WordPress

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.

Drupal and WordPress,  were the only CMS applications that made it to the winner list in CNET's hosted Webware 100.

A couple months ago, Technorati announced that users of Wordpress needed to upgrade to the latest available version (now at Version 2.5). This week, Technorati announced that blogs remaining vulnerable to identified security exploits may no longer be indexed by their service.

Because of this ongoing problem, we're discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised. We strongly recommend upgrading your WordPress installation. Even if you haven't been afflicted by a compromise, by the time you are aware that you have been a number of negative consequences may have already occurred (for instance, flagged spam by Technorati, Google or Yahoo!) -- this has been reported by many WordPress users.

By not upgrading your software, the search engine services may block your site from being listed. I can't think of a greater incentive to update your content management software to the latest version than the threat of being delisted. This is a bold move by Technorati. I'm personally glad Technorati is taking a stand against sites hosting older versions of Wordpress with the known security holes. In my opinion, there really isn't a good reason you shouldn't be upgrading your Wordpress site to the latest version.

The April issue of Adobe Edge contains the article, Review of open source content management systems. The article provides an overview of what the author describes as "five of the top open source software (OSS) solutions". The five open source CMS included in the author's list are CMS Made Simple, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and XOOPS. After reading the article, I found myself wondering how we "reviewers" can actually improve our reviews of open source CMS. More importantly, I've come to the realization that I can no longer claim to be non-biased in which CMS I believe is the best out there.

The author does a fine job in the article describing the similarities and differences between the CMS being reviewed. However, one of the issues I have in this article and many others I've read that review CMS is the big jumps in the conclusion:

Drupal, Joomla!, and XOOPS are best for building an e-commerce site because all three offer:

• Inventory management
• Support for third-party payment processing mechanisms (such as PayPal)
• Modules for shipping and sales tax calculators
• Shopping cart functionality

While it is true that Drupal, Joomla! and XOOPS can do e-commerce, none of these CMS can do that straight out of the box. I can just imagine a shop owner or design company trying Drupal, Joomla!, or XOOPS for the very first time and wondering, "how the heck do I get a shopping-cart into the CMS?". While the author does hint in the article that third-party modules are needed to make the e-commerce work, I think the author would have been better off better explaining that "some work is required" to get those features into the CMS.

Matt Mullenweg, founder of the WordPress blogging application, recently announced on his own blog that his Automattic company has hired Andy Peating. Andy Peating is the creator of BuddyPress which is a WordPress Multi-User based social network platform.

Matt Mullenweg announced this morning that WordPress.com users will now have 3 GB of free drive space for their blogs. Previously, WordPress.com only offered 50 MB of free space to those that signed up for the free service. Why are they doing this? Looks like Wordpress.com has no longer decided to play nice guy against their biggest competitors, TypePad and Blogger.

The following is an excerpt from Mullenweg's announcement at WordPress.com:

Yes, WordPress and XOOPS are two completely separate projects, but they do have at least one thing in common. Both Web applications were updated this past week to address known security vulnerabilities.

WordPress 2.3.2 was released to fix some very significant security bugs. The release addresses an exploit that can be used to expose your draft posts. WordPress 2.3.2 also "suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations".

I came across another one of those "top ten" lists, this time, "Ten Reasons to choose Wordpress". Among the ten reasons to choose Wordpress were:

• Wordpress is used the world over
• Famous bloggers use Wordpress
• Wordpress is free

I've used Wordpress before and I have to say I chose it for its functionality and not whether a million zillion people used it. I know there are people who use, join, and buy something because it is popular. However, I have thankfully never been one of those people.

Packt Publishing is starting to announce the various winners in its Open Source CMS Awards.  The first category announced was the Best Open Source Social Networking CMS.

Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress came out in front of Elgg and Drupal, who finished joint second.

Judges comments for their decisions included: