WordPress

Now, this is nice

Steph has posted about the work he has been doing getting the Power of Information Taskforce report online for interested folk to comment on it before it gets published. It’s a lovely piece of work:

It is in fact a new theme, not the usual CommentPress which has been lying dormant for quite a while. As Steph says:

I think this is a small step forward from CommentPress and CoComment in terms of accessibility, Javascript independence and browser compatibility. It’s also marginally less laborious and slightly more purpose-built than the approach Ofcom took to their commentable consultations. And hopefully its muted style is slightly more pleasing to aesthetes than tools like CommentOnThis.

Best of all, the theme has been made available for other people to use – you can grab it from here.

This post is clearly about medium rather than message, so I’ll comment on the report itself some other time 😉

WordPress and domains

After my posting on WordPress for Good, this page was brought to my attention. It states that:

For various reasons related to our WordPress trademark, we ask if you’re going to start a site about WordPress or related to it that you not use "WordPress" in the domain name. Try using "wp" instead, or another variation. We’re not lawyers, but very good ones tell us we have to do this to preserve our trademark. Also many users have told us they find it confusing.

How utterly lame, and also inconsistent for an open source project. This is one of the few times I feel a bit let down by WordPress.

This reminds me a little of the Firefox logo and name copyright farrago. In my view, you should be open or not. An open source project setting rules on what people can and can’t do with a bunch of letters in a certain order is plain daft, in my view.

I’m leaving WordPress for Good where it is for now.

Making WordPress into a CMS

As I mentioned earlier, I am going to be running some workshops at the Social Media Exchange, organised by Sound Delivery next month on the topic of ‘WordPress for good’.

The aim of the sessions will be to demonstrate how you can develop a really strong web presence quickly and cheaply using WP – not just as a blog but also as a CMS, to run a small but more traditional looking website.

This is possible due to WordPress’ ability to have static pages as well as blog posts, but more importantly in its amazing flexibility in terms of themes and plugins.

To try and be as helpful as possible, I am building a site to provide some resources for anyone wanting to build a site for their organisation using WordPress – it’s at http://wordpressforgood.com but there isn’t much there at the moment.

I’d like to make sure that I get as much material up there as I can before the event, so that those attending who get suitably enthused have something to get their teeth into straight away.

I’d really like to know what your favourite WordPress-as-a-CMS themes and plugins are so that I can add them to the site – and give you credit too, of course! There are a number of ways you could do this:

Thanks in advance for any pointers you can provide!

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