Earlier today, Matthew Mullenweg announced the official release of Wordpress 2.7.  This new version of Wordpress is a dandy with significant improvements made to the Wordpress administrative interface and dashboard.  The choices you now have to customizing our blogging workflow is almost endless.

While we could start reading off from the changelogs for all the new features in Wordpress 2.7, It's probably just as easy to show you the video.

Editor's Note: There have been moments here at CMS Report when I am amazed with the insightful and in depth comments written by some of our readers. This is one of those moments. Chris Jewitt, left us a comment regarding several popular content management systems (CMS).  The CMS mentioned in this brief review are Joomla!, Wordpress, Dotnetnuke, Plone, Drupal, Alfresco, and Sharepoint.

I moved Chris Jewitt's comments have been moved to the "front page" so the story isn't missed by those visiting this site.  Any hyperlinks found in this story have been added by the editor.

Below Submitted by Chris Jewitt on December 4, 2008 - 1:42am.  

Jared Ritchey: "I managed to break free for 30 minutes and wrap up a small bug in the WordPress Menu Creator. As it stands we are at version 1.0.2 which is only a maintenance release to fix some issues when using widgets in conjunction with the menu manager."

Complete Story

CMS Wire recent took a look at Technorati's Top 100 blog sites and determined which CMS the sites were using most.  They concluded, not surprisingly, that Wordpress was the most popular CMS with 34% of the top sites using the blogging application.

Simply put, we found that WordPress dominates the list, that Movable Type comes in with a respectable second [16%], and the rest are either custom jobbies or a smattering of other platforms which are, relatively speaking, eating dust.

Probably more interesting, is that full-fledged CMS barely made a dent in the top 100 list.

Wider scope Web CMS technologies are not used much by the top blogs. Drupal scores 5 sites, with Plone used by 1. Other popular Web CMS platforms are conspicuous only by their absence.

CMS Wire isn't saying that CMS are not good for blogging.  I think what CMS Wire is observing is that when users want to only blog...they prefer to keep it simple.  Why use a CMS with more features than they possibly can use when something like Wordpress or Movable Type can do the job?  At least that is what I get from the article.

Smashing Magazine has posted a couple articles to help web developers and designers with their Wordpress and Drupal sites.  Some great suggestions and resources are listed in these articles.

1. WordPress Developer’s Toolbox
2. Drupal Developer's Toolbox

Packt is pleased to announce the release of a new book for business bloggers. Written by Paul Thewlis, WordPress for Business Bloggers teaches users to build an attractive and professional blog with advanced plug-ins, analytics, advertising, and SEO.

WordPress allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with many outstanding features. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users, who have created a large and diverse collection of plug-ins.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Wordpress 2.6 is more than a blog and is quickly evolving into a full-fledged Web content management system.  While they're a little late, some of my competitors (CMS Watch, InformationWeek) also recently noted the trend of blogging applications such as Wordpress taking on more CMS-like duties.

I wish I would have expanded on my own thoughts about blogging tools continuing to add more CMS functions into their software.  However, I'm not so sure I could have written it better than Irina Guseva's post at CMS Wire.  She takes the story even further by asking whether the trend from blog to CMS is a good thing or not.