Weblog Tools Collection

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Thord Daniel Hedengren over at Devlounge has published an extensive checklist based on his experience of things to consider when using WordPress as a CMS, especially when it will be used for a client. His post covers a number of different situations you should think about ahead of time before you step into your favorite code editor. According to Thord, there are three things you need to consider before committing to WordPress:

1. Is the functionality needed covered by the WordPress core functions, and/or with the addition of (not too many) plugins? This is usually managing information pages (using Pages), and publishing news/press releases (using Posts). If I need to add a lot of custom stuff, including the custom fields, then perhaps it gets too complicated for the client.

2. Is there a good translation of WordPress available, so that your client can get the backend in their own language? Why should my Swedish customers not have their CMS in Swedish? There is no reason, of course, and it is easy enough to install a language pack.

3. Will my client be able to upgrade WordPress themselves, or do I need to make plans for this as well? This is true for most platforms out there, but nevertheless you’ll need to have an upgrade strategy.

I’ve never dived into the realm of setting up WordPress for a client so this is all new to me. However, I know a lot of you install and configure WordPress for your own clients. With that in mind, I’d be interested in knowing your own checklist of things to consider before committing them to WordPress.

Plume CMS: Here is another CMS system brought to my attention. It uses PHP and MySql. With a single installation of Plume you can have multiple websites, file management, multiple authors with different rights and websites in any languages thanks to a full utf-8 support. Plume CMS proposes a flexible plugin infrastructure to extend it and is fully accessible with output providing standard compliant code by default. There are some screenshots available and they look a lot like Blogger in many ways. Thanks Michael!

The original forum release thread can be found here. Download the new version from here.

This release candidate, accoring to Dean, is mostly a fix for the backend of things with a few interface tweaks. Look through the complete list of changes in that forum topic above.

Changes worthy of note include:

• Security and authentication fixes
• New (different) method of installing plugins
• Less tables, more “webstandardsy”
• Default pinger now Ping-O-Matic

Changes not done yet, but in another RC or two:

• Theme installation engine
• Metaweblog xml support
• Batch image uploads to directly create galleries

For Upgraders, dean suggests

To upgrade from previous versions, BACK UP YOUR CURRENT INSTALL and simply copy everything in the distro’s /textpattern/ directory into your existing /textpattern/ directory. You will need to re-enter anything you’ve set in /lib/admin_config.php – this nasty step should be eliminated next release.

Do not run _update.php! It gets run automatically when needed. Forget about it entirely!

Thanks Michael!

I have completed and published the last installment of my tutorial covering how to fake a CMS with WordPress.  You can find the announcement of part 1 here.

Part 2 covers some tips and tricks to extend the framework we created in part 1 using some apache tricks and a plugin or two.  Hope you find it helpful.

I have thrown together a tutorial that shows you how to use WordPress as a CMS… sorta.

Part 1 is up at my site, you can find it here.  Part two should be up soon, and will cover getting the most out of your new WPCMS by combining some plugins with a little apache magic.

Hope to see you there.

WordPress 1.2 “Mingus” is out. I am really excited about this release and will be upgrading most of my hacks and my plugins when I get a chance. This blog, as well as a couple of others will get upgraded as time goes on. In the meantime, here is a very small changelog. The rest of the *big* changelog can be found at the WordPress Wiki. That would also be a very good resource for upgrades etc.

* Sub-categories: Categories can be arranged hierarchically and infinitely deep. Multiple categories combined with sub-categories gives WordPress the most comprehensive taxonomy system of any blogging software available.
* OPML Export and Import: You can import and export OPML to systems like Bloglines or desktop aggregators like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.
* Automatic Thumbnail Creation System: WordPress has a refined upload feature that automatically creates thumbnails any size you want.
* Encyrpted passwords and cookies: All passwords in the database and password cookies are encrypted, ensuring maximal security.
* New plugin architecture: The new plugin architecture simplifies modifying or extending WordPress features. Plugins can now hook into nearly every action WordPress does.
* Localization of WordPress and Unicode support: The efforts put into internationalizing WordPress have borne fruit, and now you can adapt WordPRess to work in your native language. Several translations are already available.
* Advanced comment moderation: You can now fine-tune your moderation filters in a manner very similar to blacklists for other weblog tools. There is also mass-editing of comments, which makes it a snap to delete hundreds of comments with the click of a button, if necessary.
* Post preview: Near-instant previews while writing or editing articles help you proofread and make improvements before finally presenting your work of art to the world.
* RSS and LiveJournal Importers: The new RSS import script is the closest thing to an universal importer. It allows you to import entries from Radio weblogs even other blogging tools that we may not support specifically. The LiveJournal importer finally lets you have a full blooded self-hosted weblog without losing all your old LiveJournal posts.
* Unlimited update services: Now you can define multiple weblog change monitoring services to be pinged when you post.
* Directory flexbility: Now you can have all the WordPress files in one directory and the weblog in a higher level directory.

Congratulations, Matt! Great work as always and thank you!

There is a new version of Pictorialis out which fixes a couple of issues that were brought up with the Beta and you can download it from http://weblogtoolscollection.com/b2-img/pictorialis.zip

Fixes for this version include:
- Built in EXIF support which does not need pre-compiled EXIF in PHP
- There is a selection mechanism for versions of GD which makes sure you always get the best possible thumbnails and pictures conversion.
- This also has some file upload fixes which makes sure that the uploaded files do not get erased before the script gets a chance to grab the files.
- The installation process has also been better defined with some fixes for the installation troubles reported from the previous version.

As in the pervious version, this new version has the following features:
- XHTML compliant code
- Simple once click addition of photos, auto thumbnail and resizing
- Extraction of EXIF information from original photo and saved as meta
- Easy installation, as easy as installing WordPress
- Simple, clean design and look
- Simple navigation

My example PhotoBlog with WordPress can be found at Pictorialis

Please visit the new Pictorialis Forums.

[EDIT] New Pictorialis Project Page. Please Bookmark.

Check out the new version of WordPress with all new features and lots of cool new toys at www.wordpress.org Download your copy today!!
More on this and the features very soon!!
:mrgreen::grin::cool:

Well, it’s finally here, the newest version of Greymatter. The Greymatter Team is very pleased with this release. In fact, this is the most pleased we have ever been with a release. Some improvements include beefed up security, emoticons (or smilies, or whatever you want to call them), music and mood inputs, updated (and validated) default templates, and more. The complete changelog is here. There has also been a change to the license agreement, so make sure you read it thoroughly.

Read more and Download GM1.3 Here…

Drupal is a Content Management System which integerates a bunch of interesting features. I consider it to be a very useful tool for websites which cater to a lot of changing content and cater to a large and active userbase. The new version has some major improvements including changes to the original database. The list of features include

Collaborative Book
Friendly URL’s
Modules
Online help
Open source
Personalization
Role based permission
Searching
Recently Modified List
User management
User authentication
Polls
Templating
Threaded comments
Version control
Blogger API support
Content syndication
News aggregator
Permalinks
Platforms supported: Apache or IIS, Unix / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X
Database independence
Multi-language
Analysis, Tracking and Statistics
Logging and Reporting
Web based administration
Discussion forums
Caching

If this long list of features makes any sense to you, go to Drupal.org and download 4.3.0 Release Candidate of Drupal. Even though this is a release candidate, it is quite stable.
*Edit* I believe this comment from Gunnar Lanegnmark deserves to be a part of this post:

What you miss from the very long list is the taxonomy system. Most people do not realize how much you can do with the right taxonomy system. Categories are not served well by one simple hierarchical list. That is the most compelling feature in Drupal, and the one which originally made me dump PostNuke, MT etc.
Now - a year later - Drupal is rocking once again. The feature list is as long as the 100 modules. Drupal has the best approach for a professional Information Architect and for a programmer. I am not a programmer, and some things are hard to do in Drupal if you are not a programmer, but I know they will come, if I ask for them, and have the patience to wait.
In other systems things are too complicated for developers to change, because the fundamental philosophy of their coding standards is flawed - so you will never get what you want, simply because it is too hard to code.

The WordPress team has released a full version of WordPress (which is what this blog is, and it has been updated to 0.72 as well) 0.72. It has some very nice new features which were lacking in b2 and even in the old WordPress. There are more options to configure and much more control over the output of the blog. There is a pseudo Blogroll built into the system and even allows update information to be downloaded from the Blogrolling website. I did have some problem with the setup of the links, but realized soon enough that it was a mistake on my part. Just remember to enable the php include for “links.weblogs.com.php” at the beginning of the index.php and everything else takes care of itself. Here is the link from SourceForge to download the zip file with the updated WordPress.

Some of the bugfixes and updates listed on the WordPress DevBlog include:

Tons of bug fixes
Password protected posts
Cursor-aware quicktags (like using a fancy text-editor)
Improved API support: full or near full support for the Blogger, MetaWeblog, and MT APIs
New template design from Dave Shea
New configuration method, no more editing files!
New Blogger import
Improved upgrade and install scripts.
Improved post and edit interface
RSS feeds for comments
RSS feeds support Conditional GET
Improved XHTML auto-formatting
Improved Link Manager
Geographical data support
Improved image upload features
Improved calendar
Improved smilies function
No more invalid characters
Increased customizability
And more!

Let me know what you think of the new template included with the package. There are going to be a few more available.

This blog is written using Wordpress which is a branch of B2 and is about to become the primary distribution of b2/Cafelog. I have been using b2 for some time now and have really liked the flexibility of the code and the simplicity of the coding practices. Some of the features of b2/Wordpress that I really like a lot are:

Cafelog runs relatively efficiently on my server without being too much of a resource hog. I use my blog extensively and hope to keep publishing with b2 and Wordpress for a long time.