Free Software Linux

I’m not quite sure I fully grasp what is going on with this (some would say I never do) but maybe it might be of interest to other readers and hopefully someone will come along and explain a bit more. I was looking about on-line the other day just following my (rather large) nose around the ‘Anthony Baggett’s theme being used by Number 10 Downing Street’ story. And I came across something I don’t really understand. Perhaps others might be able to shed some light on what might be going on here?

Here is the output of a Linux command called tree on the original contents of the theme that NMM claim to only have used the stylesheet from1.

This is a post largely related to the response that David Smith of New Media Maze posted yesterday regarding the farce of their web site development for Number 10 Downing Street.

This is quite amazing stuff really. You just couldn’t make up a better story. The Number 10 website fiasco just keeps going. New Media Maze, that “Full Service New Media Agency”, look to have really screwed up. Not only have they nicked a free Wordpress template and removed the attribution and removed the license, but it seems the site itself is actually full of bugs and errors too.

Being “that-kind-of-a-bloke”, I thought I’d dig a bit further into the Number 10 Steals Free Wordpress Theme story Here’s the background:

Number 10’s new website, from our beloved government who are such strong users and supporters of Open Source Software [NOT], is running on Wordpress. This isn’t actually big news now. There’s plenty of comment about that on the web via Google.

Video has quickly become one of the fastest growing media formats on the Internet, and that seems like a logical thing to occur. It makes sense that a company would attempt to integrate an interactive video solution into WordPress and Kaltura is the first solution that we've seen to address this. It is a decent try, but it is far from perfect.

WPBook, the WordPress for Facebook plugin which Dave Lester and others at Scholarpress originally created and which I’ve contributed some to, has been updated again. Version 0.7.4, which I just tagged in subversion (so it should be showing up in the Wordpress plugins directory by the time I post this) includes the following:

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Wordpress 2.6 is more than a blog and is quickly evolving into a full-fledged Web content management system.  While they're a little late, some of my competitors (CMS Watch, InformationWeek) also recently noted the trend of blogging applications such as Wordpress taking on more CMS-like duties.

Are others seeing a sudden drastic rise in WordPress spam comments and users in recent days? Luckily Akismet is catching most of the comments, but SABRE is not so effective at reducing spam user registrations.

If you’ve tried to leave comments here recently, bless you, and I’m sorry. First, the WP-OpenID plugin for one specific version (2.2.0) had a bug which ate comments containing double quotes, which means all comments with links in them. 2.2.1 fixes the problem. Then, Luis Villa told me in email that the Captcha on my site was unusable. So I tried it, and he’s right. A while back I installed a plugin for Mollom, which catches comments which are thought to be suspicious in one way or another, and then asks users to solve a captcha. Problem is that they were all unsolvable.

WordPress for iPhone is here. I just tested it and there appears to be some bugs still. When I setup my blog on the iPhone app, it auto inserted a couple of blank posts that did not have anything in them. Hopefully we’ll see an update soon ;-) One bigger issue is that the iPhone still does not have copy/paste support.

The battle of the open source CMS continues. Well some might not consider it a battle, but there is a definite push to stay at the top by the leaders of the pack. WordPress is no slouch where that is concerned. In the news again, WordPress announced the release of version 2.6 -- a month ahead of their original schedule no less.

Wordpress 2.6 was released just a couple days ago.  During the time I have covered Wordpress, I have always considered Wordpress more as blogging application and not really a full featured content management system.  However, ever since I installed Wordpress 2.5 on one of my sites, I can't help but think that Wordpress now rocks as a CMS. If you haven't looked at Wordpress in the past year or so, I recommend that you do yourself a favor and take a look at what you may be missing out. Below is a brief video tour of 2.6 prepared by Matt and company.  

I still need to update to v2.6, but it’s officially here. There are a host of cool new features including Gears-based acceleration. I also noticed this link indicating an upcoming iPhone application for easier use of WordPress. Good news on all WordPress fronts.