d-serv GmbH is changing its websites. It would be somewhat easy, albeit right, to get away with the old adage that the cobbler wears the worst shoes.
In recent years, d-serv GmbH has invested its time and commitment primarily in its customers’ projects and in the product development of ci-book™. Their own websites have fallen behind a bit; ci-book.de has been updated in the meantime but has not yet been finalized and should now be based on the same systems and extensions as dserv.de.
Our decision fell on what is now the most widespread content management system when it comes to small to medium-sized websites: WordPress .
Alternative systems for enterprise solutions would be “too much of a good thing” with the information that d-serv GmbH offers on its own publicly accessible websites. For large to very large or extensive websites, other systems are more likely to be considered. In the open source area, »Plone« is an alternative. In the commercial area, as a provider of Adobe Solutions, we would either access a product from Adobe or, as a user of Microsoft Office, a solution from Microsoft.
In order to ensure future care and maintenance with as little effort as possible, we have placed particular value on the following three criteria:
- Sufficiently established and internationally spread developer community.
- Well-known and well-tested extensions with “clean” installation and uninstallation routines.
- Offers – also available for a fee if required – with appropriate documentation, existing support and regular updates.
These three criteria alone reduce the number of possible offers, so-called WordPress “themes”, “frameworks” and “plugins” considerably. Below we would like to present a list of the extensions and additions to WordPress used, without describing them in detail:
- Studiopress Genesis Framework. Saves numerous plug-ins, as it allows various modifications »out-of-the-box« and, in our experience, adheres to at least 99% of the specifications and nomenclature of the WordPress core. There are also some additional, useful plug-ins from Studiopress that harmonize perfectly with the framework. Overall, however, always applies – only as many plug-ins as necessary!
- Corresponding, Genesis-based themes, whereby the themes created by Studiopress itself are preferable to most others from the developer community (third-party themes) in our opinion.
- »Duplicator Pro« has proven itself as a backup solution and, with its functions, also offers an elegant way of moving entire WordPress instances or reinstalling them on other servers or in local test environments.
- »WPML« – Insofar as multilingual WordPress websites come into consideration. A possible alternative is certainly “Polylang” – the first good experiences have already been made with WPML and the price model seems more appropriate than that of Polylang.
- »Contact Form 7« – Pretty slim form generator including reCaptcha integration (Note: The corresponding key must still be requested directly from Google.) The alternative listed by Studiopress (NinjaForms) and the form generators with too many other links (e.g. WP Forms ) couldn’t really convince.
- “Autoptimize” – Helps immensely in optimizing the CSS and JavaScript files and thus in “accelerating” the website. Is currently still under review, but seems solid.
- »WP-Optimize« – Cleans the MySQL database. Also still under review.
- “Shariff Wrapper” – Currently offers what is probably the most solid plug-in variant for “social sharing” and is used on this website as a test.
- “Regenerate Thumbnails” – Indispensable when WordPress renders different image sizes due to changing themes or settings, which then have to be adjusted in their dimensions. Can be deactivated again during operation.
- “Google Authenticator” – Is currently, albeit “outdated”, one of the plug-ins that enables two-step authentication via Google’s or Microsoft’s Authenticator apps on the smartphone. The search for more up-to-date plug-ins is ongoing.