WordPress

Jared Ritchey has a few things to say about search engine optimization and WordPress.

Mike Gifford, Open Concept, commented here at CMS Report that his company had just posted a report they did for a client comparing three open source content management systems. His company needed to recommend to their client whether Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal would be a good replacement for their current CMS, Back-End (BE).

A new version of bbPress, the "simple, fast, and elegant" forum application, is available.  The new version is 0.8.2 and introduces some new features.

• Hierarchical Forums
• Customized permalinks (friendly URLs)
• Plugin Management
• More tag cloud formatting options
• Moderators and Admins are considered “trusted” and will never have their posts marked as spam.
• Faster database queries

Additional information including download links and install instructions can be found on the original announcement for bbPress 0.8.2.

So you want to write a successful blog?  Or perhaps just have a successful Website that people actually visit?  Lorelle reminds us just how to make your blog of interest to others.

I have many friends raised within countries which still play by these rules, where you are and do what your father or mother did, and maybe your grandparents before you, not what you want to do. Where apprenticeship programs are the only way into a trade. Where you are tested and found competent for a specific job, not because your heart leads the way.

By golly, I have been so busy the past couple weeks that I didn't even had a chance to check out a beta of Wordpress 2.2.  Now it's too late for me because Wordpress 2.2 has been officially released.  Not only does this release include over 200 bug fixes, but it also has some new nifty features.

• WordPress Widgets allowing you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity.
• Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement the XML-RPC interface.
• A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.

At first I was skeptical that this article was without bias regarding Wordpress.com since it was Matt Mullenweg's own blog that referred me to the story.  I was pleased to discover that the author, Jonathan Bailey, helped erased my skepticism in his well written article, Wordpress.com is Virtually Spam Free.  The first two paragraphs should get you interested in reading more.

This past week saw updates for both Wordpress and Wordpress MU.  While both open source packages are blogging applications they are not quite the same software.  Wordpress MU is intended to run up to hundreds of thousands of blogs with a single install of WordPress. Hence the MU in Wordpress MU stands for Multi-User.

A security update is available in both branches of  Wordpress as 2.1.3 and 2.0.10.

Last week, Linux.com posted an article titled, Drupal vs. WordPress - Which is better for blogging?

I really can't display every open source project's invitation for college students to apply to Google's Summer of Code.  But just like the invitation from Drupal, WordPress would be another one of those projects I wouldn't have minded working on when I was going to college.

When I first started developing this website, CMSReport.com, it was my intention to also take "the opportunity to provide a series of how-to articles on building a Website using Drupal".  I wanted to help those getting started in using a content management system for their site by suggesting some tips and ideas that could make their life easier.  As time wore on, when it came to my own site I found that except for a few well written posts I failed miserably at this goal.

I'm pretty good at tasks such as developing, innovating, documenting, and system administration.  However, some people can't walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.  Unfortunately, I'm one of those people.  I have difficulty developing and documenting at the same time.  This isn't unusual as one of the most talented programmers I know struggles with documentation and will ask me for help in writing instructions for his own software.  My point is that when you find people who is blessed with being able to document their own work you need to let others know about that person.