ReadWriteWeb

The first place I had ever seen an API actually at work was as part of an operating system. It was a strange OS at that, a permutation of CP/M that used a graphical front end called GEM, which would later be ported to the Atari ST. The definition was explained to me like this: An "interface," as everyone knows, is a specification for how electrical components interconnect. Well, now it's possible for an application program - the part that does what users need - to interconnect with the operating system, which does what the computer needs. This way the operating functions don't have to be built into every program, they can just be handed off to the OS and the connection will look seamless. The principle was called a layer of abstraction. It was 1984, and it was the first time I'd heard the term.

It would be wrong to call the concept "revolutionary," unless you measure time in units of eons. Nearly three decades after its introduction, only recently have businesses come to realize how widely this architectural principle could be applied. No longer do complex processes have to be bound to precise, policy-intrinsic procedures. If teams can work independently, and computer resources devised to suit each team individually, then all that needs to be specified is the exchange of information between them.

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.

At the end of this discourse, to borrow a phrase from my hero, Edward R. Murrow, a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest. But if you've seen this nest recently, you know that if it was fouled to any considerable degree, it might not look all that different anyway.

At one of Microsoft's sessions on HTML5 and CSS3 a few weeks ago, the lead program manager for Internet Explorer 10, John Hrvatin, was introducing Web developers to the basic concepts of layout. These were folks who held up their hands to show they've built Web sites for a decade or more. And for many of them, this was the first experience they ever had in considering the following elements: Column flow. White space. Gutter adjustment. Pagination. Visibility at a distance. Symmetry.

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.

No single Web technology has survived longer on life support than the intranet - the broader goal of employee intercommunication and content management, to which enterprises still aspire. Despite an over-abundance of very capable tools over the years, including content management systems and collaboration platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint, the element that companies have lacked to date has been inspiration. It's as if a construction firm had dumped all the best building materials into one big pit: With that much treasure in one place, how come no one builds houses with it?

This year's version of the spark for inspiration comes from social media, and the realization that while a low percentage of employees uses the company intranet, a higher percentage uses Facebook. Coinciding with this week's Gartner Symposium/ITExpo in Orlando, Florida, where "the social organization" is a principal topic, CMS market share leader OpenText's latest Social Communities 8.1 upgrade adds a curious new feature that's sure to get businesses talking: social data mining.

At the end of this discourse, to borrow a phrase from my hero, Edward R. Murrow, a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest. But if you've seen this nest recently, you know that if it was fouled to any considerable degree, it might not look all that different anyway.

At one of Microsoft's sessions on HTML5 and CSS3 a few weeks ago, the lead program manager for Internet Explorer 10, John Hrvatin, was introducing Web developers to the basic concepts of layout. These were folks who held up their hands to show they've built Web sites for a decade or more. And for many of them, this was the first experience they ever had in considering the following elements: Column flow. White space. Gutter adjustment. Pagination. Visibility at a distance. Symmetry.

Static sites have better performance than dynamic sites, but you lose a lot of features by giving up a content management system (CMS), right? Maybe not, if you have a framework like Octopress.

Last week I looked at static sites and cloud services, but even Todd Hoff's excellent coverage put me off a bit. Then I ran into the Octopress 2.0 announcement.

A Web publisher's choice of content management system could determine its relative visibility to its audience, especially those who frequent social networks. In last December's Water & Stone CMS market share report surveying some 4,200 sites using open source CMS, Drupal - the open source CMS platform for Linux and Windows - claimed a 13.6% share of the CMS market versus Joomla with about one-third and WordPress with one-fourth. But of the Facebook posts that lead readers to these sites, WordPress generated two-thirds of those posts.

There needs to be more developer activity around Drupal if it's to gain sorely needed momentum. So in an effort to grow the Drupal ecosystem, principal commercial contributor Acquia today announced it will launch an Acquia Apps Market around Drupal applications and tools in Q4.

Easily the single most underappreciated content management system ever constructed is Umbraco, the .NET-based open source platform built by Niels Hartvig and a Danish team who present themselves as the friendliest developers on the planet. For anyone who's ever used it, Umbraco is a Saturn V Rocket construction kit, with all the constituent parts neatly labeled but without a complete assembly manual. (There are some great videos where you can watch friendly developers build component parts, but you really need to watch them about 18 times to figure out what they're doing.) While you can run a simple blog out-of-the-box with Umbraco, it's as reconfigurable as Legos, but not as self-explanatory. Not nearly.

Getting out of the doghouse and earning consideration on the same level with Drupal and Joomla has required the Umbraco team to wean their platform off of XSLT - a perfectly standardized language for XML transforms that's used by no one and loved by fewer - and onto something a bit more high-level. The team has been accomplishing that, albeit in stages, with version 4 with the adoption of Razor, Microsoft's newer (and better) ASP.NET syntax based on C#, although Visual Basic also works quite well.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has given his 2011 State of the Word address, and the state of the word is strong. Nearly 15% of the world's websites are powered by WordPress, up from 8.5% last year. For every 100 new active domains in the U.S., 22 of them run the popular open-source blogging software.

Mullenweg's address at the WordCamp conference in San Francisco this week goes through the history of the WordPress user interface, showing how its features developed over time and were then pared down to today's minimal, efficient design. With its frequent adjustments to UI and its healthy market for ready-made and custom themes and plug-ins, WordPress' user friendliness is key to its broad and rapid adoption by content creators. But this year, WordPress conducted its first user and developer survey, receiving over 18,000 responses, and it found a thriving economy for developers and site administrators as well.