ReadWriteWeb

Today's links include some thoughts from Bruce Schneier on surveillance, the latest update from OpenStack on community work and a post from Neelie Kroes (vice president of the European Commission) about cloud computing and data protection reform. Also, an easy blackout plugin for WordPress for sites participating in the SOPA/PIPA protest on January 18th.

A post by Kevinjohn Gallagher on "no longer recommending WordPress" to his clients has gotten a bit of traction lately. While there's legitimate criticism to be leveled at WordPress, Gallagher's isn't (for the most part) it. If you're approaching WordPress with the expectation that it's the be-all and end-all of content management systems (CMSes) you're going to be sorely disappointed. And frankly, I hope WordPress never tries to fit the ridiculous list of requirements that Gallagher tries to saddle it with.

What do you do when your blogging service is slated to go dark? If you're a user of the popular Italian blogging service Splinder.com, you pack up and move over to WordPress.com. At least, that's what Automattic is hoping while it throws a lifeline to the bloggers that are being thrown out into the cold.

Splinder.com announced the shutdown in November of last year. Today Daryl L. L. Houston announced an importer for Splinder.com on WordPress.com that's available to users ahead of the closure, slated for January 31st.

If you’re using WordPress, the options you are mostly likely to use are to run your own stack, use a shared hosting provider that offers WordPress or to go with WordPress.com. With the rise of PaaS offerings like OpenShift, though, why not run WordPress there?

As it stands, most PaaS providers are largely targeted at custom code rather than packages like WordPress. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get WordPress up and running, as Amit Shah demonstrated by moving his WordPress blog to OpenShift.

I started using my first content management system around 1997, when things were crude and clumsy. You would think in the past 15 or so years time would heal all and improvements would be made, but you would be wrong. The modern CMS is still in a state of flux.

In the early days of the CMS we had major players such as OpenText (which didn't really have true CMS functionality until around 2002), Vignette (which was a separate company before being acquired by OpenText in 2009), and Fatwire (which was acquired by Oracle this past summer), among others. Note a trend here? These were gigantic software installations, requiring six figure PO's and a phalanx of consultants to care for and feed these beasts. They were and still are the exclusive domain of the IT department, who treated them like other big-ticket software installations. If you wanted to build a corporate website, you need plenty of time to plan your requirements and implement the code.

WordPress has released version 2.0 of its Android app for mobile blogging, and as a WordPress for iOS user, I am jealous. The new app launches with a screen that covers just about every first action a mobile blogger needs. It's arranged in correct order of priority, and it uses a big, easily tappable grid of buttons with an "action bar" over the top to handle the rest.

Other additions are catching up with WordPress for iOS, but they're welcome. The post editor now has a formatting toolbar above the keyboard, and the app now has a tablet view. The app also adds post uploading in the background and gets a few other fixes. This is an open-source app, and it's the best mobile blogging interface I've seen yet. What's up with everybody else?

Yesterday WordPress launched version 3.3, named "Sonny," in honor of the great jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt. The release has two goals: To make the editing process easier for return users, and help introduce new bloggers to the platform.

The new toolbar is a combination of the admin bar and the old Dashboard header. There's now support for drag-and-drop media uploads. The new dropdown menu has become a hover menu. WordPress has also added touch support for iPad. WordPress users who have felt frustrated over the co-editing experience will find this update especially satisfying. Now, the red bar that tells you if someone is editing the post will only pop up if another is actually in the post. The 3.3 version has also added a Tumblr importer so that users can quickly bring their Tumblr blog into the mix.

BitNami is going beyond the value-add of bundling popular open source "stacks" of software to start including popular plugins and modules for the software. BitNami is starting with WordPress and Drupal by adding popular plugins for each of the popular Content Management Systems (CMS).

We've covered BitNami before. The service started by offering pre-configured "stacks" of popular open source software to simplify deployment. Initially the offerings were binaries that would install self-contained stacks on Linux, Mac OS X and/or Windows. (Not all stacks run on all OSes.)

Yesterday, WordPress announced WordAds, a program for hosted WordPress.com blogs to make some money off their sites. The first ads will come from the WordPress partnership with Federated Media announced at Web 2.0 this October. Interested users must apply to join WordAds, and it requires a custom domain, a service for which WordPress charges.

In return, WordPress is offering independent publishers a chance to make money on the WordPress platform. WordPress already provides a healthy living for thousands of self-employed developers, and now publishers have a chance to earn money from their WordPress content, too.

According to water & stone, the "big three" open source CMSes from 2010 continue to dominate in 2011. WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla all topped the company's survey of open source CMSes, with WordPress "clearly outpacing" Drupal and Joomla.

The survey started with 35 systems, which were narrowed down to 20 after getting the survey responses. The report primarily looked at rate of adoption and brand strength. All we really care about is rate of adoption, so let's look at that.