For all you WordPress junkies out there, one of our sister sites just released a child theme for the Genesis Theme Framework called Photo-Genic.  Check them out here or get a look at the demo here.

Yesterday, about 10.2 MILLION blogs fell off the face of the planet for just Under 2 hours when WordPress.com experienced it’s first major outage in four years.  In all, about 5.5 million pageviews lost in those 110 minutes of downtime.

According to Matt Mullenweg, the downtime was caused by an unscheduled “core router” change at one of WordPress.com’s datacenter providers.   I find it fascinating that a core router change at one data center broke failover mechanisms that should have shifted services over to another working DC.  True to Automattic’s slogan, “Inspired by you, Striving to create good, Nothing is perfect.”, it seem someone was less than perfect in designing their failover system… and then forgot to test it.

This one seems rather minor, but could be an issue for some sites.  WordPress 2.9.2 fixes a problem with registered users being able to “peek” into your trash.  Nothing I’ll be getting my panties bunched up over, but since the upgrade process is like 2 clicks and a password, just do it!

Hey all — New version of WordPress has been released.  Just about three weeks after the release of WordPress 2.9, version 2.9.1 hits the street with several bug fixes.

Many believed that the release of 2.9 was a bit premature after tons of users reported issues related to CURL (curl_setopt() to be specific) and several other issues, so the dev team took a few weeks to get these fixes tested in the form of a beta and RC1 version before finally releasing it as a final.  We’ve been testing the updates on several sites and they have in fact fixed all of the problems we were seeing.

Grab your upgrade at WordPress.org or use your auto-update feature (after backing up your database, of course).

WordPress 2.9 has been in the works for a while now, and in beta for a couple months.  I’m happy to announce that it has been officially released!

Some notable new features:

1. Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

Get your asses over to the WordPress download section or use the update feature to get yourself some 2.9 sweetness. WordPress is a very light-weight script for a normal blog account, you won’t be needing any best dedicated hosting providers.

The fine folks over at WordPress just released what they’re calling a “hardening” upgrade.  Version 2.8.5 doesn’t have any new features, just some code improvements to make sure you’re WP site stays safe…

As you know over the past couple of months we have been working on the new features for WordPress 2.9. We have also been working on trying to make WordPress as secure as possible and during this process we have identified a number of security hardening changes that we thought were worth back-porting to the 2.8 branch so as to get these improvements out there and make all your sites as secure as possible.

Seems a few things were missed back in the 2.8.1 security release, but 2.8.3 is supposed to fix all that.

Unfortunately, I missed some places when fixing the privilege escalation issues for 2.8.1.  Luckily, the entire WordPress community has our backs.

Download the update or use the autoupdate feature to cure what ales your wordpress.

I’ve worked with Open Source publishing software for the last decade or so, and it seems that every so often two packages get pretty powerful or popular and the debates begin.  Most recently it’s been Joomla and WordPress in the spotlight.

First of all, I’m not going to do (in this post) an extremely in-depth comparison of the pros and cons of each of these wonderful packages.  Why?  Because, quite simply, it’s an apples to oranges comparison.  Although both can do, or can be extended to do, most of the same things they’re both very different animals and should be treated as such.

If you’re asking the question “which is better”, Joomla or WordPress, then I’ll have to break out some blunt honesty — you need to do your homework or hire someone to help you analyse your needs and break it all down for you.  The truth is both are better at specific things and based on your individual needs, you’ll need to decide which is better for you.

A general overview:

Joomla

Joomla is a full blown content management system.  It’s an attempt to be everything to everyone and overall, it does just that.  It has the ability to manage content in various styles and has a “front page” component that does a good job of displaying content in chronological order allowing it to emulate a blog.  Over the last few years, it has evolved into a “framework” of sorts, allowing developers to rather easily use native functions of the CMS (Database abstraction, user system, etc…) to create native extensions and modules or port existing php software into Joomla extensions.

Content is managed in a rather ridged Section and Category taxonomy.  Each content item can be assigned a single category and each category can be assigned a single section.  Content can be displayed by section, category or in aggregate form and can be displayed in a few different formats including tables/lists and blog-style.  Access to content can be controlled by a very basic group security scheme.

Templating can be as simple or robust as you’d like it to be.  Both open source and commercial templates are widely available if you don’t have the skills or resources to create your own.  Templates all consist of a main component “Content” area and unlimited “Module” areas and can be assigned site-wide, or by section and category.

WordPress

WordPress is a simple and powerful blogging platform that has evolved the ability to manage content.  It’s not trying to be everything to everyone but can be extended to most of the things Joomla can do.  It thrives at blogging, but does have the ability to create and manage content pages.  Like Joomla, WordPress also has a robust API allowing for developers to create native plugins and widgets or port existing php software into WordPress plugins. WordPress is a very light-weight script and it is compatible with almost all web host provider.

Content is managed using a very flexible Category / Sub-Category taxonomy. Content items can be assigned to several categories and sub-categories and can be displayed by any of the assigned classifications.  It also natively supports another taxonomy call “tags”.  Tags are simply subject classifications and content can also be displayed based on it’s tags.

Templateing in WordPress, like Joomla, can be anything you make of it.  Open source and commercial templates are widely available.  Although the template structure and syntax is significantly different from Joomla, templates also consist of a main content area and unlimited widget (or module) areas.  Recently, several WordPress theme “frameworks” have cropped up making templating more easily extensible.

Overall

Both platforms can probably do what you want them to do.  WordPress is geared more to blog publishing, but can manage a pretty tricked out website.  Joomla is geared more at people that need a corporate style publishing system and can run a full-fledged corporate site, but if you want to use it for a blog, it can definitely handle the job.

Whats Next…

In the coming weeks, I’ll continue this comparison in a bit more depth.  I’ll also tell you about GeekExtreme and why we switched from Joomla to WordPress.  We may also throw a third publishing system, Drupal, into the mix and confuse everyone a bit more.

WordPress 2.8.2 has been released!

WordPress 2.8.2 fixes an XSS vulnerability. Comment author URLs were not fully sanitized when displayed in the admin. This could be exploited to redirect you away from the admin to another site.  Download 2.8.2 or automatically upgrade from the Tools->Upgrade page of your blog’s admin.