A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Wordpress 2.6 is more than a blog and is quickly evolving into a full-fledged Web content management system. While they're a little late, some of my competitors (CMS Watch) also recently noted the trend of blogging applications such as Wordpress taking on more CMS-like duties.
Drupal and WordPress, were the only CMS applications that made it to the winner list in CNET's hosted Webware 100.
The April issue of Adobe Edge contains the article, Review of open source content management systems. The article provides an overview of what the author describes as "five of the top open source software (OSS) solutions". The five open source CMS included in the author's list are CMS Made Simple, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and XOOPS. After reading the article, I found myself wondering how we "reviewers" can actually improve our reviews of open source CMS. More importantly, I've come to the realization that I can no longer claim to be non-biased in which CMS I believe is the best out there.
The author does a fine job in the article describing the similarities and differences between the CMS being reviewed. However, one of the issues I have in this article and many others I've read that review CMS is the big jumps in the conclusion:
Drupal, Joomla!, and XOOPS are best for building an e-commerce site because all three offer:
- Inventory management
- Support for third-party payment processing mechanisms (such as PayPal)
- Modules for shipping and sales tax calculators
- Shopping cart functionality
While it is true that Drupal, Joomla! and XOOPS can do e-commerce, none of these CMS can do that straight out of the box. I can just imagine a shop owner or design company trying Drupal, Joomla!, or XOOPS for the very first time and wondering, "how the heck do I get a shopping-cart into the CMS?". While the author does hint in the article that third-party modules are needed to make the e-commerce work, I think the author would have been better off better explaining that "some work is required" to get those features into the CMS.
Matt Mullenweg, founder of the WordPress blogging application, recently announced on his own blog that his Automattic company has hired Andy Peating. Andy Peating is the creator of BuddyPress which is a WordPress Multi-User based social network platform.
Matt Mullenweg announced this morning that WordPress.com users will now have 3 GB of free drive space for their blogs. Previously, WordPress.com only offered 50 MB of free space to those that signed up for the free service. Why are they doing this? Looks like Wordpress.com has no longer decided to play nice guy against their biggest competitors, TypePad and Blogger.
The following is an excerpt from Mullenweg's announcement at WordPress.com:
Yes, WordPress and XOOPS are two completely separate projects, but they do have at least one thing in common. Both Web applications were updated this past week to address known security vulnerabilities.
WordPress 2.3.2 was released to fix some very significant security bugs. The release addresses an exploit that can be used to expose your draft posts. WordPress 2.3.2 also "suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations".
I came across another one of those "top ten" lists, this time, "Ten Reasons to choose Wordpress". Among the ten reasons to choose Wordpress were:
I've used Wordpress before and I have to say I chose it for its functionality and not whether a million zillion people used it. I know there are people who use, join, and buy something because it is popular. However, I have thankfully never been one of those people.
Packt Publishing is starting to announce the various winners in its Open Source CMS Awards. The first category announced was the Best Open Source Social Networking CMS.
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 came out in front of Elgg and Drupal, who finished joint second.
Judges comments for their decisions included:
I recently upgrade a blog of mine from Wordpress 2.2 to Wordpress 2.3. My wife and I don't post on the blog much (looking for better ideas on how to utilize the site), but it's great to keep around to test the latest and greatest Wordpress has to offer. In my view, the most important new feature in Wordpress 2.3 is the baseline introduction of tags (also called taxonomy or even categories in other CMS applications).
Jared Ritchey has a few things to say about search engine optimization and WordPress.