Once again, both Drupal and Wordpress are winners in CNET's annual Webware 100. According to CNET editor, Rafe Needleman, "nearly 630,000 votes were cast during the voting this year to pick the best Web 2.0 sites and services".
WordPress is the de-facto standard blogging engine and is often used to build full websites. Its power lies in its simplicity, allowing authors to start building their websites in minutes. However, WordPress is still missing some basic features keeping it from becoming a full fledged CMS. SitePress tries to close that gap.
SitePress is an ambitious mega-plugin for WordPress. It intends to turn WP into a reasonably featured content management system. SitePress contributes exactly where WordPress is short:
Idealware is providing online a report on open source content management systems by comparing Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal, and Plone. This 60-page independent Idealware report in PDF format provides both an introduction to the topic and a very detailed comparison of the four systems. The report also includes their new directory of the consultants and firms who help nonprofit create websites and implement these Content Management Systems.
Good Web Practices has a new post comparing three of everyone's favorite content management systems, Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal [link broken]. The comparisons the author makes between the three CMS are fair as he weighs out the positives and negatives of each CMS. Those that "get" open source will also like the way he concludes his article.
This is a really cool story on how local governments can improve their presence on the Internet and save money using open source software. The City of Albert Lea needed to improve their website but the small Minnesota city was facing project costs of $10,000 to $30,000. In walks Wordpress being utilized as a full content management system. As reported by the Albert Lea Tribune:
Some cities pay a consultant $10,000, $20,000, even $50,000 for a Web-based content-management site that looks professional and is consistent through and through. Fairbault is one instance.
Albert Lea, however, paid $720 to local resident Jeshua Erickson last December, she said. Kauffmann was in charge of the site’s revision, and last October she put together a committee of city
officials to advise her.She said the committee decided to shoot for a site using a content management system — or CMS — but it was outside of her Internet skills. The city began seeking estimates from Web design companies. When the estimates returned, they realized the city couldn’t afford it.
“We just didn’t feel we could justify spending $20,000-plus on a Web site,” Kauffmann said. “I happened to run into Jeshua Erickson on the Pelican Breeze one day, and we talked about Web sites and how he was developing them using WordPress.”
I'll have to say that even though Wordpress is open source and "free", this city got a steal with getting a website for under $1000. While Albert Lea is a small city, developing government sites can become big projects with lots of complications. Either the city was kind to the developer and his hours or he felt some civil duty to give the city's taxpayers a good deal. An example of this developer doing such a good job, Albert Lea's website is currently running Wordpress 2.7 which is the latest available version of Wordpress. Very well done Mr. Erickson.
Royal Pingdom completed a survey looking at the top blog platforms of the top 100 blogs. This survey mirrors other studies that I've read showing that Wordpress is king of the blog platform.
We found that Wordpress is the most-used platform among self-hosted blogs, which perhaps isn’t a huge surprise. It has more than twice as many blogs in the top 100 as Movable Type, the blog platform that came in second place.
Wordpress is used by 27 blogs in the top 100.
Movable Type is used by 12 blogs in the top 100.
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.
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.
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.
The articles don't include everything, but it's a wonderful start for those just beginning to learn about Drupal or Wordpress. Link found via Nick Lewis' blog.
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) also recently noted the trend of blogging applications such as Wordpress taking on more CMS-like duties.