Last Saturday the C. Murray Consulting team spent the day at the first ever, sold-out and not to mention “Best Ever!”, WordCamp Boston. This event was held at the very high-tech and very cool Microsoft N.E.R.D. Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
First, a huge thanks to all of the organizers and volunteers behind this awesome event. They did a great job of keeping the whole event running smoothly. The location was perfect, the swag was cool and the people were great!
The C. Murray Consulting team represented levels of WordPress expertise from across the spectrum. The conference rose to the challenge, providing sessions that catered to the beginner all the way up to the expert. Being a beginner myself, I loved the WordPress 101 session presented so well by Amanda Blum. In fact, the whole day was one invaluable lesson for me.
As for my more experienced colleagues – they too learned a thing or two. Here are a few highlights from their experiences.
Continue reading C. Murray Consulting Goes To Camp
Our third post on Smashing Magazine was published on Monday, December 14th. Part two of Advanced Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers offers techniques for customizing content administration. On the day of publication, it made it up to #2 on the Delicious hot list.
On Wednesday, December 16th, WordPress Tavern published their interview with Jake Goldman, Director of Client Services at C. Murray Consulting. You can listen to the latest episode on their website, or download the podcast directly from iTunes. The 90 minute interview covered a lot of ground, including WordPress value perception, site design philosophy, the upcoming 2.9 update, and the future of WordPress.
Jake is also one of the lead organizers of WordPress Boston. Jake is managing the new Applied Track where he will be moderating a panel, and is also presenting “Themes 101″ in the beginner track. The entire C. Murray Consulting team will be in attendance… look for us there!
C. Murray Consulting’s second post on Smashing Magazine, Advanced Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers, was published on the morning of November 25, 2009.
The original article covered 4 over-arching topics, and was so lengthy that the editors decided to split it into two parts! Part two – which focuses on customizing the administrative experience – will be published in two weeks.
Advanced Power Tips, part one, covers techniques for multi-block page / post content and digs deeper into methods for associating page content with post categories.
Continue reading Smashing Mag Redux: Advanced Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers
It doesn’t look much different than it did a month ago, but under the hood the most prominent website in U.S. government is now running the open source Drupal content management system. This apparently replaces an unknown proprietary CMS that was implemented during the Bush Administration.
On the heels of the high-profile Recovery.gov Drupal site launched earlier in the year, this is another big win for the Open Source community and an important stamp of approval for the Drupal system. Seeing a site with this level of prominence leverage Open Source technology will be noticed by governments and corporations around the world where Open Source has traditionally been looked at as not polished enough and not secure enough for mission critical operations. For direct web communications with the U.S. people, WhiteHouse.gov is about as mission critical as it gets.
Having worked through dozens of projects on Open Source content management systems, the government’s Drupal choice is not at all surprising. The evolution of the platform from it’s political roots during the Dean Campaign in 2004 is just extraordinary. Today, there is not much you can’t do on the platform with it’s robust developer API and with the thousands of modules contributed to the project by the community.
Although we don’t have access to all the specific Drupal modules in place (I’d love to see it), we did notice a few interesting tidbits via a look at the page source:
- Related blog posts appear to be handled by the Views module (no surprise there)
- The popular AddThis link sharing service is being used
- WebTrends is keeping track of your visits (Sorry, Google Analytics)
- The beautiful slideshow on the homepage is built with jQuery
- Contributed module Galleria is getting some use in the Photo Galleries
- And in case you were wondering, yes, the robots.txt file is still only two lines long, slightly shorter than 2,400 present during the prior Administration
Have you uncovered more details? Let us know in the comments. It’ll be interesting to see how this site evolves in the coming months and years knowing that Drupal is under the hood.
Update 10/26/2009 – More Open Source in government. The SEC’s Investor.gov site launched a few days ago on WordPress, our other favorite platform.
CMS Wire and Water & Stone released their 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report late last week, and we can’t say we’re surprised by the results.
The report incorporated a variety of criteria, including adoption, mindshare, and third party support to reach their overall conclusion: WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are dominating the open source market. The 70+ page report, which discusses a variety of open source CMS topics, compared 20 top market leaders.
Joomla came away the leader in overall market share by a little over 6% (although WordPress dominated by a large margin in sites identifying as “blogs”) – a result that doesn’t surprise us; more on that below the fold. But digging into some of the key metrics we use to measure project success as a service firm – like user satisfaction – suggests a different conclusion: WordPress is leading the pack, and Drupal is just behind.
Source: 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, water&stone and CMSWire (2009)
Continue reading WordPress, Drupal top Open CMS Report… why we’re not surprised
On September 23, Google released Chrome Frame, an add-on for Internet Explorer (IE) 6-8. Chrome Frame allows websites to request that IE visitors use the rendering engine behind Google’s speedy Chrome web browser instead of IE’s native engine. A TechCrunch synopsis and the Chrome Frame page provide further explanation. This article offers strategic insight into why Google is aggressively pushing their own browser technology, whether Chrome Frame will succeed, and how Chrome Frame should be seen by web development clients.
Ask any web developer what they think of Internet Explorer 6 and you’ll hear an earful. The 8 year old web browser still commands nearly 20% of the browser market and is woefully inadequate at supporting modern standards, incurring millions of dollars for legacy support every year. IE 7 and 8 were big improvements, but as we’ve opined on before, even IE8 fails to support forward looking techniques supported by the competition.
In the 6 month since IE8’s release, competitors Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and even Opera, have all seen major updates. All of them introduced performance upgrades, in particular to their JavaScript engines. JavaScript is increasingly the engine for dynamic content on websites, from animations to on the fly content loading without page reloads (via AJAX). Google’s browser, Chrome, positioned itself from day one as focused on performance, JavaScript performance in particular. At least in theoretical tests, it more than delivers on its promise.
Continue reading Google Chrome Frame: Why they did it and why it probably won’t work
On July 2nd, a post by Jake Goldman that was originally published here on the C. Murray Consulting Blog was enhanced and republished on Smashing Magazine. The post began as five quick tips for implementing WordPress as a Content Management System and grew into an in-depth, essential guide for leveraging WordPress as a full-featured website CMS.
Read the full post on Smashing Magazine
The post highlights real-life examples from some of our recent WordPress implementations:
Congratulations to Jake for creating such valuable tips and making them available to the open source community. Thanks also to Smashing Magazine for distributing the article.
Ever since WordPress 2.5 was released, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of WordPress as a comprehensive CMS.
WordPress offers a wealth of plug-ins that extend the limitations of its reasonably light core; we’ve even contribued a couple of our own back to the community. But if you like to make slim, fast websites – like we do – you know that sometimes the plug-ins, and their overhead, are overkill.
Here are five power tips for template developers that address common CMS implementation challenges with solutions that are not well documented or not entirely intuitive. Please note that all of the code here was written for and tested with the latest version of WordPress (2.7.1). Some of the functions may not be compatible with older versions, or may require some initialization (i.e. global $post).
Continue reading WordPress as a CMS: 5 8 Power Tips for Template Developers
