Data Circle

Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS (via: Matt)

I’ve been looking for a half-decent content management system for some time, as until now I’ve been writing my own code for each site that I run (Game Demos is just one example of this). This is a real pain, as I never have the time to write an admin interface—and therefore end up using phpMyAdmin—and I’m not as good as designing interfaces as other people. However, I have thought several times about using WordPress as a content management system—even though it started as a blogging platform—which is why the above article is particularly of interest to me.

Reasons why I would consider using WordPress as a CMS:

• Spam protection: Akismet is by far the most effective anti-spam solution I’ve come across, it probably performs better on blog comments than SpamAssassin does on my email. Sure, there are plugins available for several other systems, but with WordPress the support is practically built-in. Yes, it is technically a plugin, but it comes shipped with the distribution, so there’s one less step to mess around with.
• Familiarity: I use WordPress on several other blogs, including Rogue Tory and Politics Watch, so I’m comfortable with the interface and the way the software does things. In a similar vein, readers of my sites/blogs are also more likely to be familiar with the commenting interface for WordPress than for other content management systems.
• Theme availability: WordPress seems to have more themes available for it than any other blog or content management system I’ve seen. You can download thousands of free themes, pay less than $100 for an off-the-shelf professionally designed theme, or cough up for a designer to create a unique theme especially for your site—there are plenty of companies and individuals around who offer this service. What’s more, WordPress themes can be made—one of my major bugbears with Drupal is that all of the themes tend to look like Drupal sites.
• Plugins: Like themes, there are thousands of plugins available, enabling pretty much anything you could possibly want to do with WordPress—from formatting posts with Textile to cross-posting to other sites (e.g. LiveJournal) automatically. I’m not aware of any other system with the same variety of plugins (though Drupal probably comes a close second), and I suspect this is largely due to the ease of creating and installing plugins for WordPress.

I don’t have much time at the moment to play around with WordPress, as I’m busy writing up my MPhil thesis, but once that’s out of the way I think I will give it a whirl on Politics Watch as an experiment and see how far I get.

WordPress 2.6 is now available for download, with a fantastic array of new features, including:

• Wikipedia-style tracking of changes.
• Support for Gears, to allow static files (stylesheets, images etc.) to be downloaded to your local drive for faster access – though I’m not entirely sure how this differs from having files stored in your browser cache.
• The ability to preview themes before pushing them live.

From my own point of view, I’m not sure that I’ll get a great deal of benefit from any of the major changes, though I do like the automatically updating word count feature, and of course I’m glad to see nearly 200 bugs closed in this release.

As always, my advice is to upgrade as soon as possible, if only to take advantage of the security fixes. Upgrading is fairly simple, though you may need to be careful if you have lots of plugins or themes installed, and of course you should always take a backup of your database and existing installation, just in case something does go wrong. Naturally, if you have a WordPress.com blog, all of this will have been taken care of for you anyway.

WordPress, perhaps the most popular blogging software out there, has a new version out today, which plugs several security holes (though I’m not sure that exposing your draft posts really counts as a vulnerability) and fixes a few minor bugs.

Upgrading from any version post 2.1 seems to be pretty easy – I’ve just upgraded Data Circle, Politics Watch and Rogue Tory, all from different versions, and it took me about ten minutes in total. The CSS for the admin panel has been improved, so the fonts look a lot better under Linux. Security updates and bug fixes are of course also welcome, although these are less obvious improvements in a way because I haven’t seen the problems they cause.

Anyway, if you’re running WordPress on any of your sites, I’d strongly recommend that you download the latest release and then follow the upgrade instructions. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, and you’ll be protecting your site from several vulnerabilities by doing so. If this is too much effort for you, WordPress.com will keep things up to date for you, and items such as domain mapping cost a minimal amount per year.

If you’re running any blogs on WordPress, you should be aware that version 2.2.1 is now available. As well as a number of small bug fixes consisting mainly of cosmetic changes, the release also fixes three security vulnerabilities and so is a required upgrade. I’ve already upgraded one of my blogs without any problems and it was a fairly simple process, although I do wish there was an automated way of doing this, especially for people like me who have multiple blogs (I haven’t got round to trying WordPress MU yet).

I’ve just found out about Mrs. Wordpress, a site which sends up the “Mr. Wordpress”—the imaginary figure who is the first person to post a comment on every new Wordpress blog. It’s rather amusing, though I don’t know how long the author of the site will keep updating it.

I’ve finally got around to updating the WordPress installation that powers Data Circle to version 2.1. Initially there were a few teething problems caused by insufficient permissions for the upgrade script to make the necessary database changes, but these have now been fixed and everything is back to normal. I don’t think that any of the improvements are likely to be noticed by viewers of the site as they mostly seem to be backend changes, but hopefully things like the new version of the Akismet plugin will help keep spam away from the site.

I know that I haven’t posted for some time either but I’m hoping to rectify that over the next few weeks, so look out for new material coming soon.

bbPress 0.72 via Photo Matt

bbPress, the software used to power the WordPress support forums, has finally had an official release after two years in development. I’ve been waiting for a proper release of bbPress for some time, so needless to say I’m very happy to see it finally making it out of beta status.

bbPress includes some interesting and useful features that some other forum systems lack. It’s biggest selling point is of course the close integration with WordPress (though it’s possible to run the forums without a blog if you so desire), but it also has built-in support for Akismet, the comment spam solution which seems to be very effective—bar the occasional downtime and false negatives.

I wish I had time to get involved with the development of bbPress as I think it has the potential to be a really useful piece of software, but for the moment I’ll have to be content just using it instead.

Via Photo Matt: Simpler integration with WordPress

bbPress is the software used to power the WordPress support forums, and has been available as an alpha release for some time now. However, until recently it’s been a bit of a pain in the backside to integrate with the blogging software, even though the intention of the bbPress developers seems to be for the two products to work together (though naturally there’s no obligation to run WordPress just because you have a bbPress installation and vice versa). Thankfully that problem is gradually being resolved, and it appears that the two products are much easier to integrate than the last time I tried installing bbPress. If I get a few spare minutes this weekend (though this is unlikely looking at my current workload!), I’ll see if I can throw together a test blog/forum combination to see if it really is that easy.

I’m not sure whether it’s just me or not, but Akismet doesn’t seem to be catching any of my comment spams at the moment, and I’m getting connection refused errors when trying to connect to the service. I’ve had about 300 spams get through already and there seems to be no sign of them slowing down.

If anyone knows of a generic spam catcher that has a WordPress plugin but can also easily be accessed from other PHP scripts (Rogue Tory gets an awful lot of comment spam and it’s running a custom blog system that I wrote), please let me know.

Update: The guys at Akismet have posted about the downtime, it’s great to see such a quick response from what is mostly a free service, and on a bank holiday weekend too.

WordPress.com, the popular site for hosting your blog if you want to run WordPress but don’t feel like installing it yourself, has recently announced paid upgrade options in the form of custom CSS, in which you can edit the themes provided to you by the site or even create your own new ones.

They’re also currently testing domain mapping, which is a feature that I think many people would like to see. It’s also important from a competitive point of view, as you can use Blogger on your own domain and TypePad also offers this feature. I’m actually surprised that this wasn’t the first feature to be implemented as I would have thought it was the most requested feature, but I suppose it might require more behind the scenes work than things such as custom CSS.

As well as the two upgrade options already mentioned, there’s also a post for discussing paid upgrade ideas, so if there’s something else that you’d like to see and are willing to pay for then it might be a good idea to add a comment there and see if it makes it onto WordPress.com at some point.

The only problem I see with all these paid upgrade options is that they could add up to rather a lot of cash if you wanted several of them. It could end up being the case that if you need more than one or two of the features then it will be cheaper to buy a budget hosting account instead and install WordPress on that. Having said that, WordPress.com does offer you the advantage of not having to upgrade your software whenever a new version is released, which I suspect is a major selling point for many non-technical people who want to have a blog without worrying about the underlying software.

Further coverage

• WordPress.com adds paid upgrades
• Big Day
• WordPress.com adds Private Blogs and Custom CSS Upgrades