Latest Micro CMS News & Articles

What better a way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon than to create a list of ways to use a piece of software — 48 ways to be exact. The author, Raj Dash. The software, the famously popular WordPress — more than a Blogging platform according to Dash.

According to Dash it’s WordPress customization capabilities that enable the blogging platform to morph into so many different solutions. For example, the ability to create custom themes, custom fields and custom code for custom fields and custom/widely available plugins all allow WordPress to be so many things to so many people.

He does say that WordPress is best suited for small business or low-volume uses as a content management system. So when reviewing the list keep that in mind.

Dash breaks his list down in to several categories including:

• Basic Uses
• Website/WebServices Clones and Alternatives
• Prologue Theme/Plugin Package
• Custom Sites
• Other

In going through the list of 48, there are a lot of existing examples of where a specific use has already been done – which is good to see it’s not all pie in the sky. Mind you, many of the suggestions can also be applied to many other blogging platforms or CMS Systems, so saying they are “unique” might be stretching it a bit.

A couple of examples that caught our eye were twists on some popular sites today and just some plain cool ideas:

• A Geocoded newsite – new stories are represented as icons on a Google MyMap. Click an icon and the news story pops up.

• A network hub/feed aggregator – Using the RSS Feed Importer plugin

• Twitter Clone – Using the Prologue Theme/Plugin

Have read through the article to review the entire list of 48 Unique Ways to Use WordPress. Anything there catch your eye? Have you ever tried one of these and found success or failure?

Movable Type, on it's trek towards full fledged CMS'ness, just got a little closer. Today saw Mark Carey's announcement of MT Forum — a MT add-on module which delivers fully functional forums that are loosely based on the behavior of the popular phpBB system.

Does this addition bump the MT Community Solution — the other way to build forums with MT — off the table? Let's have a look.

Looking for a live blogging tool for covering conferences, sporting events and such? Here's a real contender: Cover It Live. It provides a web based platform for blogging to the masses in real time, complete with rich media support, polls, comments and filtered questions and comments.

Implementation is as simple as embedding a snippet of code into your page and no download is necessary for your viewers to access the broadcast. Sweet as a nut.

Webware, C|Net's Web 2.0 blog-monkey, has launched the second annual Webware 100 poll. There are awards and there are awards, but popular voting awards under the C|Net banner are worth noticing. With half a million votes from Web users last time around, we will watch developments here with interest.

There is a wide range of categories to vote in including Audio, Browsing, Productivity and Video; but the battles we are primarily interested in will be conducted in the “Publishing and Photography” category.

Ever since the birth of reality television and the subsequent rise of Web 2.0 technologies, user-generated content has become more popular. So popular in fact, that the news is now relying on it.

CNN announced that its ever-popular iReport is expanding itself in hopes of becoming the YouTube of cable news. While iReport has been around since 2006 and has received more than 100,000 news-related photo and video submissions, CNN rarely uses more than 10 percent of the content in its newscasts. That is of course because they've needed to check each story out for accuracy and other pesky newsy type information.

But no more…

Compendium Blogware is a Software as a Service, organization-oriented blogging platform. This means that it concentrates on SEO, customer relationships and sales conversion, and incorporates administration features like editorial controls, restricting employees from posting anything they shouldn't.

The makers of Compendium held a webinar last week, in which co-founder Chris Baggot offered some advice to organizations regarding blogging for the coming months:

Responding to the growing success of Facebook.com, the social networking titan, MySpace.com has retaliated with an announcement that they will be unleashing the MySpace Developer Platform.

The platform, which is slated to be released as a test next week, will allow developers to integrate games, media-sharing features and other programs with the site - not unlike the way developers have been able to share their programs via Facebook.

The gang at Six Apart has just announced a new extension for their Movable Type 4.1 Commercial and Open Source publishing platforms. It's called the the Action Streams Plugin and by tying together data from all manner of social networking providers it moves you one step closer to the open social web dream.

It's official, Moveable Type Open Source (MTOS) 4.1 Stable has been released to the market.

We've been keeping you up to date about MTOS since we heard about it in August. In December we gave you an overview of the new open source version.

It was just last week that MT4.1 RC1 was released. So the guys and gals over at Six Apart are moving fast.

It was a gray winter morning in CMSland and here's how we decided to spend it: we packed down a block of fresh soda bread and headed over to Chez Technorati to have a gander at their 100 most linked-to (popular) blogs. With that list in hand we skipped about through viewed source, many emails and some kindly conversation. In the end we had ourselves a nifty little list consisting of website name and the blogging technology or Web CMS platform said site ran on.

Simply put, we found that WordPress dominates the list, that Movable Type comes in with a respectable second, and the rest are either custom jobbies or a smattering of other platforms which are, relatively speaking, eating dust. We enclose the full list here for your consideration, but first a couple of notes on the results.

It's official. Movable Type v4.1 has taken another definitive step toward production. This means the real deal is not far away. There are a few changes from the beta release, but for the most part — she's looking fit.

There are now three different versions of the Movable Type Publishing Platform: Commercial, Open Source and Personal. And with the newest version of Movable Type in Beta, release v4.1, there's and interesting change of orientation deep down in the product's core.

In the final days of 2007, many a to-do list is being checked off. With all the last minute, “revolutionary” social web updates, you'd think Santa's elves were part of the operation.

Case in point: OpenID, a universal signature mechanism that eliminates the need for multiple site logins, has been incorporated into Blogger.

Too often in our plight to design beautiful, engaging websites, we overlook the unique abilities and disabilities of our users. Sure, we know their demographics, their wants, their desires and maybe even their top tasks. But do we really design with their abilities in mind?

The fun never stops for the folks at JumpBox, where they are unveiling an expansion of their product line to include Jumpboxes for Open Source applications: Alfresco, OTRS, Bugzilla, and Mantis.

Hello. Open source blogging fanatics, it's your day. Coming full-circle-ish — and probably well timed for the Le Web 3 event in Paris — Six Apart has just released an open source version of Movable Type. It's called Movable Type Open Source, MTOS for short, and it is just the latest chapter in the continuing story of a company that strives towards the old adage “Power to the People.”

So you're in the web provision game, and you're too much of a big shot to use WordPress, right?
If you're doing multi-user, community-based, advanced website features then I can understand that. For a pretty-boy website and a heavily branded product, you don't want WordPress. If you're building the next Facebook, or setting up a web solution for The New York Times, this is not the tool you need.

But if you are doing a bit of blogging and want to put in a few ads here and there, or run a newsletter, a RSS feed, a poll and an occasional blogcast, then WordPress is perfect.
It's low-maintenance, set-up is quick, updating and customizing is a snap, and non-techies will find the back-end content management intuitive and hassle-free.

But the best thing about WordPress, as everyone knows, is the sheer weight and quality of plugins to extend this cuddly Micro CMS. Here's a few of the best.

“When I examine the landscape of open source projects that have had a big impact on the technology industry, I’ve concluded that projects which have had the biggest impact (usually) have a well-capitalized company behind them.”

- Dries Buytaert, November 2007

Today marks the release of TagManage 2007, an SMB (small and mid-sized business) app for social bookmarking and blogging. TagManage was created by samuelbressi productions (yes, all lowercase).

Clients can install TagManage onto their intranets and enable employees to bookmark frequently-visited sites and publish blog entries.

“TagManage is built upon four basic, fundamental principles: bookmark, blog, tag, and share,” said Samuel Bressi. (We'll let you guess what his position is in the company.)

“Users can apply tags to bookmarks, blogs, and even other users, creating a social mesh of shared resources.”

Bookmarks and blog entries can be marked either public or private, making it a dandy addition to enterprises that want to reinvigorate the line between public and private activity.

Mess around with TagManage at the TagManage website.

The old knock on open source software has always been the lack of a vendor to help customers get the product installed and up-and-running. Many IT managers have experienced this frustration first hand when they have downloaded and uncompressed an open source product but then had no idea how to proceed.

If only there were people or companies who could help with installation, configuration, and training?