I don't know of any issues related to this.
• Some Cisco PIX firewalls are reported to drop oversized packets. But I do not have any information about what versions do so or how to fix this.
• Before EDNS, DNS reverted to TCP based transactions if the query exceeded 512 bytes. The only consequence from this is some extra IP packets on the network, and somewhat slower DNS. If the client asks a question where the server needs to send more than a 512 bytes reply it answers back that the client need to revert to TCP.
• DNS tries to compress the packets. That is, everything between two dots are only sent one time in the packet. If you query for www.novell.no and get a reply back with lots of additional records, novell is only sent once in the packet. Additional records are records that you did not ask about, but  what the DNS server think that you probably want to ask about later.

EDNS - turn off in Windows 2003

You can't turn off EDNS in Windows 2003 - it will always reply as EDNS capable if the source includes EDNS in the original packet. To make sure you do not send out EDNS probes to all hosts on the Internet you can make the following change in registry. (By default this feature is disabled, and the registry key is not present.)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\DNS\Parameters
EnableEDNSProbes=0x0

External links:

• Report from Fortiguard center.
• RFC2671 - the original specification.
• Article from Microsoft that talks about how to install the tool dnscmd.exe.
• How to change EDNS settings in Windows 2003.

• Tags: EDNS, DNS, EDNS0

FrontPage as a CMS

Microsoft FrontPage as a CMS

Yes - it can be done. You did not believe so. FrontPage can be used as light-weight CMS system. I have used FrontPage on my humor page for some time now and gained some experience using FrontPage.

First impression

FrontPage is easy to work with. And relatively easy to learn. Lots of limitations but you can live with most of them.

Features of FrontPage

• Easy to work with style sheets. CSS is cool. You can do lots with them,
• Spell checker in many languages. At least in the languages you have Microsoft Office dictionaries installed :) At least for me, the spell checker is used regularly. And I do misspell  lots of words.
• Powerful editor. You can do lots of stuff here like making tables. Most CMS editors only allow you to write text.
• Clip art with lots of art. If you are like me and like to have some graphics on your page you'll find lots of art here. The art in the table below is from the clip art.

How this CMS fits into my requirements

You can read my requirements here. Requirements in italic is not from my list but something I came out with when looking into FrontPage.

Requirement	Conclusion
Cache ability		As long as you publish your pages with the .htm extension all cache headers are set correctly. If you need to use .asp or .aspx extensions to gain additional functionality then you need to set the headers yourself. When you use static files IIS can even compress the files so you reduce your bandwidth requirements.
Scalability		You'll get the best performance IIS and your server can provide. And you can scale out without any problems using Squid.
Readable URL's		You choose the name (and location) yourself.
RSS/atom feed from articles		It can be done - but with add-ons. Read more here. The only bug I've found is that the date is written with the current locale (as seen from the FrontPage client I assume) and because of that new feed readers will not get the right publishing date.
Content editor		A WYSIWYG content editor where you get full control if you need that.
Menus and navigation		Navigation is separate from placement of files. You can move your menus how much you want it in the menus without the need to move the files. It's also easy to include navigation into your webpages.
Mobile content		There is no easy way to produce mobile HTML code.
Index and search		With FrontPage extensions it's easy to make a search function. If you require more features you can use Index Server, but you have to write code to make that work.
Web community		No web community except for MSDN. Not many seem to use FrontPage. At least if they have more than 2 or 3 pages on their site. You can program to FrontPage API's but no one seem to do so.
Blog functionality		For other to make comments you have to develop this functionality yourself.
Platform		FrontPage should run on IIS with FrontPage extensions installed. You can manage without but will miss out many features.
Templates		FrontPage got something called dynamic templates. You create a template (your HTML code) and make manageable regions where pages made from the template are allowed to edit content. If you change a template existing pages will not be updated unless you do so.

Links

Tags: IIS, FrontPage, cms

Umbraco CMS review

Umbraco CMS

I have for some time been looking into Umbraco to see if I can use it for my own CMS system. Unfortunately, my time is limited and thorough testing have not been done.

First impression of Umbraco

I downloaded the installation of Umbraco version 2.1 from their homepage. My first impression of the installer was that it was very good. It installed cleanly in about 10 minutes.

After the installation I looked into how to publish my templates. It's quick to learn the fundamentals of Umbraco. But it's not easy to do anything creative with it. You need to learn XSLT or program ASP.NET controls to do anything but publish simple content. Either way you have to spend some time write code for your needs.

Documentation and example code does not come easy. It's hard to get started and the documentation is at best half-done. The developers also charge money for add-ons to Umbraco. If you download the ASP.NET control document described above you'll see that. Because of this I'm not sure where Umbraco is headed.

How this CMS fits into my requirements

You can read my requirements here. Requirements in italic is not from my list but something I came out with when looking into Umbraco.

Requirement	Conclusion
Cache ability		This CMS set the cache-control headers to private. If the headers can change, it have to be done by a developer.
Scalability		I have done some tests with OpenSTA Umbraco seems to perform well.
Readable URL's		The filename (.aspx) are made from the title of the page.
RSS/atom feed from articles		It can be done - no problem at all. But you need to develop this feature.
Content editor		A WYSIWYG content editor with templates wrapping around your text.
Menus and navigation		The structure of the menus are directly related to how you place your document within the tree. You can move your documents as you want.
Mobile content		There is no easy way to produce mobile HTML code.
Index and search		Umbraco have their own site indexing tool in umbracoUtilities. (See links.)
Web community		I can't tell how good the community is. Umbraco is open source and published under the GPL license. But except for the developers I have not found any community.
Blog functionality		For other to make comments you have to develop this functionality yourself.
Platform		Umbraco requires .NET and is because of that limited to Windows Server 200x and Microsoft SQL Server. Umbraco forum mentions Mono support, but it's not straight forward at this time.

Relevant links

• Umbraco documentation at Wikibooks.
• Umbraco official homepage.
• How to change content-type for specific documents. The package umbracoUtilities is the package that you need.
• My requirement list for a CMS.
• Umbraco blog.

Tags: cms, umbraco, .Net

Requirements for a personal CMS system

For the last few weeks I've been thinking a lot about my web presence on the Internet. At the moment I got dozens (ok, I cannot count) of sites that are not linked together. They are:

• www.helge.net - a Sharepoint site


• blog.helge.net - my blog, provided by blogger.com


• dagens.helge.net - my funnypage. Made in FrontPage


• ip.helge.net - a site for revealing your IP address

All sites have different layout and publishing engines. I also have som lab sites - but I guess they are OK to keep out of this list.

This document will try to point out my requirements for a CMS system based on my experience in the past with my existing systems.
All requirements does not have to be in place for me to choose a system, but this is what I'm looking for.

Cacheability. I want a CMS to provide the right HTTP headers to the client where content is not personalized. That is the Last-Modified and Cache-Control headers.
With these headers I can scale out a system with Squid if performance is needed. Also crawlers will work more efficient.
More information about these headers are to be found here.

Scalability. In the past I've seen lots of custom made web publishing tools that won't scale to more than a few concurrent users.
Given the right architecture a CMS should scale to lots of concurrent users without the need of external proxies.
I test a website using either OpenSTA or siege.

Readable URL's. My CMS should have nice, readable URL's like /fun/cat_mess instead of ?ID=333. This makes crawlers more happy and makes it easier for almost any log analysis tools to show you what pages have been visited. I use Google Analytics for statistics.

 

RSS/atom feed from articles. And with channel support so I can provide different channels (like dagens and GPS) for different users. One feed should give all channels, for use with Feedburner to enable quick indexing of new content. Feed file should be cacheable as described above.

 

Content editor. Other persons should be able to write content without the knowledge of HTML. This includes a WYSIWYG editor with basic formatting. People with HTML knowledge should be able to write as well. Layout of the site should be separated from the content.

 

Menus and navigation. The CMS must provide navigational means. I belive all do, so I won't elaborate about this point. But it is a requirement.

 

Mobile content. More and more users are using Windows Mobile or other handheld computers. There should be som abillity to display a scaled-down version of the site for these users.

 

Index and search. Indexing and searching is a requirement today. Either you can use Google Custom Search Engnine as your search engine or you need to provide this on your own. Google is slow at indexing new pages so it can take weeks after you added content before is searchable. (With RSS feed and Feedburner blog searches are updated much faster.)

 

Web community. The CMS should have a web community where support and new functionality can be found when needed. No need to reinvent the weel all the time :) Short learning curve for programming to the CMS is also required as I belive there is a need for customization.

 

Blog functionality. Not necessary but can be nice to have. Feedback on content is (almost) always appreciated.

---

In the future I'll try to test variuous CMS against this requirements. And reviews will be posted here as well.

Web publishing tool

Are there any good publishing tools that are easy to use? I've been using FrontPage for some time now, but it is not the greatest tool out there.

 

FrontPage got templates. Nice feature. But it's very hard to update all pages made from a template. And I would like an easier interface to publish to (Like Adobe Contribute).