Blogging Platforms News & Articles

Six Apart (news, site), the blogging pioneer that hasn't garnered much attention in over a year, started making headlines again last week. Though executives are reportedly denying any goings-on, rumor has it that the company is looking to make a deal in the Japanese market. 

This week Six Apart (news, site) launched their very own microblogging service to complement the burgeoning family of TypePad conversational media hubs. TypePad Micro aims not to compete, but to work in tandem with popular services like Twitter.  

Considering their track record, WordPress (news, site) has been sort of lacking in the tiny iterations department. It's not without good reason, of course; the team behind the popular Web platform has been hard at work on version 2.9. Just yesterday they announced an opportunity for those who can't wait to get their hands on it.

Being a part of the testing process this time around is just like every other time, save for one cool detail. In addition to the usual (the wp-testers mailing list, or the Trac ticketing system) WordPress is offering the help of a handy little plugin. The WordPress Beta Tester converts a test install of the latest release version of WordPress into a beta test install of the up and coming release.

"During the beta phase we are going to focus on the stabilization of the new features and the removal of existing bugs which are well-understood and have easily testable solutions," wrote Peter Westwood of WordPress on the team's development blog. "During this process we will not be adding any more enhancements so as to ensure that the focus is on making the 2.9 release as bug-free as possible."

You can read more about the the new plugin here, or get it directly from WordPress Extend.

Westwood says the team is aiming to release WordPress 2.9 beta 1 around the end of this month and hopefully a final release in either late November or December. This probably means that in no time we'll be back back to covering those tiny iterations we missed so much. Keep up with us as we keep up with WordPress.

Socialcast (news, site) seems to've echoed various vendors' recent-and very successful-forays into providing solutions for revealing what goes on behind the scenes of enterprise microblogging.

Their new analytics software, Social Business Intelligence (SBI), gauges social activity within company walls and scrutinizes interactivity patterns between users. Such deep digging allows the tool to cut out the useless chitchat and focus solely on valuable discussions.

Six Apart (news, site) is all over the place lately. In addition to Movable Type integrating Zemanta, the company has two new introductions to make. 

TypePad Cloud Platform is a new tool that enables developers to build social applications via the system's API. Meanwhile storage, infrastructure and organization of the data is left to TypePad's cloud environment.  Secondly, meet TypePad Motion, the first application built on the new platform. Typepad Motion is a microblogging app that evolved from Pownce, which Six Apart acquired last year. 

Founding WordPress (news, site) developer Matt Mullenweg posted some interesting stats about the platform in his blog earlier this month: "Last week you guys published 1.4 million new blog posts, but you only ran the spell checker about 204 thousand times. Ahem. The two possible explanations for this are that we’re all perfect writers or that we just forget to run the spell checker."

Since the majority of you probably fall into the former category, listen up! Automattic, the company behind WordPress and other popular solutions like Akismet and PollDaddy, just cut loose a new and improved spell check and grammar tool that works live with your blog. 

Well, well, well, look who's aging all gracefully and stuff. On Sunday August 23rd, our dear Blogger (news, site) hits the double digit mark.

To celebrate their birthday the team that gave everyone the power of the press announced they'll be  giving even more. That is, over the next few weeks they'll be rolling out a handful of new features. Some of the updates will be direct results of the product ideas survey Blogger posted back in April, while others will be tools the company has had on the back burner for some time now.

In fact, they're so excited for their decade dance that they let one new feature slip a tad early. Fresh support for the PubSubHubbub protocol means that as feed readers adopt PubSubHubbub, blog posts will surface immediately for users. This currently includes Google Reader, FriendFeed, Liveddoor Reader and FavIt, meaning a ton of you web writers out there are probably already benefiting from it.

For more of the latest news about the platform and what they've got in store for their 10th year, hang around here.

Team WordPress (news, site) has discovered and destroyed another security bug. This particular problem was considerably more serious than the privilege escalation issues we saw in the last security update, but still not terribly detrimental.

Via a specially crafted URL, an attacker could bypass a security check to verify a user requested password reset. In the event of an unauthorized reset, the first account without a key in the database (usually the administrative account) would have its password reset, and the new password would be emailed to the account owner. Says Matt Mullenweg, founding WordPress developer: "This doesn’t allow remote access, but it is very annoying."

As usual, the WordPress development team was quick to fix the issue, and version 2.8.4 can be downloaded here.

Continue to follow us as we follow the famous web CMS here, and keep the solution healthy by contributing your feedback to the weekly dev chats here.

Well boys and girls, you voted and the results are in. WordPress (news, site) promised to release some semi-solid details on the features that made the 2.9 cut at some point in July, and so they came, skidding into home at the last possible minute.

Over 3,500 WordPress enthusiasts responded to the survey posted a few weeks ago, asking participants to choose which multimedia features sounded like winners among those that had been suggested (Flickr-like photo stream, a revised media UI, bulk media input API, media albums, easier embeds, etc.). The exact features for 2.9 are still being worked out, but the results of the survey provide a pretty good idea of how things are going to go down in the coming months. Et voilà:

As you hardcore bloggers may or may not know, WordPress kicked out a beta version of their first application for the BlackBerry earlier this month and, mirroring their official platform release pattern, has since announced about a thousand (six) tiny iterations.

Since the announcement of the native application, a few similar offerings from competitors have come out of the woodwork. Wicked, an application from a company called ScreamingToaster, is one such solution that caught our eye. On the downside, it costs money. On the up, it seems (for the time being) to be relatively advanced as it saves blogs in the cloud, comes with a social GPS feature and integrates with popular tools like Twitter.

Things are moving pretty quickly in the Web CMS world, as usual. Accordingly, hot on the heels of WordPress 2.8 comes an announcement about 2.9. With the upcoming version already in the development process, the team behind the highly popular blogging platform dropped a few hints on us last week about which direction the future is taking them in.

A sizable chunk of the WordPress audience recently expressed the desire for more/better media features. As a result, version 2.9 will reportedly come with an infrastructure better equipped for media handling.

In order to determine exactly what WordPress users wanted to see the most, the development team posted some possible features on their blog and told anyone and everyone to vote. Included in the list of possibilities: Flickr-like photostream, a revised media UI, bulk media input API, media albums, easier embeds, better media settings and custom image sizes, among others. Unfortunately the survey is already closed, but word on the 'Press street is that a more solid list of the anticipated 2.9 features will be posted some time this month, after the priority has been determined.

Naturally, the number of contributing developers will play a large part in the process, so if you’ve ever thought about taking a dip in the WordPress development pool, now is the time. Developer chats are held each Wednesday in the WordPress IRC channel (irc.freenode.com #wordpress-dev) at 9 PM UTC (5pm Eastern, 2pm Pacific). Not a developer? Don't worry, you can still keep tabs on the latest and greatest WordPress news here.

Back in December 2007, Six Apart announced that the Movable Type (MT) blogging system was going open source. The move was greeted with enthusiasm, but the momentum never really seemed to build from that point. Now a group of ex-Six Apart staff and other MT enthusiasts have taken matters -- and the code -- into their own hands. Say hello to Open Melody. Let's have a look.