January 23, 2006, 1:02 PM — WordPress, the popular open-source content management system system, has received a significant update. The program was already popular with many companies because of its built-in support for web standards, ping notifications, comments and more. WordPress 2.0 adds many features that make it a more powerful content management system, especially for companies that want to maintain sites with multiple levels of users.
All in all, WordPress 2.0 is a major upgrade that makes it a powerful tool for companies that want a web-based content management system that supports web standards.
The new version of WordPress has a very easy installation. You need to have a database created and know the database name, user name and password. Then you download WordPress, copy it to your server, and edit a text file to let the program know how to connect to your database. Finally, you run the installer script, which sets up the WordPress database. The install is impressively quick and easy.
Here's a rundown of the features in WordPress 2.0 that will be useful for ebusiness publishing.
User Roles - Every user in WordPress now has a role that determines their access and rights within the application. Users' rights are managed by assignment to roles; rights are determined by the roles themselves. For example, you can let a role create new articles, but not publish it, and then have a second role be allowed to review and publish the new content.
Import - The import process has been updated to make it easier to import content from other content management systems. When importing, you can assign articles to specific users.
WYSIWYG editing - The post editor is designed to let you see what an article will look like as you edit it. It's a nice addition, because it gives you an idea of what the content portion of your pages will look like. It can be disabled for users that want to see their code, too.
Post preview - While the WYSIWYG editor is convenient, it doesn't show you exactly how articles will be displayed in your pages. The preview now puts the article in the context of your page, with the same layout and style sheets that it will be published with.
Theme abstraction - WordPress abstracts the "look" of your site from the content. Version 2 extends this capability, letting you change "Themes" on the fly. This separation of content from presentation will make it easier to test and update the look of sites. For example, you could use a test installation to try out various changes to a site's look. Once the look has been finalized, the theme can be copied to the production installation. Within the admin interface, the theme can easily be activated, instantly changing the look of the entire site.
Customizable URLS - WordPress lets you create custom patterns for article urls. This lets you have URLS that are meaningful, but specific to your site's requirements.
Multi-paged articles - WordPress can split long posts into multiple pages to avoid extremely long web pages, to speed page loads, or just to increase the number of opportunities to display advertisements.
Improved caching - WordPress creates pages dynamically, combining page templates with the results of queries to a database. The program caches popular queries to improve performance.
Extensive plug-in support - plug-ins are not new to WordPress, but several now come pre-installed, and there are also now a huge number of plug-ins available. One built-in plug-in is Akismet, a spam filtering plug-in. It works with an online service to dynamically identify spammers and filter their comments, streamlining comment approval. The service is free for individuals, and several levels of service are available for commercial use.
In testing the new version, I've found it to be very reliable. The biggest problem I've noticed is the program's clunky tools for uploading and placing images. It would be helpful if the application would let you easily configure default handling for images.
Overall, the update is an important one, and moves WordPress from being more of a blogging tool to being a real web content management system. Though the application is free, commercial services for it are appearing, like Akismet. This suggests that a healthy ecosystem is growing around WordPress, like Apache and some other open-source apps.
With a popular, free code base and commercial services available for those that need them, WordPress looks like it may be developing into a leading content management system.
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WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.
