Content Management Matters ™

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.

Mochila, the online marketplace for high-quality syndicated media, announces a partnership with widget provider Gigya to add new distribution features to its network.

The new tie-in will enable Mochila users to utilize Gigya's Wildfire technology to distribute content in widget format.

Gigya is already partnered with numerous content providers including MetaCafe, Gaia, and c|net amongst others. These widgets enable viral connectivity between available content and the other half of Gigya's partnership family, which consists of just about all of the popular social networks.

One-click posting functionality lets Gigya users share content without leaving the content provider's site. Moreover, the widgets are particularly designed with a view to viral distribution.

Have a butcher's at this one, and you will get the picture:

If you are already part of the Mochila marketplace, grab a widget and spread the love!

When we last left our coverage of the W3C's soon-to-be standard for widget development, there was naught but an incomplete list of requirements.

My my, how things have changed as the World Wide Web Consortium has recently released an updated version of the Widgets 1.0 Working Draft.

Not to be confused with items that might be cranked in a factory, the W3C's idea of a widget is a small application (e.g. code snippet) that runs in a web browser as part of a web page. Examples include: clocks, stock tickers, newscasters, weather forecasters, and games.

The usefulness of widgets notwithstanding, the important thing to remember is that widgets can update and display remote data - like your Facebook status.

The goal of the Widgets 1.0 standard is to specify "widgets' packaging format, their configuration and processing model, launching by the user agent, version control, DOM APIs and events including communication between widgets, digital signing, accessibility, and discovery within HTML documents."

Here's to the W3C in their effort to standardize widget use before another innocent website is senselessly defaced.

For more information about the Widgets 1.0 specification, we encourage you to visit the W3C site.

Loath to ever be left out of a sandbox Yahoo! and Google have already begun to play in, last Friday Microsoft brought mash-up tool Popfly to the light of day.

Like its predecessors Yahoo! Pipes and Google's RSS API, Popfly promises to be the Web mash-up builder "for the rest of us."

SurveyGizmo has announced that their popular web survey and data collection tool can now can be used in your favorite Web CMS or blogging solution.