Wordpress 2.6 was released just a couple days ago.  During the time I have covered Wordpress, I have always considered Wordpress more as blogging application and not really a full featured content management system.  However, ever since I installed Wordpress 2.5 on one of my sites, I can't help but think that Wordpress now rocks as a CMS.

If you haven't looked at Wordpress in the past year or so, I recommend that you do yourself a favor and take a look at what you may be missing out.

Below is a brief video tour of 2.6 prepared by Matt and company.

 

"A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It’s been in the oven for a while, and we’re finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste."

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A few days ago, I mentioned that "Drupal 6 feels ready to me" for public release. Evidently, that was more than feeling as Drupal 6 was released early Wednesday morning.

As a user of Drupal, let me start by saying thank you to all the developers and advocates that brought Drupal 6 to light. I've been watching Drupal 6 grow from a distance this past year and have made some observations. There is a lot more sweat, tears, and love put into Drupal than most outsiders realize. Those of us that have used Drupal during the past six years owe a lot to those of you active in the Drupal community.

You can check out the release announcement at Drupal.org for all the new features and enhancements that have been rolled into Drupal 6. Let's look at some of the highlighted features in Drupal 6 which I've listed below.

A couple days ago, a fantastic video giving an overview of Drupal was made available at Drupal.org.  I was impressed enough with the video that I thought it was worth mentioning here.  While the video gets technical, but I think anyone who has interest in content management applications (most of my site visitors) should be able to follow along just fine. 

Some of the new features included in the latest release of OpenEdit, version 5.622 include:

• New job/issue tracking project form
• Validating and Captcha
• Improved interface (via ajax use) for adding menu's items inline and image archive
• New synchronize/pull ability to mirror OpenEdit web sites

Check out the release notes for complete details.

I recently stumbled over, Wasabidreams.com.  While the site may be short on articles, it does have one article that can be used as a very good guide for selecting the right content management system for you.  The full article is titled, "Why Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress and similar software are so popular and 20 things to look for".  Whew!  Do you think the length of that title was selected to get the attention of search engines?

The article not only gives detailed explanations of twenty things to use as criteria for selecting a CMS, but also  some background as to why someone would need the use of a CMS.  As to answering the question for why open source software such as Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress are so popular?  I think that article is a good start in answering that question, but I think there is more to the answer than just "free".  But don't let that stop you from reading the article, it's a very good CMS guide for newcomers to visit.

"We have a tradition around these parts of publishing information for the WordPress community surrounding a new major release of WordPress. With WordPress 2.3 to be released on September 24, 2007, I think it’s appropriate to follow the tradition and let you know about the ten things I think you should know about WordPress 2.3."

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"After eight months of development, we are proud to announce the release of the first beta version of the Drupal 6.x family. This beta includes a tremendous number of new features and new programming APIs for both users and developers. We improved Drupal's human language related features, interoperability with databases, logging solutions, sign on systems and also included an update notification module for improved security, so it becomes easier than ever to get up to date with the latest security and bug fixes."

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