When you look for a WordPress theme design books, there isn’t much choice. I looked at the country’s best book store and found nine books when I search for “WordPress themes”. Five of them are published by Packt Publishing. Some of these books only feature a chapter about WordPress theme design or studies, only some are actually interesting.

Packt Publishing offered me  the chance to review “WordPress 2.8 Themes Cookbook”. And that’s what you’re reading right now!

The WordPress 2.8 themes design cookbook is one of Packt Publishings cookbook series meaning it contains loads of recipes. Each recipe is a small articles/paragraphs with an idea and how to work it out. Just like a regular cookbook. I haven’t got compression material to compare the book with others of the same topic.

The book is called “WordPress 2.8 themes design cookbook”, which means it’s all about WordPress 2.9 theme designing. After reading the book you should be able to create and modify WordPress themes.

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What does an orange have to do with WordPress? Michael Fields uses the metaphor to explain how taxonomies work in WordPress and what that means for your site. Video via WordPress.TV.

Confident Technologies, Inc. today announced that its image-based verification solution, Confident CAPTCHA is now available as a Wordpress plugin, a Joomla extension and a Drupal module.

Confident CAPTCHA™ is a unique, image-based CAPTCHA solution that stops spam and bots in a way that is easy and intuitive for your website visitors. Rather than forcing people to decipher warped and distorted characters or words, Confident CAPTCHA presents the visitor with a grid of randomly-generated pictures and simply asks them to click on specific pictures to verify that they are human and not a bot.

Text-based CAPTCHAs have become so difficult to read that visitors become frustrated and abandon the action or the website completely. Confident CAPTCHA is easy on people while being tough on bots. It improves the user experience, helping increase conversion rates and user interactions on your site.

Use Confident CAPTCHA to stop spam and bots on Web forms, comment posts, new account registrations, polls and surveys, and many other areas of your website.

Confident CAPTCHA is very configurable. You can choose:

• The number of images to display
• The number of images that the visitor must click
• Order of category selection
• Background color
• Optional audio verification for the visually impaired

For more information, please visit www.ConfidentTechnologies.com.

Follow Confident Technologies on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ConfidentTech

In case you haven’t heard, WordPress 3.0 was released last week. This is probably the first time I’ve been behind in blogging about the official release of a new major version of WordPress. However, since I told you all about WordPress 3.0 coming soon a couple weeks ago, I felt there wasn’t a need to rush and tell you to go get WordPress 3.0 and try out all it’s new features including taxonomy and multiuser integration. Instead, I spent this past week seeing how others reacted to WordPress 3.0.

As a fan of open source content management systems, its been rather pleasing to see some of the larger technology publications spend more time talking about applications like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. For the tech press, WordPress 3.0 was no exception with some of the major players such as Computerworld, PCWorld, and TechCrunch all making sure they spin out an article reviewing this latest version of WordPress.

What may surprise you though, is that open source CMS is just not an interest of computer geeks. Slowly but surely, open source CMS is the talk of business folks too. For example, both Fast Company and BusinessWeek made sure that they included articles this past week on WordPress 3.0. In the Fast Company article, Francine Hardaway writes some classic things to why business should pay attention to WordPress. Some of my favorite lines from her article, “6 Reasons Small Businesses need WordPress“:

• “WordPress can do anything you need it to do, and for a small business, that’s a gift usually reserved for expensive sites.”
• “Plug-ins for WordPress are the business-to-business version of apps for the iPhone.”
• “WordPress no longer looks like a blog. For small businesses who wouldn’t know a blog from a bag of potato chips, WordPress is a website, otherwise known as a content management system.”

These are all some fantastic words from Hardaway and I think they show that applications such as WordPress are making a significant impact in the business world. I wouldn’t call WordPress an ECM, but it most definately walks and talks like a CMS for the small business folks. If you haven’t taken a look at WordPress in quite awhile, I’d encourage you to take a new look at this application.

Below is the summary video from the WordPress folks introducing you to WordPress 3.0. Enjoy.

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During the final days of May, the first release candidate for WordPress 3.0 was released to the public. In the world of WordPress, when a version of the popular blogging application becomes a release candidates it means that the official version of WordPress isn’t too far behind.

What’s an RC? An RC comes after beta and before the final launch. It means we think we’ve got everything done: all features finished, all bugs squashed, and all potential issues addressed. But, then, with over 20 million people using WordPress with a wide variety of configurations and hosting setups, it’s entirely possible that we’ve missed something.

So what are the new features that will be included in WordPress 3.0. Personally, I’m excited about improvements in custom taxonomy and the merging of standalone WordPress with WordPress Multi-User code which WordPress is calling Multisite. Some of the highlights of WordPress 3.0 include:

• New menu management feature
• New theme “Twenty Ten” is the only theme in the WordPress distribution.
• Improved child theme support; child theme use is highly encouraged and as described in the Child Themes article, very simple to accomplish
• New comment_form() that outputs a complete commenting form for use within a theme template
• Expanded contextual help
• All importers moved to the plugin repository (e.g. WordPress Importer)
• Custom backgrounds for themes
• The Default (Kubrick), and Classic themes, are no longer included in the WordPress distribution, but are available in the Theme repository
• Bulk theme update ability
• Improved custom post types (try the Custom Post Type UI or GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools plugins to see the possibilities)
• Improved custom taxonomies including hierarchical (category-style) support (again, try the Custom Post Type UI or GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools plugins)
• Standalone WordPress and WPMU code merged and is called Multisite (Note: extra domain stuff remains plugin territory for this version)
• Multisite requires wp-config.php file changes to institute

Below the fold I’ve also included a video from WordPress.TV on WordPress 3.0 multisite.

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Matt Mullenweg discusses the past year and the year ahead for the WordPress community in his keynote presentation at WordCamp San Francisco 2010.

[Source: WordPress.TV]

So I’ve said that that WordPress isn’t a Content Management System (CMS).  My point was more than semantics as it isn’t a Web CMS (WCMS) either.  That said, I have never said that WordPress is anything but a great tool.

So the question remains, if WordPress isn’t a WCMS, what is it? Maybe we need a new term….how about “Website Management System”?

Why WMS?

So let’s look back in time.  When WCMS started in the late 90s, all the systems were clearly in the CMS camp.  Over time, new ways of solving the website management issue came about.  After all, not everyone needs full-blown WCMS when a simpler blogging tool would suffice.

So when people started using these more streamlined tools to stand-up websites, the tools were quickly tagged with the CMS label.  This was hasty and incorrect, but it was understandable.  For many, the sole purpose of a CMS was to publish information to the web.  This is incorrect, but we in the ECM side of the house ignored the situation, so it happened.

The fact is that managing a website and publishing content and data to said website is different than managing content.  In many ways it can be more complex.  The two tasks aren’t mutually exclusive, but you can easily do one without being able to do the other.  I wouldn’t use OnBase to manage my website just like I wouldn’t use WordPress to manage my Correspondence or any records.

Some WMS solutions ALSO manage content well.  This intersection of a CMS and WMS is the more traditional WCMS category.

Remember, there are good and bad tools in all three spaces.

Quick Look

So how would this look?  Throwing a Venn diagram together gives us this…

Not looking to categorize the world here, just illustrate.  The size of the circles and amount of overlap are not indicative of anything.  I also want to state that I wasn’t placing names in such a manner that the position within any circle matters.

A system may be in one area by definition, but it doesn’t mean that there are not areas of gray.  In reality, systems are going to be along a spectrum based upon how well they support WMS and CMS requirements.

Let’s face it, it is a very gray/fuzzy world out there.  WordPress is, in my opinion, a WMS, but one that is rapidly moving towards gaining WCMS status.

Remember the Goal

The goal here is to help us to better understand what the capabilities of each system and what problems they are best at solving.  It isn’t to say that that any system stinks (at least not today).

Look at it from this perspective.  I would not use Documentum to manage a website.    Conversely, I would not use WordPress to manage my company’s documents.  Systems in the middle, I could use for both, though that is a far cry from saying that it would be a smart thing.

Remember, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you should do something.

As we try and define what it means to be a Content Management professional, being able to categorize and define the tools and problems we work with is critical.

You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You’ll find God in the church of your choice
You’ll find Woody Guthrie in the Brooklyn State Hospital
And though it’s only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You’ll find them both
In the Grand Canyon
At sundown
- LAST THOUGHTS ON WOODY GUTHRIE

Forgive me, WordPress, for I have sinned. It’s been 8 weeks since my last blog post. And in that time many people have slandered WordPress, accusing it of not being a Web Content Management (WCM) platform at all. But that’s not important right now.

What is important is the main reason for my 8 week lapse – the arrival of my very own WCM – Willow Coco Marks, born 19 Feb and smiling ever since. So I’m now the proud owner of two darling little sproglets. And no-one would ever dare to ask me which of my children I love more. That would be horrible. It would be like asking a CMS vendor to take five super important features decide which they love the most. No-one who has seen Streep bawling her eyes out in Sophie’s Choice would go there.

So, here is the deal. I challenge any CMS vendor to rate these in order of priority:

• Editors – A user interface that is a editor or publisher’s wet dream
• Performance - The fastest, most stable and scalable CMS in the world
• Features – The richest set of features any CMS could dream of offering
• Developers – An open, standard, extensible product that makes developers salivate
• Website – A product that can give you a kick-ass website, really really quickly

Yes, yes, yes, we know they are all important. But not equally important to you. For example, would you choose a proprietary format if it made the editor interface better? Would you add the feature the developers all want if it affected performance?

So, dear vendors, have a long hard introspective and submit your answers in the comments in the form E P F D W (assuming you like the random order I listed them in) with the first being most important and the last less important than the other four. And no, there isn’t a right answer.

Who wants to play?

Five years ago, my wife and I had a dream. Together, we wanted to start a blog called “Like that Idea” and so we registered the domain LikethatIdea.com. The idea for the WordPress blog was to have a site where we could identify and review neat ideas which we thought others would like to read about. The ideas came in the form of products, books, movies, services, and interesting article that we read ourselves. In the end though, we ran out of ideas to write about and the site never really took off.

By the time many of you read this post, Like that Idea will be never more. I’m currently working on wiping the site off the server. It’s time to say goodbye to one of the few joint Internet projects that my wife and I worked on together. Instead, we’ll use the time to work on our own personal projects as well as working jointly on the biggest project of our lifetime, our family. If you’re wanting to purchase the domain, feel free to make us an offer.

Below is a post I couldn’t help but transfer from LikethatIdea.com over to this site. Thinking back at this moment in time still puts a smile on my face.

Leaning Tower of Zip

We would like to begin one of our first entries with some local humor. Earlier this month, the Zip Feed Tower was scheduled to be demolished to make way for “new” real estate. At 202 feet, the Zip Feed Tower is believed to be the state’s tallest building (we don’t have much out here in South Dakota). On December 4th, explosives were used to bring down the 48 year old structure. A raffle was held to see who would be the one to trigger the blast (proceeds going to the Dakota Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society). The raffle and corporate sponsorship is expected to have raised nearly $140,000. Thousands of people, including national media, lined up to see the tower go down.

So what is so funny about blasting a feed tower? Well the tower as of this Friday afternoon is still standing. All the explosives did was to sink the tower in it’s basement and lean it over. Long time residents of Sioux Falls are still laughing and are alright with the national attention the whole event has received. We of course drove by the Zip Feed Tower to get a picture. Wrecking balls are expected to arrive any day now and finish what the explosives couldn’t finish. We wouldn’t be surprised to see the wrecking balls have some difficulty of their own!

Originally posted on 12/9/2005 at LikethatIdea.com

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I usually stay clear of search engine optimization (SEO) discussions, but I think this video is worth your time. In the video, Corey Eulas teaches SEO tips, tricks, and best practices found to increase traffic from search engines. This talk includes examples with a look “under the hood” of a few actual sites owned by members of the audience. You will “discover how to enhance user experience and usability while making your site more search engine friendly”.

It doesn’t hurt to take Corey Eulas’ advice and likely his tips will improve your chances for being ranked higher in the index pages of the search engines. However, I’m a firm believer that the number one tip for good SEO of your website is writing good content. Sure, you can tweak the code here and there and write the buzz words search engines may be looking for in order to help improve your site’s listing in the search index. In the end though it’s the quality of your content that will eventually win people over to your site.