Wordpress "CMS" 3.1 is Available

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Submitted by Bryan on

This week, the Wordpress core developers released WordPress Version 3.1.This release took a little longer than CMS Report had first anticipated, but we see it as a sign that today's WordPress is much more complex than it used to be when it was considered only a tool for blogging.WordPress Logo In fact, Matt Mullenweg in his Wordpress 3.1. announcement  seemed to recognize this continued evolution of WordPress as a content management system.

With the 3.1 release, WordPress is more of a CMS than ever before. The only limit to what you can build is your imagination.

New features in WordPress 3.1 that would be of interest to content authors and site managers include:

  • A "lightning fasy" redesigned linking workflow which makes it easy to link to your existing posts and pages
  • An admin bar so you’re never more than a click away from your most-used dashboard pages
  • A streamlined writing interface that hides many of the seldom-used panels intended to improve the user experience for new bloggers.
  • A refreshed blue admin scheme available for selection under your personal options

For WordPress developers, additional new features that may interest them in this latest version of WordPress include:

  • A new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts
  • New CMS capabilities:
    • archive pages for custom content types
    • a new Network Admin
    • an overhaul of the import and export system
    • the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries

WordPress 3.1 is available for download from WordPress.org or you can update from within the dashboard within your current version of WordPress.

Indexing for the Enterprise: Retrieve Your Documents 100% of the Time

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Submitted by jthumma on

“Seek and you will find” would be great for workers if their software would consistently deliver the information they need, where and when they want it. Too often, the bridge between what’s needed and found is incomplete, especially as organizations grow, the amount of stored information increases, and more people are involved. A sea of documents, disparate legacy and line-of-business systems, and the paths each document travels during the business lifecycle makes some searches as efficient as sifting through dark file folders in a dim basement while wearing sunglasses. Service, reputations and profits can suffer irreparably when documents are demanded and can’t be located.

The challenges aren’t always the result of inferior technology. Often they arise from poorly devised indexing plans.

Ideally, employees would determine what they need and have it delivered to their cerebral desktops. Not only is this impossible, but security considerations necessitate filtering what each user is (and is not) allowed to access. Web-based enterprise content management (ECM), supported by an enterprise approach to indexing, delivers information workers need to succeed, unearthing relevant files within seconds. To ensure specific, meaningful, and consistent search results rather than extensive, irrelevant lists of files (or none at all), you should follow these basic indexing rules.

Make your Drupal website Visitor Friendly!

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Submitted by Radha1587 on

Interesting and useful content is a necessity on any web site, particularly on those built around a Content Management System. However, this may not be the only necessity. Another necessity is making the browsing experience on your site pleasant for the visitor, and in this context, making the content easy to find. Having content on the front page of the site is one way to make it findable, but the amount of content is limited to a point before the page becomes unwieldy. In this tutorial, we will make it easier for site visitors to find our content in a number of ways.

Read more: http://www.packtpub.com/article/making-content-findable-in-drupal-6

Build a website using Drupal book

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Submitted by Afsha on

Drupal is a powerful, free system that anyone can use in order to create their own website. Packt's "Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions" by Mark Noble will help you build powerful website features for your business and connect to your customers through blogs, product catalogs, newsletters, and maps. This book requires no website development knowledge at all. It gives a complete example of a real world site with clear explanation.


"Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions" is a practical guide with clear, step-by-step instructions for setting up a home page, product catalog, blog, events calendar, and much more. It is your guide to building your business website in Drupal. All functionality is presented in a very clear step-by-step format which is easy to follow as you build your own site. This book will explore several modules that will allow you to do everything from adding calendars and events to integrating content from Flickr and YouTube. Each chapter adds some features to your website and brings you closer to your customers.


You can read an exclusive chapter at the publisher's website. This book takes a step-by-step approach to building a complete website using Drupal and enhancing it to include modern technology used by cutting-edge companies. All instructions are written in such a way that they make sense to readers of any technical level. At the end of the book, you should be able to build a site on your own. This book will definitely be your guide to a powerful website.

Clearing the weeds in taxonomy

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Submitted by Bryan on

A number of content management systems allow for data to be classified using taxonomy (sometimes called categories or tags in a CMS).  Most of us that use CMS and taxonomy aren't experts in how best to structure our vocabulary and usually end up with a mess of terms.  In the end, we have a mess on our hand and wonder how best we should approach cleaning up the terms we're using.

A blog post by Lars Trieloff, The Art of Mining a Folksonomy, gives some great suggestions for cleaning up your taxonomy.  The post was written for the Day's CQ5 CMS, but should be of use to almost any CMS user with taxonomy.

As you all know, CQ5 supports tagging and taxonomies and both side by side. Taxonomies are great, because they allow multi-dimensional classification of content, but sometimes there are things that do not fit into the taxonomy. And this is where it comes handy that you can just type and add a new tag to the standard tag namespace folksonomy. Using this feedback from the folksonomy you and enhance and improve your taxonomy. But what happens if you do not start with a neatly organized taxonomy, but with a wild-west folksonomy that has been created by numerous authors and you want to bring order into the chaos?

OSC: WordPress 2.3 New Taxonomy

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Submitted by Bryan on

Many times, I have claimed WordPress is The Undisputed Blogging Champion of the World. Not only has this been ascertained by data architects and information engineers, but also, most recently in a Friday Night Smackdown for the WWE title. And yet, given all of the SEO super power for which WordPress is well known, there is a simple, elegant data model holding things together beneath the templates and the plug-ins.

Complete Story

Implementing a Taxonomy

Bryan's picture
Submitted by Bryan on
I came across a very good article with regards to taxonomy titled, Search in Focus: Implementing a Taxonomy by Penny Crosman.  The article is a month or two old, but I haven't run across it before so maybe others haven't either.
Search engines don't know the difference between reading glasses and drinking glasses, but a taxonomy puts your query in context. We outline several ways to build taxonomies, ranging from the tough but potentially more accurate approach of building from scratch to the easier but potentially compromised approach of buying a prebuilt taxonomy or using automated clustering software.
Also be sure to check out the author's 10 Reasons To Use A Taxonomy.   Both of these articles were posted on Intelligent Enterprise.

The first time I heard the term taxonomy really wasn't until I started using Drupal.  It can take awhile to learn how best to use (and not to use) taxonomy in Drupal, but I've always found that there was enough help around to figure how best to utilize it for my sites.  Even after a couple years, I find I'm still learning how best to use taxonomy as the way I implement it seems to vary from site to site.  I also have yet to figure the best way to address what I call taxonomy bloat.  That's the tough part of learning, it all takes time and experience.