Zach Beauvais

Some of my long-term readers (hi, Mum) might remember that my original blog was a Drupal install, and that my less-than-lovely ISP dropped my connection as I was uploading some new files—therefore borking the CSS. If you don’t follow, that’s OK. The point is that my old site was Drupal (a heavy-duty Content Management System, which is fantastic) now it’s Wordperss (cause it does blogging, and does it well). Well, WordPress has won my geeky heart (it’s smaller than my cynical heart, and not as strong as my music heart, but probably the most covered here).

They have done one thing in the past month which has really, really impressed me. They’ve got a plugin which lets you upgrade to the latest version of their software (which you install on your webserver yourself) without any complicated, difficult-to-remember steps. This is why I lost Drupal: upgrading, and it killing itself in the transfer. Now, I have the latest WordPress, and I’m very impressed.

Its WYSIWYG editor works better, and the media manager is fantastic. As you probably know, I stopped using a local blogging client because ecto is rubbish, and Vista is worse. So I now blog from WordPress itself through Firefox on my Mac. Three things that make me happy: Wordpress on Firefox running on a Mac… ah!

Another thing which is brilliant is the flickr sidebar plugin I have had for ages. I completely forgot to check out its “view more photos” link. It automatically finds images from the sets I’ve told it about, and uses them to create a page on my site populated with my flickr stream images!

Typeroom is a content management system which takes a different approach to traditional Content Management. Instead of using databases and managing content directly, Typeroom works more like Adobe Contribute by allowing traditional html pages to be edited in real time. With the service due for public testing shortly, I have had a Beta test of the setup and have a few observations.

The editor is web-based, and a user simply enters a url into Typeroom’s site and navigates to content they wish to edit and selects ‘edit this page’. Typeroom then displays a copy of the page and opens a WYSIWYG editing environment. This is a multi-paned approach, with the editing at the bottom and a preview panel above that updates in real time. Text and images can be manipulated from the editing pane, and there are various formatting options. The look is not dissimilar to TinyMCE or other familiar WYSIWYG platforms. Impressively, they have a drag-and-drop interface for adding images, and an auto-align by simply dragging images around the editing area. This feature, if it works consistently, could be of major advantage to non-technical users, because it eliminates the need to assign either a style or an attribute to an image to make it flow consistently. 

Publishing makes use of either FTP or a Typeroom account, which presumably stores FTP information. An interesting feature, though, is the ability to ‘publish’ by sending a revised version by email to a webmaster.