WordPress

Wordpress has dominated the list of top content management systems for years; however, this could soon change. With the popularity of SquareSpace and other content management systems rising, Wordpress could soon see users leaving for a better suited website builder.

SquareSpace now has over 1.8 million websites and this number grows daily. The number is nowhere near Wordpress’s 60million websites; however, it is growing significantly annually and could kick Wordpress off the top spot in a few years.

With so many security issues, hacks and vulnerabilities in today’s WordPress websites the best defense and sure way to protect your website and data is to have a proper automated backups set.

There are many ways to take backups of your website, some webmasters prefer to take backups manually of their web files and databases. But to save time and be more productive there are many automated tools and services that can be combined and used to take backups.

WordPress 3.9 has been released with a number of refinements that WordPress hopes you'll "love". The changes and new features are solid but perhaps not as many as we've come to expect given past WordPress point releases. Some of the new features that can be found in WordPress 3.9 include improvements in the media editing experience, gallery previews, and live editing of widgets and headers.

As many of you know, I recently sold my shares in Agility – the web CMS company that I co-founded. Over the last three months, I have been experimenting with new technologies as I formulate the next step in my career.

As a first project, I decided to build a new website for a product that my wife’s company developed – the ClearBlue Ionizer. ClearBlue is a new technology for purifying water in pools and spas that drastically reduces the amount of chemicals required.

Years ago, I quickly discovered there was great public interest in comparisons of open source content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla. When you throw WordPress into the mix and you can attract an even greater audience. Despite how much traffic such headlines draw people in, CMS Report has been pretty selective when we provide or point to such articles. There is some uncertainty whether there is genuine value being provided in feature comparison articles which is why I've shied away from them in recent years.

Over the weekend, I spent some much needed time doing some maintenance work for my wife's photography site which runs on WordPress. One of the concerns I had with the release and automatic update of WordPress 3.8 is how it might impact the Photocrati theme package my wife uses for the site. So far, I haven't found any issues related to the WordPress 3.8 upgrade. I am a little concern we may have an issue with the Photocrati gallery not allowing her to add additional photos to a current gallery, but as far as I can tell this is a separate issue.

The month of August starts out with a bang for WordPress fans. We knew given Matt Mullenweg's State of the Word speech that it was only a matter of time when WordPress 3.6 would be released. Starting yesterday afternoon, site administrators such as my wife (it runs in the family) were quickly greeted with a notification that the WordPress update is available.

Yesterday's launch gives WordPress sites the availability of a new blog-centric theme (Twenty Thirteen), "bullet-proof" autosave and post locking, a revamped revision browser, native support for audio and video embeds, and improved integration with Spotify, Rdio, and SoundCloud.

A few months ago, CMS Australian enthusiast Said Salameh posted this excellent breakdown comparing the number of steps required to complete simple tasks between eight leading open source content management systems. He illustrates how simple things like editing a page or adding an article can take ten steps or more – far more than necessary. His post spawned a discussion on the Web Content Management group on LinkedIn drawing out frustrations from many in the industry about the complexity of content management systems – particularly open source systems.

A few days ago, WordPress 3.5 was released and I originally planned to write the typical "what is new in WordPress" article similar to what I've done in the past for CMS Report. However, I thought this time around I would also discuss how I'm using WordPress to support the website of one of my favorite photographers, Karen Ruby of Dakota Imagery. Certainly, in this article there is no cause for you to suspect my opinions are biased with regard to her photography skills despite the fact we've been married for 11 years and she is the mother of my child.

"From Friendster to Flickr to Facebook I’ve always been active on other sites, what we now call social media, but as my interest in those has waxed and waned I’ve always come back to my home on the web, powered by Open Source software on a domain I own. This is definitely the longest sustained activity I’ve done, and I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t continue the rest of my life, however long or short that may be."

- Matt Mullenweg, Ten Years of Blogging, ma.tt, June 16, 2012.