WordPress

WordCampTV: From Personal Blogger to Professional Marketer

From WordCamp Portland 2010, Melissa Lion & Julie Yamamoto session how how to evolve your career from blogger to professional marketer. I'm always fascinated when I hear people's professional career evolved over time, especially when it is a career that is immersed in information technology, the social web, and Enterprise 2.0.

Wordpress "CMS" 3.1 is Available

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.

WordPress wins Hall of Fame CMS Award

Birmingham, UK. 19 November 2010 - Packt Publishing is pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Hall of Fame Award in the 2010 Open Source Awards. Hall of Fame CMS is a category introduced to the Award last year, which features a competition between the previous winners of the Open Source CMS Award; Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress.

With this award, WordPress has gone from winning the Open Source CMS Award last year to winning the Hall of Fame CMS category, reserved for the biggest projects in the Content Management Framework industry.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg told Packt, “On behalf of the entire WordPress community I'm honored to accept this award, it's a great recognition of all the hard work and effort we've invested into WordPress. We envision a day when every man, woman, and child will be able to have an effortless beautiful website powered by Free software."

Testing popular CMS and blogging systems

For a long time I’ve been really interested in performance aspects of content management systems and smarter blogging systems. This is the reason for my decision to test some of the popular systems on a workbench and to get some technical information about these systems.

The test was quite simple. I installed the packages on my sandbox server and added a function (cip-bench()) to the installation. Then I ran the index page with the default template and configuration. The data I got from the test was limited on the raw index page after the installation. I picked up 5 aspects for the test:

  • The first one was the memory usage of the system
  • The execution time
  • Executed database queries
  • How many database tables exist
  • And the last parameter shows how many files are required.

It is interesting to see how different some CMS solve their tasks. I was surprised of some results for example 399 database queries of contenido.

To sum up this test I was impressed by chyrp. It’s delivered with an elegant backend and I think it has got a lot of potential to become more popular and famous. The memory usage of wordpress seems to be improved in contrast to previous versions.

Blog

name memory avg time queries tables required files
chyrp 5.556 MB 0.3 – 0.5 7-10 8 63
geeklog 6.97 MB 0.6 – 0.7 59 50 38
serendipity 6.773 MB 0.5 – 0.55 11 21 48
textpattern 2.823 MB 0.2 – 0.3 21 17 12
wordpress 12.044 MB 0.4 – 0.6 15 11 73

CMS

name memory avg time queries tables required files
cmsmadesimple 7.543 MB 1.1 – 1.48 38 – 52 52 92
contenido 9.562 MB 0.6 – 0.9 254 – 265 (399) 76 123
impressCMS 10.938 MB 0.5 – 0.6 53-55 57 139
joomla 6.289 MB 0.7 – 0.8 7 – 11 33 127

Finalists in Packt's 2010 Open Source Awards announced

Packt Publishing recently announced the finalists in each of the categories for their 2010 Open Awards. While award categories for content management systems are still included, this year Packt is also adding additional flavors of open source projects to be judged. The new award categories include awards for most promising open source project, e-commerce applications, graphics software, and JavaScript libraries.

The Voting for the winners in each of the categories ends on November 5, 2010.  This "public vote" will then be combined with votes by a panel of judges in each category to be announced on November 15, 2010.