“In the last six months or so, over half the sites being launched with WordPress are really not blogging sites per se, they are complete sites,” said Raanan Bar-Cohen, vice president of media services for Automattic, the company WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg started to offer a hosted version of the software.

Such use has caught at least some of the CMS community by surprise.

“There’s a debate raging within Twitter about whether traditional blogging platform WordPress is also a CMS,” wrote Tony Byrne in a blog post. Byrne is the founder of the CMS analyst firm The Real Story Group, formerly called CMS Watch. “Our take: many organizations are using WordPress as a CMS. That makes it a CMS.”

“A larger enterprise would almost never want [to] use one of those tools for a major web property. But they offer useful alternatives for [small and medium-size business] scenarios, as well as simpler projects,” Byrne elaborated.

WordPress, created in 2003, uses a variety of open-source programs and open standards, such as PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

Byrne admitted he was skeptical at first of the idea of using WordPress as a CMS. Out of the box, it doesn’t have many of the capabilities, such as workflow or advanced version control, needed even for basic CMS duties.

“It’s one thing to run a blog with a few extra plug-ins and widgets. It’s another to run a corporate Web site,” Byrne said in an interview.

Nonetheless, The Real Story Group spoke with customers and examined Web sites. It found that if an organization had to maintain a relatively simple Web site, one with 50 pages or fewer, then WordPress could prove to be a low-cost, relatively easy-to-maintain option.

“It’s not a [full] development platform, but it can drive a simple Web site fairly capably,” Byrne said.

While it is less sophisticated than many CMS packages, such as the open-source Drupal, it could provide an alternative to other simple platforms, like Joomla and the .Net-driven DotNetNuke.

In this realm, WordPress offers a few distinct advantages, most notably its intuitive interface. “WordPress has an ease of use that is something other vendors could learn from,” Byrne said.

Also, thanks to third-party developers, WordPress has a wide array of plug-ins to extend its functionality, some of which can be used to tackle CMS chores. For instance, a plug-in called
Edit Flow offers workflow, or the ability to route a document to multiple parties for editing and approval.

Overall, the WordPress site itself lists more than 8,600 plug-ins.

WordPress has its downsides as well. For one, access control is quite limited, Byrne said. The software offers only sitewide roles. Anybody with administrative rights has the ability to edit any page on the entire site. Someone from human resources, for instance, wouldn’t be restricted to editing only HR pages.

Another shortcoming is the lack of advanced content modeling. While a site can host a series of Web pages, it would be difficult to make finer distinctions among the pages — for a news site to separate news articles from case studies and features, for instance.

Making such distinctions would be possible through some development work, though other CMSes can make this sort of templating much easier.

In general, the deeper into development that a Web site administrator must go, the more the organization should consider another platform, Byrne said.

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San Francisco-based MacSpeech makes general-use programs and ones designed specifically for the medical and legal fields.

According to Nuance, which already makes a dictation program for Apple’s iPhone, the deal will help it produce its flagship Dragon Naturally Speaking desktop software for Macs.

Shares of Nuance rose 18 cents, or 1.3 percent, to close at $14.63.

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Ametrine Audio has announced the release of Fire and Ice, a new synthesizer powered by the Wusik-Engine. The concept was to make a synth with two personalities: The “Fire” section covers basses, stab, synth and lead sounds, whilst the “Ice” section features pads, keys, organs, bell-tones and arps. 160 main presets are included with 250 variations. Two brand new skins have also been developed for the Fire and Ice.

Fire and IceFire and Ice is available for Windows in the VST format.

Summary:

• Powered by the Wusik-Engine.
• 160 main presets with 250 variations.
• Custom made Bass, Stab, Synth, Lead, pads, Keys, Organs, Bell-tones and Arpeggio sounds:

-Bass and Stabs 44
-Synth and Leads 23
-Arp and Wave-sequences 20
-Pads and Strings 30
-Bell-tones 21
-Keys and Organs 22

• Windows Platform Only

System requirements:

Windows 95/98/ME/2000/NT/XP/Vista, 128 MB RAM Recommended.

4.2 GB free hard disc space, VST compatible host software.

(Works Great in Logic Audio 5.5)

Install Note-

• Run WusikStation or FireAndIce
• Drug&Drop WusikPACK file to it.

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With the applications, middleware and the Kernel itself, the Symbian 3 platform will be offered under terms of the Eclipse Public License and other open source licenses. According to Larry Berkin, head of global alliances for the foundation, “you can download it, you can modify it”. Previously, the kernel was made available via open source.

Berkin said they’re open-sourcing 108 packages that will be available at the source code level. Handset manufacturers can modify the code and build differentiated handsets, he added.

According to Berkin, the foundation members accelerated the process originally due to be fully open-sourced by June. Code, more than 40 million lines of it, will be available at Symbian’s Website at 6 a.m. Pacific Time.

“End-users will see, ideally, differentiated devices, converged devices that are based on Symbian that range from smartphones [to converged devices],” such as cameras or a phone that is a gaming device, he said.

According to Berkin, the open-sourcing could possibly result in incompatible, forked versions of the platform, and manufacturers need to be responsible for their work with Symbian. The market can be self-correcting in situations such as this, he said.

There are 330 million Symbian-based devices in use, said Berkin. Five manufacturers currently build Symbian devices: Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Fujitsu, and Sharp.

Symbian technology had been driven by Symbian Limited, the majority of which was owned by Nokia, which then spun it out as an open source project.

Putting Symbian into open source will boost the platform in the marketplace, said analyst William Stofega, program manager for mobile device technology and trends at IDC. Development Kits are also available to download for building Symbian applications and mobile devices. These include the Symbian Developer Kit and the Product Development Kit.

In November 2009, Nokia put the Linux-based Maemo OS on its high-end N900 “mobile computer,” which features a phone and capabilities like email, a Web browser, and video. But the company remains a backer of Symbian, according to Nokia representatives.

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Google has begun letting online visitors tell its news website what topics they want to tune into.

According to Google Software engineer Jude Britto, people can click on “stars” to mark groups of stories on preferred subjects to signal Google News to watch for updates or developments.

In a blog post, Britto said, it’s one way to let us know that you’re interested in that subject, when you star a story in Google News.

He added, when there are significant updates, we’ll alert you by putting the headline in bold so you can get more information.

The 20 most recently “starred” stories will be tracked in a section added to the Google News page, according to Britto.

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Joomla 1.6 is the next generation of Joomla, the most popular Open Source Content Management System in the world.

The broad goals of Joomla 1.6 are to:

• implement an expanded access control system;
• implement a nested categories solution;
• add a commenting system;
• and standardize the way extensions are built using the MVC framework.

To achieve those things there is a lot of other ancillary work to be done, but those are the highlights of this new version.

Apart from some user interface improvements the new access control and nested categories systems are feature complete. The access control system is progressively coming online throughout the administrator as is the nested category system. The new comments system has not been added to the core stack yet.

Currently, most work focuses on finishing the backend Administrator, bringing all extensions up to a common standard. The following Administrator extensions are “Beta ready“, which means they are essentially feature complete, at a consistent code standard and ready for rigorous testing.

• Articles manager
• Banners manager
• Configuration manager (used for Global Configuration and Component options)
• Modules manager
• Messages (private) manager
• Newsfeeds manager
• Plugins manager
• Redirect manager (a new component to redirect old page links to new ones)
• Search manager
• Template manager (including new “styles”)
• User manager (includes ability to add new user groups and content access levels)
• Weblinks manager

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