Cloudiness » wordpress

How did WordPress win?

Art — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 04:26:53 +0000

An extended post by a former product manager for Movable Type, comparing the fortunes of Six Apart and WordPress. Some interesting business insights, for example, in how WP made gains in the corporate blogging world, a realm that usually doesn’t seem relevant to the livelihood of blogging software companies. Turns out it is.

Bonus: In a footnote, there’s an interesting bit of gossip about the Huffington Post and Movable Type.

Panic Blog

Art — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:16:25 +0000

Aside from the geek-awesome alternate universe Atari 2600 game packages, I’m just plain grooving on the site’s design. Usually page designs with multiple motifs look like bad ideas executed badly but this is wonderful in all kinds of ways. (edit: Use the Safari or Chrome web browser for added grooviness.)

The Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny

Art — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 02:21:30 +0000

I wasn’t planning on linking to anything involving SXSW this week since every going-on there will be blogged and tweeted to death without me, but I liked the premise of this: Three dev teams were tasked with producing a website to uniform design, content and technical specifications within 100 hours, each in a different CMS: Drupal, Joomla or WordPress. My friend Tom Boutell provides session notes (and better backgrounding than the Showdown site provides).

Ultimately, the result is not a proof of any platform’s superiority, but that there’s sufficient functional overlap of the low and high end CMSes to make specifying a platform a considerably less nervewracking experience than it was a couple years ago.

Incidentally, Tom just announced Context at SXSW today, a brand new CMS based on the Symfony framework.

Widget Cart needs beta testers

Art — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:56:04 +0000

Widget Cart is a WordPress plugin that adds ecommerce to any WordPress website with widgets enabled. You can add a shopping cart to your new or current website as easily as adding any other blog widget. “Add to Cart” buttons can be inserted anywhere in any post or page; the cart sits among your other WordPress widgets where users can change the quantities on the items they order before checking out at PayPal.

It only needs a WordPress- based website, widgets enabled, and your PayPal account to receive and handle orders.

The project is in its final stages and needs testers. The plugin is more or less feature-complete according to my tasklist, which means upgrading it to a final release will (hopefully) not require any more effort by the testers than replacing the plugin files.

Widget Cart will be available for public download and submitted to the WordPress plugin directory when I’m satisfied that it works properly and has sufficent documentation. For now I want to be able to notify anybody affected by updates.

Widget Cart is GPL‘d. I will never require registration or payment for downloads and documentation. It was heavily influenced by QuickShop, which is designed to serve slightly different purposes; if Widget Cart interests you but you’re using a checkout system other than PayPal I encourage you to try it instead.

If you’d like to participate, comment on this post and I’ll contact you by email. Comments are screened and I will withhold publication at your request.