WordPress Wins Best Overall Content Management System Award

WordPress has just won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. In addition to popular vote, judges for this award included Bryan Ruby, who runs CMSReport.com, jQuery creator John Resig, Deane Barker of Blend Interactive, and Karen Koombs, Head of Web Services at the University of Houston Libraries [...]

LDAP and WordPress

I was about to leave another comment on Charles’ useful post about his LDAP script, but then I figured that this is a different enough topic to warrant its own post — even though inspired by Charles’ LDAP enthusiasm.
I’ve just been experimenting with using LDAP to authenticate users on my WordPress sites and, I tell [...]

The Great CMS debate

This post grows out of a brief email conversation between Andy and myself regarding the CMS service models on campus. During our conversation, Andy asked me to share some of our experiences in Arts & Sciences as they relate to CMS selection support, policies and so on – so I am delighted to extend our [...]

Another CMS option: Plone

I recently received the below message from Nicholas A. Kraft, an assistant professor in the department of computer science at UA.  I share it here to add to the ongoing discussion of CMS options and to document another success story of an open-source CMS implementation at UA:
Hi Andy,
I just happened across the WebTide post about [...]

Display Tags in 3 Columns

If you’re tired of all of the tag clouds you see out there and just want a simple list that you can browse through, then this bit of code is for you. In WordPress, there are convenient functions to list all tags (and categories) outside of The Loop in an unordered list. However, [...]

Automatically add links to WordPress image captions

As I mentioned in my previous post, the UA News sites have a few custom functions that improve upon certain things WordPress does (or does not do) by default.  One such function is automatically adding a link to the captions for a high quality image. When a user decides to link the thumbnail of [...]

New UA News Center launched

Today we have relaunched UA News as well as Dialog, Dialog Extra, and Research Magazine.  This presents a major technological shift because these suite of sites are all running on WordPress.  These sites blur the lines compared to previous endeavors by sharing common user-focused design and functionality as well as spreading our best content across [...]

How to Transition to a CMS

For many web developers, the idea of transitioning to a content management system (CMS) is both appealing and frightening. It’s appealing because of how easy it would be to manage once everything is converted. It’s frightening because when you have a large, mostly static site, transitioning to a database-driven CMS requires a lot of work, [...]

Open-source CMS and UA: The floor is open

So we’re kicking off an exploratory phase into selecting and centrally supporting a UA-wide standardized open-source content management system.  As time goes by, it’s more and more apparent that our campus as a whole needs a central option for maintaining web content, particularly since we’re so decentralized in terms of how web sites are created and [...]