Wordpress News & Articles

This week Packt (news, site) has announced one winner a day for its 2009 Open Source CMS awards. Already they've revealed that:

• Plone (news, site) won 2009 Best Other Open Source CMS
• Drupal (news, site) won 2009 Best Open Source PHP CMS and the first inaugural 2009 Hall of Fame award
• ImpressCMS (news, site) won 2009 Most Promising Open Source CMS

Today's category is the last: 2009 Overall Best Open Source CMS.

Congratulations to WordPress (news, site) for taking home the crown. Tied for runners up are MODx (news, site) and SilverStripe (news, site).

The WordPress project receives US$ 4,000 in prize money, while MODx and SilverStripe each receive US$ 2,500. In addition to the money, WordPress also becomes eligible for the Hall of Fame category next year.

In the winners' announcement, Packt Publishing stated that, "After Pixie and Pligg [tied for runners up] for the Most Promising CMS category, this is the second time the combined opinion of judges and the public was evenly divided for two CMSes, awarding each of them a first runner up spot."

Hannon Hill (news, site) goes all social with its latest update for Cascade Server CMS, offering access to Twitter and WordPress with more to follow.

For most of us, a good day is being able to go about our business without any annoyances getting in our way. Unfortunately, when your business involves the Internet, mere annoyances rate much higher on the "good" scale than, say, discovering your Web CMS was hacked at least six months ago and you've been leaking critical user data like a sieve.

If that user data involves sensitive information such as medical data, credit card numbers, bank account information or anything else that is subject to either regulations or sleepless nights over losing your shirt, you should at least investigate security add-ons.

Billed as a content platform for Web developers, here comes BitsyBox offering data stores, easy editing and a content delivery network in one hosted Web CMS.

It's that time again. WordPress (news, site) is just a little ways away from releasing their 2.9 milestone and they need all the help they can get to exterminate the lingering pests.

Everyone is invited to join in on the two scheduled massacres. The first is November 5-7 (WordPress is stretching this one through the weekend to accommodate as many schedules as possible) and the second will take place November 14-16. Want to kill vermin right alongside Mark Jaquith? Head over to WordCamp NYC (which coincides with the second hunt) and visit the special Hacker Room, a location set up for developers to visit and work on 2.9 bug tickets together.

There are 3 ways in which to participate:

• Test: Review all the patches that need testing by reviewing WordPress' report here. Jot your results in the comments section for all to review.
• Fix: WordPress has also provided a report for bugs that need patches. They encourage you to target the ones that seem like they'd wreak the most havoc or would have the biggest impact once fixed.
• Report: If you find a brand new bug, create a ticket.

New to the bug hunt process? Don't worry, WordPress believes in equal opportunity. Check out the process for becoming part of the team here. 

Products in the simple CMS arena should be light, focussed, but still leave the user with a positive feel. How does now out-of-beta Viviti stack up?

Hannon Hill's Web CMS (news, site) Cascade Server 6.4 (beta) is now available for download, offering a new framework for interacting with data from other services.

Getting users to update their platforms can be a pain, but WordPress developers (news, site) always seems up to the challenge. Aware that it's not always laziness that contributes to an audience's disinterest, a beta version of a new feature has been rolled out to test the compatibility of plugins against various versions of WordPress. This way, you can be sure catching up won't mean leaving behind your favorite little blog bloaters.

One of the simplest methods of ensuring that your published words don't end up looking functionally illiterate is to use a spell checker. But what if you're in need of a bit more help?

You could pay an editor or make an agreement with a friend to edit each other's work. But you may not be able to afford an editor, or may not have any friends you wish to trust in this way, or may not have any friends, period. Sniff.

Now here's the good news. WordPress (news, site) users gained access to a built-in personal editor in September, thanks to Automattic's (news, site) release of the SaaS-based spell checker called After the Deadline.

After the Deadline was already available for free to WordPress users. Now, Automattic -- a company name that all but begs for a spell checker -- has taken this spelling, grammar and style-checking tool, and released it under the GPL as open source. There are a number of client libraries for interfacing with the tool:

• jQuery API (MIT/LGPL)
• Python Library by Miguel Ventura (MIT License)
• Ruby Library by Danny Tatom (MIT License)
• TinyMCE Plugin (LGPL)

Whether or not you trust such tools, they can be an interesting way to catch awkward portions of your writing, and at the very least make you think about the phrases they highlight. Try out the demo and consider whether such a tool would enhance your open source content management system. The source code is available here.

(And yes, we fed this article through the demo. It had a couple of reasonable complaints, one that made no sense, missed some items we had expected it to mark, and didn't completely choke on the URLs.)

Well guys, we're still inching our way towards an official release of WordPress (news, site) 2.9. The journey so far has been full of joy, pain, tiny iterations and most recently, some serious security issues. So serious, in fact, that WordPress developer Peter Westwood recently reported that the team will be back-porting some changes to the 2.8 branch.

Though Westwood claims the move is to get the features out there for WordPress users to try prior to the 2.9 release, we presume it's also partially because the popular blogging platform suffered some backlash when a particularly nasty worm wreaked havoc in September.  

The newest release, WordPress 2.8.5, features the following goodies expected in 2.9:

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins

Thinking of holding out until the official 2.9 release to upgrade? Team WordPress urges you to think again. They're even offering up a plugin called WordPress Exploit Scanner which searches the files on your website, as well as the posts and comment tables of your database for anything suspicious. 

So go on, get started already. 

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• E-mail and Texting are on Generation Y's Most Wanted List
• SharePoint Steps Up Social Aspects of Enterprise Software
• Reputation Management Tips From Google
• WordPress Blogs Get Mobile-Friendly

On Friday we announced the release of the second annual 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. The project was a collaboration with water & stone, an APAC-based interactive agency. The initial announcement addressed what the report covers, its purpose and some key highlights.

For the sake of disclosure, while I did look over the preliminary survey and advise on some tweaks, I otherwise wasn't involved in this report and am looking at this data with fresh eyes and no particular bias from the side of CMSWire.

Now let's take a look more in depth.

Following on the heels of the 2008 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, this year we collaborated with water&stone to produce an improved 2009 version. The report is an interesting study of 20 dominant systems in the market. It's really not about which CMS is best, nor about relative comparisons beyond brand strength, sentiment and adoption patterns. We're aware of this.

Traditional and Social Media Analysis

What the study did was sniff around the nooks and crannies of our increasingly electronic and publicly broadcast lives and endeavor to quantify the relative brand strengths, brand sentiments and adoption patterns for the top 20 most popular content management products. In addition, we ran a survey on CMSWire.com a little ways back. With this tool we were able to directly pose questions to our readership -- and more than 1200 of you took to the task (thank you!).

This year's analysis looked at Alfresco, CMS Made Simple, DotNetNuke, Drupal, e107, eZ Publish, Jahia, Joomla, Liferay, MODx, OpenCms, phpWebSite, Plone, SilverStripe, Textpattern, TikiWiki, Typo3, Umbraco and WordPress.

Key Conclusions: 3 Dominate, Many Are Vibrant

What jumped quickly out is that The Big Three -- Joomla, WordPress and Drupal -- led the survey set across a wide range of measures. However, the top slots are not static, Joomla has gained market share over Drupal, and WordPress with its hosted version has what looks like a smoother path to adoption.

The report identifies less obvious stars. Alfresco, a vendor focused on both document management and web content management, performed well across a number of categories, and led the Java-based open source CMS race over its nearest rival, Liferay. DotNetNuke led the .NET-based open source CMS category, though Umbraco is up and coming.

The report goes on to identify reasons why DotNetNuke's position may soon be changing. In addition to naming the market leaders, the study identifies projects whose market share and brand metrics indicate they are at risk or facing a closing window of opportunity. A metric we found of particular interest was the product evaluation rates versus the adoption rates.

The 90+ page report is available for free and includes profiles of each of the systems covered.

New Web CMS Soapbox tries to differentiate itself in a crowded market. Having been developed organically as the system that its creator used to develop websites for others, it is available now as a hosted service for all to try. 

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.