Content Management Matters ™

Automattic, a web development corporation, has been making headway with its blogging and publishing platform WordPress, and now the company wants to spice things up with an integrated commenting system by the name of IntenseDebate.

The company recently purchased IntenseDebate for an undisclosed amount and plans on integrating some of its functionality within WordPress for the upcoming 2.7 release.

Every successful mega corporation knows that the first rule of acquisitions is: Why buy one of anything, when you can buy two for twice the price? Or, in Google's case, why own Blogger in the U.S., when you can also own Textcube in South Korea?

Video has quickly become one of the fastest growing media formats on the Internet, and that seems like a logical thing to occur. It makes sense that a company would attempt to integrate an interactive video solution into WordPress and Kaltura is the first solution that we've seen to address this. It is a decent try, but it is far from perfect.

It's only been out for a couple of weeks now, but Squarespace version 5.0 is generating a buzz that looks to threaten the blogging platforms we have all come to know and love. What's so special about this latest version?

We couldn’t help but notice the recent trend among blogging software products. Many of them are starting to look and act like web content management tools. Is it the seemingly inevitable merger with the Web CMS market, or the progression into the seemingly inevitable micro CMS arena?

Water & Stone, a web development company specializing in Open Source technologies, released a popularity survey of open source content management systems. In the analysis of 19 of the most prominent open source content management systems, Water and Stone evaluated CMS’s on the basis of Rate of Adoption and Brand Strength, as well as a variety of other viability indicators and trends.

The battle of the open source CMS continues. Well some might not consider it a battle, but there is a definite push to stay at the top by the leaders of the pack. WordPress is no slouch where that is concerned. In the news again, WordPress announced the release of version 2.6 -- a month ahead of their original schedule no less.

We all know that blogs and blogging are a shockingly effective means of sharing your most ingenious thoughts and building or participating in online communities.

Right. You got that message a while back. But considering that there are a number of options to choose from, the final step of getting going can still seem a touch daunting. We've put in a little spadework and here's a quick guide through the woods for the rest of us.

In this guide we show you how anyone can build and embed simple web widgets.

It's free, extremely easy and takes about five minutes to roll out your first creation. One of the best things about widgets is that you can enable sharing. Sharing widgets means more mashing of your ideas and content. More mashing means more community and more buzz around your brainchildren. For those who love to play and live in the WWW sandbox, this article is for you.

There are a number of ways to get targeted news, relevant to your niche, to your website. We've tried most of them, and the new NewsBar Wizard from Google News AJAX Search API is easily the best to date.

Simply enter the keywords you want to show up in the feed, copy the code generated by Google, and embed it to your website. The result enables visitors to view the latest headlines from each of the listed terms at a glance, and click quickly between news for the various search terms. The widget displays the results without any heavy-handed branding, flashy effects, or unnecessary load times. In short, it's Google doing what it does best -- giving us unparalled results faster than anyone else.

We show you exactly how to embed this fantastic new capability onto a WordPress -driven website, but the principle will be largely the same for most other content management and blogging platforms (if you use static html, it'll be easier again). It's a CPP situation (copy javascript, paste, pray...). You know the kind.

Here's where to get the Google NewsBar Wizard.

And here's the full lowdown, with embedding directions:

SixApart, creators of TypePad and the Facebook BlogIt tool (among many other things), is in the news again. This time they have created a blog anti-spam plugin for TypePad. Here’s the kicker, though…it works with WordPress also. Watchout Akismet…here comes TypePad AntiSpam.

Remember when you were a kid and you spent the summer at camp, lying in the sun, hiking, grilling and just plain having fun? Or maybe you just wished you were one of those kids.

Here's a camp that doesn't have the sunbathing, hiking or grilling. No, this camp is nothing like that at all. This is WordCamp. And the fun? Well, that's completely up to you.

Webware has announced its top 100 list. Some of the results were shocking…some surprise winners, some surprise non-winners and some that we all knew would make the list -- can you say WordPress?

As with any website, design can be key to your overall performance. Many already know that WordPress offers some great features for blogs and sites alike. But did you know that you can get great magazine style themes to ensure maximum design efficiency online?

It wasn't that long ago that we brought you an exclusive view of 7 really Superfly Plugins for Wordpress. But low and behold our ever resourceful colleague John appears to have missed a couple key ones. Now he said we could call him a dufus..but I don't know...

Instead, we offer up 4 more that should whet your appetite for WordPress, particularly around marketing capabilities. Just for fun, we'll give you the other seven as a reminder to John to get with the program.