WordPress

The level of interest in content management systems astounds me. Each year, I continue to see at CMS Report an increase of visitors looking for information on content management. Our stories tend to focus on open source CMS more than proprietary applications and evidently that's the subject matter that our readers want to read.

Below are the top ten stories of 2009 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. As you can see, stories involving Drupal, WordPress, Joomla!, Alfresco, and Nuxeo took center stage. These stories might not have been the ten I would have personally picked for this list, but I'll respect the numbers behind their ranking.

1. Mollom: A solution for comment spam
2. 2009 Best Open Source PHP CMS: Drupal wins, Wordpress and Joomla! not far behind
3. Serving a home for my Drupal site
4. WordPress leads the Packt as 2009 Overall Best Open Source CMS
5. Allen Ellis: Why the Packt CMS Competition is Broken, and How to Fix It
6. Google PageRank
7. Alfresco Module Obtains U.S. DoD 5015.02 Records Management Certification
8. Using Wordpress city saves $19,000
9. Cheryl McKinnon, Nuxeo, and Open Source
10. Drupal Gardens preview video by Acquia

The interest in Nuxeo took me by surprise and I'll be adding the CMS to my top 30 CMS Focus page as time allows. As always, our thanks to all those who continue to return to this site to read the stories, join in on the conversation, and even submit articles. As I've said before, I'm not sure we would be doing this if it wasn't for the interest shown by others visiting the site.

There are a number of nice features and improvements that are included with the new WordPress 2.9. Probably the feature that will get everyone's attention is the improvements in the media-handling of images and videos. The improvements in this latest version of WordPress continue to show why this open source blogging application excels in usability.

Four features that the developers are highlighting in WordPress 2.0 include:

This year, I had the privilege of participating as a member on the judging panel for Packt Publishing's Overall Best Open Source CMS Award. As I mentioned last month, WordPress was declared the winner of the award followed by MODx, SilverStripe, DotNetNuke, and finally XOOPS. Since the award announcement, I've had a lot of inquiries asking me how and in what order did I rank the content management systems. I decided to wait for a month before my posting my rankings of the Web applications because I wanted focus to remain on the declared winners and not my individual choices.

My rankings for the Overall Best Open Source CMS (with number one being the highest) were:

1. WordPress
2. DotNetNuke
3. SilverStripe
4. MODx
5. XOOPS

Each of the judges on the panel, selects their top three CMS from the five included in this category. The judges are given a lot of reign for how they rank the CMS and may consider a number of factors such as performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security. Despite the criteria given, the fact is the best CMS is the CMS you determine is best in meeting your project requirements. In other words, you may find that all five CMSes in this category meet your project needs or in some cases none of the given applications will meet your requirements. Despite how I ranked the CMS you still need to do your own homework before choosing what your "best" CMS.

After four years, WordPress has finally earned respect from the judges in Packt Publishing's 2009 Open Source CMS Award. WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award and is finally being recognized for its evolution from a blogging application to a full fledged Web content management system. Packt also declared MODx and SilverStripe tied for the first runner up position in this award.

We are pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress has won this Award for the first time in the past four years, earning itself a place in the Hall of Fame category for the Award next year.

While WordPress occupied the top spot in the Overall Award, the other two extremely popular finalists MODx and SilverStripe tied for the first runner up position. After Pixie and Pligg sharing a similar result 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.

It is important to note that neither Drupal nor Joomla! competed in the Overall Best category as previous winners in this category compete in the Hall of Fame category. This year, Drupal out competed Joomla! in both the Hall of Fame category as well as the Best Open Source PHP CMS category. Joomla! may be out of luck this year but you surely can't count them out as the upcoming Joomla! 1.6 version should keep them competitive for next year. With three CMS now included in the Hall of Fame it should be an interesting rivalry between the three in 2010.

Some personal notes about the 2009 winners: As one of the judges for the Overall Best Open Source CMS, I too thought WordPress earned the spot for first place. However, I thought DotNetDuke should have been a runner up as I was impressed with it from a usability perspective. Similar to last year, I plan to eventually write a post of my review and the order in which I judged the CMS to be the best among the five finalists for this category. For now though, I don't want to take the spotlight away from either MODx or SilverStripe as the well deserved runner up winners.

Drupal was announced the winner in Packt Publishing's 2009 award for Best PHP Based Open Source CMS. Instant replay at the finish line may have been required as Packt reports that Wordpress and Joomla! were not too far behind the leading CMS.

We are pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.

Akismet is a powerful spam filter that’s built in to WordPress.com. But what if you’re running a self-hosted WordPress blog?

This tutorial will give you the simple information you need to install and activate Akismet on your WordPress.org blog.

Source

Matt Mullenweg posted on his blog a link for how to install and run a Wordpress blog on a Palm Pre. We're not talking how to manage your Wordpress site using your cell phone as a client. Instead, we're talking about running Wordpress with the Palm Pre as the Web server. That's pretty impressive.

In ten or twenty years from now why couldn't you host your blog or personal CMS on a portable device? Could what appears to be a gimmick today actually be the future for Web applications? I don't think it's that far fetch of an idea as many might think...

Wordpress users have been encouraged to update to to the latest version of Wordpress, currently at 2.8.4. It appears there is a nasty worm going around attacking Wordpress sites.

During the past year, I've posted various articles on social publishing systems. Open source content management systems such as Drupal, Movable Type, and WordPress have done a lot in the past year to better incorporate social media features into their web applications. I think the topic of social publishing will continue to be an interesting topic as the CMS continues to evolve in order to stay current with the current social tech trends.

The following is a WordPress.TV video of Andy Peatling, Automattic, talking about the WordPress social networking system BuddyPress at WordCamp Montreal. In the video Peatling gives practical advice for people considering WordPress/BuddyPress as a platform.

The Blog Herald has posted an interesting piece on an unannounced change in WordPress 2.8. Basically, Wordpress no longer notifies other servers of your updated articles at the same time you post those articles.