Gadgetopia

WordPress.com: Looks like Wordpress is starting hosted blogs at wordpress.com. The software is still available for download and self-hosting at wordpress.org.

WordPress Wins Best Open Source Social Networking CMS: I was a judge on this panel. Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress ...

WordPress : Looks like a good blogging platform built on PHP / MySQL, which is just so much more hackable than the Perl / MySQL backend Movable Type uses. GPL, even. WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a ...

Over the last couple of weeks, we've had fun working with the gang at Federated Media to put together their Holiday Gadget Guide. Deane's one of the contributing authors, so I'm sure he'll post a little more about it later on. It was a fun little site to put together ...

WordPress's idea of SQL injection security: addslashes: I found this post while I was in the middle of wrestling with this, exact problem and it was driving me nuts, so I'm sympathetic to this guy's plight. And he puts it so well. I've decided to launch a whole new category ...

WordPress 2.1 Ella: A roundup of the new features in WordPress 2.1. Gmail started a revolution, it seems: Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again. This is good too: You can set any "page" to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere ...

WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2: This is pretty bad. Yikes. This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took ...

On PHP: Matt from WordPress fame gets all uppity on PHP5. Fast forward 3 more years and PHP 5 has been, from an adoption point of view, a complete flop. Most estimates place it in the single-digit percentages or at best the low teens, mostly gassed by marginal frameworks. Even ...

WordPress on Yahoo: As if Movable Type on Yahoo! wasn't enough, now you can have WordPress pre-installed. When we started, Yahoo asked "What would the perfect blog host do?" and their team has been really amazing in executing on a really kick-ass platform for serious bloggers. It took a little ...

Revolution WordPress Theme: I have to say that I m really smitten with this guy s WordPress themes. He s selling them, and he s used them to hot-rod WordPress into several different vertical platforms. The Revolution themes are widget-ready, customizable themes that provide ideal solutions for online magazines, online newspapers, and other websites ...

You Don't Have To Be Pretty To Be Successful: Joseph Scott has some commentary and a lot of good links on the state of the WordPress codebase. There are lots of good things about WP. It is fairly easy to install and from the user point of view it looks ...

Version 2.6: WordPress v2.6 gets versioning. Version/revision saves a copy of a post every time you edit it, allows you to view (not edit) each of those copies (revisions), Shows forward (in time) diffs between any two revisions. I m a big fan of versioning. As I discussed in this post, ...

I love Movable Type, but using WordPress on my personal site has highlighted two annoyances with the MT editing interface which are real problems. Rather than just being annoying, they really have an effect on the quality of writing and categorization. Semi-WYSIWYG editing. In WordPress, you can "Save and Continue" ...

WordPress Support: The WordPress support forums have started letting people tag their posts. The results are interesting. They have a list of tags with more common ones emphasized by font size, a la Flickr.

I don't mean to go on another rant about comment spam, but I'm suffering under another deluge on my personal site. While the Texas Holdem spammer was a blitzkreig, another spammer has deanebarker.net under slow siege. Someone out there is posting a spam comment to my site twice per hour, ...

I was in Barnes and Noble tonight, and I noticed a few things. There were four books on the shelves having to do with Mambo and/or Joomla (I refuse to add the exclamation point). This is the first time I've seen books on those systems in my local store. I ...

Blogging systems have always confused "posts" and "pages." We've talked about this before: what is the difference between a time-sensitive "post" and an "eternal" page? At what point does a "post" get re-visited and revised enough that it should become a page? We wrote about this at length almost two ...

bbPress > Home: This is the new forum software for WordPress. It's really nice to use, and the tag thing is handy. bbPress is focused on web standards, ease of use, ease of integration, and speed. Most software in this space is focused on features like avatars or file attachment ...

Once again, Matt Smith has come and rescued me from spammers. A couple of weeks ago, I was at my wit's end. Some commentors recommended Akismet, but I thought it was WordPress-only. Then Matt emailed me to tell me there was a Movable Type port. Given Matt's track record of ...

Here s a fact: intranets don t have to be crazy-complicated. Intranets are fundamentally about sharing simple information, which is not as hard as some people make it out to be. As simple as this is, most organizations either have no intranet, or a smattering of HTML pages someone threw together ...

PHP Blogging Apps Vulnerable to XML-RPC Exploits: This is very, very bad. Many popular PHP-based blogging, wiki and content management programs can be exploited through a security hole in the way PHP programs handle XML commands. The flaw allows an attacker to compromise a web server, and is found in ...

miniBB :: Evolution of bulletin boards: A neat little bulletin board system I've been using over at the WordPress support area. PHP / MySQL. miniBB ("minimalistic bulletin board") is flat linear (non-tree) version of highly customizable bulletin board. It inherits most popular features from the bulletin boards the planet has ...

GoPHP5.org - helping speed the transition to PHP 5.2: On the heels of our WordPress/PHP5 discussion yesterday and the PHP end-of-life announcement, this site is trying to get everyone to abandon PHP4 and break backwards compatibility. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any ...

Tossing this out for discussion and/or flaming In what order are the top open-source content management systems, from biggest to smallest? Yes, it s vague. By biggest, I mean a back-of-the-napkin estimation of factors like number of installs, number of developers, size of community, magnitude of momentum, strength of buzz, ...

About three weeks ago, an upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type killed our comment spam filtering. I finally had an hour to track the problem down, and it turns out the upgrade cleared the WordPress API key that MT-Akismet needs to function. We ve restored the key, and comment ...

Open Source CMS Award: Packt is doing their awards again this year, and I ve been asked to judge in Best Open Source PHP CMS. Go nominate your favorite app. Nominations are open through August 25. Now entering its third year, the Award has established itself as an important measure for ...

Internet Explorer: Customize the Image Toolbar: You know that little toolbar that appears in Internet Explorer when you hover over an image it lets you save the image or email it or whatever. Did you know you can turn this off in HTML? Or ...

Day One was busy The Next Content Wave: Hypersyndication We started off with a keynote talk from Dick Costolo, who is the guy who created and sold FeedBurner and now works for Google. He talked about how far syndication has come. If you went to CNN or Gannett even ...

Saunderslog 3.0 launches: We just launched a new site for Alec Saunders, and he was nice enough to blog about it. So, earlier this year I decided that my old design was getting kind of long in the tooth. Nor did I have the time to devote to building a ...

BuiltWith.com - Web Technology Profiler: This is a very cool idea that isn t quite what I hoped it would be. Web Page Technology Profiler [ ] Find out what a site is built with. You can enter a URL, and it will contact that URL and do some analysis on what ...

Textpattern: This app has finally been released in "gamma," whatever that is. Sounds like a pre-pre-pre-beta, which is what I thought an "alpha" was... When it comes to publishing on the internet, beginners and experts alike are met with a bothersome paradox: word processors and graphics applications allow anyone to ...

Someone on the ProNet mailing list mentioned ecto today. It's a desktop blogging client seems like a good one. ecto is a feature-rich desktop blogging client for MacOSX and Windows, supporting a wide range of weblog systems, such as TypePad, MovableType, WordPress, Drupal, Nucleus, Blogger, and more. ecto is ...

Since everyone but the janitor started blogging at Microsoft, they've been aggregating their blogs into one big honkin' feed that I call The Fire Hose, since reading it is like trying to drink from a fire hose. I find some interesting stories occasionally, but I probably missed 50 since I ...

I've installed the Movable Type 3.2 beta, and there are a bunch of interface improvements. That's the big focus of this release -- ease of administration. They've worked very hard to make the admin side scale to thousands of posts and comments, and they've done a wonderful job. The listing ...

I read a great white paper on open-source content management last night called "Content Management Problems and Open Source Solutions." In it, the author examines several different scenarios and profiles over a dozen different open-source content management systems, explaining the key features of each and why it's right for the ...

PHP Sucks, But It Doesn t Matter: Jeff Atwood essentially closes the PHP sucks argument by agreeing with it, then explaining why it doesn t matter. The TIOBE community index I linked above? It s written in PHP. Wikipedia, which is likely to be on the first page of anything you search for ...

Joe and I have been working with eZ publish for the last few months. It is, without a doubt, the best content management system I've ever used. I got more done in one week with eZ publish than I did in nine months with Documentum. I like it so much, ...

People love Josh Clark. He wrote the Big Medium CMS (AMS?), and we did an interview with him a while back. Read the comments on that post -- as I said, people love Josh Clark like Germans love David Hasslehoff. And here's a page that may demonstrate why: Is Big ...

Six Apart ProNet - Plugin Directory - Built for 3.2: If you're on the latest version of Movable Type, take a browse of the plugins built to take advantage of the new API hooks in that version. There's some really great stuff here: Ajaxify Ajaxify is a set of plugins ...

On PHP: There have been a lot of blogs jumping around on PHP in the last few days, and I've finally tracked it back to its source. Tim Bray -- one of the "pillars of the Web," if I can be so bold -- posted about PHP a week ago. ...

It struck me last night that there are two models of RSS aggregation: "real-time" and "stored" (yes, I just made those two terms up...). Real-time are aggregators like Mozilla's Sage extension. This model goes and gets the feed real time and displays it on-demand. In a lot of ways, they're ...

I have something of a small ethical dilemma. Let me explain I have been selected as a judge in Packt s Open Source CMS Awards. In this capacity, I m being asked to rate whatever CMS are nominated. I m fairly sure Joomla will be one of the nominees, along with Drupal, ...