WordPress Publisher Blog

Arbu, a new media agency based in the UK, just published a post titled “WordPress Doesn’t Just Blog …”:

… it rocks, rolls, cleans our teeth and rummages around in our psyche. Well, perhaps not, but while editing the Colintraive & Glendaruel Community Website (which is run using WordPress and a basic hack of Kubrick) it occurred to me that Arbu has implemented websites using WP for all sorts of purposes and rarely for straight blogging. In fact when I thought about it properly, very few of the sites we produce are actually blogs.

In the post they highlight community, commerce, social networking, and other types of sites being built with WordPress.

[Visit arbu.co.uk ]

Robert Scoble’s blog, Scobleizer.com, has been completely redesigned:

Hosted, as before, on WordPress.com VIP - the new design incorporates many new features including integration of his friendfeed widget, and a showcase of Scoble’s latest videos from FastComapany.TV .

[ Visit Scobleizer.com ]

This New York Times article gives some interesting background on The Page, A Time Inc site that’s run by Mark Halperin and provides real-time politics and election coverage. The Page has rapidly gained a very large readership since it’s launch 6 months ago. What’s interesting from a WordPress point of view is that even though The Page is tightly integrated into the main Time.com site, it’s actually 100% WordPress based and hosted as part of the WordPress.com VIP program.

The newly formed Thomson Reuters Corp made its highly anticipated debut this past Thursday. Thomson Reuters is now the largest business focused media company in the world with 50,000 employees and annual revenues of more than $12.5 billion.

To communicate to various groups about the new combined entity, Thomson Reuters selected WordPress.com VIP to host this high-traffic and high-profile site:

The Web Communications team at Thomson Reuters was able to quickly get the site built using a custom theme. Leveraging the WordPress.com grid infrastructure, the team was able to deliver a superior user experience, particularly during the high traffic spikes.

As with other large traffic spike sites on WordPress.com VIP such as Gizmodo’s Live Blog - it’s good to know that when the world shows up at your door step, it’s an opportunity, not a problem.

Green Options Media has built an impressive blog network focusing on environmental issues.

This fast growing network is built on WordPress MU:

Who is the audience for these blogs ?

Both treehuggers and the “green curious” will find information they can use and people with whom they can share their journeys towards a more sustainable lifestyle.

[ Visit Green Options Media ]

Keeping your WordPress setup up-to-date is a critical component of your overall security strategy along with strong passwords, and a secure hosting environment.

As Matt points out in a recent post, with each new version of WordPress it has become easier to be notified of updates, new plugins, and in WordPress 2.5 there is even a one-click auto-update feature for plugins.

In addition, one-click updating of the core WordPress software is something that’s being actively tackled for future versions of WordPress.

So what’s the best way to update your WordPress ? Matt has a good summary:

Upgrade your blog to the latest WP. This shouldn’t be hard. There are plugins for it, if you’re techy use Subversion, there is the standard FTP method, and finally Media Temple, Dreamhost, and Bluehost (through SimpleScripts) all have been pretty good about having their one-click upgrade systems ready with new versions within a day or two of a release. If your host is chronically behind, vote with your wallet and switch.

• If you need someone to help you upgrade, consider hiring help on the wp-pro mailing list. (It has close to a thousand subscribers and consultants on it.) Or you could always ply a geeky friend with caffeine, libations, food, or gadgets. Just get them to setup a system lik the above so you can do it yourself next time.

Change your passwords, for yourself and any other users you have on the system. If the attacker grabbed your password when you were on an old version, they can still log in after you’ve upgraded if you don’t change it. There’s a new password strength meter in 2.5 helps you pick a good password.

Search through your posts for any that might have been modified, and comb through the directories on your web server looking for anything out of the ordinary. Your host may be able to help you with the latter.

And big picture, if maintaining and upgrading doesn’t sound like something that your organization wants to tackle and you are hosting your blogs on your own infrastructure, consider hosting with a provider that offers one-click upgrades ( we list a few here ) or hosting on WordPress.com VIP.

[ via Photomatt ]

A few weeks ago we mentioned that Sony had contributed WordPress plugins to the community which they had originally developed for the official PlayStation.Blog.

A few more details about these plugins and the overall project were just posted by cnp_studio, the very talented lead development firm that built the PlayStation blog:

A few highlights from this innovative project include :

Plugins We Used

The great thing about WordPress and the community behind it is that in most instances if you want to do something, someone has already created a plugin for that. In our case we have quite a few plugins at work on the PS Blog including:

* Audio Player - Enjoy those soundtrack posts
* WordPress Download Monitor - Helps us track the number of downloads on the PS Blog Widgets.

and

Plugins We Developed

Sometimes you need something and there isn’t a plugin for it. No problem, you develop a plugin to fill that need. What’s really great is when you have a group like the guys at Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) who want to contribute back to the WordPress community and then release these plugins back for others:

Lots of other good info to digest - so I highly recommend heading over to the cnp_studio blog to read the full details.

[Visit cnp_studio_blog]

The self installed version of WordPress 2.5 was released just a few days ago, and now the new dashboard and new features present in WordPress 2.5 are live on WordPress.com and WordPress.com VIP.

Head over to the announcement post by Matt to read all the details.

[ Visit WordPress.com ]

WordPress 2.5 was released this past weekend:

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

You can read the full details on the WordPress.org blog, and watch the screencast below highlighting the excellent new gallery feature:

For those of you on WordPress.com and WordPress.com VIP, the new code with the redesigned dashboard should be rolling out soon.

[Visit WordPress.org]

MyBabyOurBaby.com is a really impressive site built with WordPress MU and bbPress. The site’s focus is on “saving memories you didn’t even know about” in a very scrapbook-like fashion:

Sure, plenty of other sites allow parents to create online scrapbooks and keepsake photo albums, but no other site makes it easier for busy parents to collect and organize memories from invited family members and friends.

In a post on the WordPress MU forums, co-founder Beau Lebens talks about what it took to build the site and future plans to release some of the custom plugins:

Hi all, I wanted to throw up the site I’ve been working on for a while which uses WPMU as it’s core. It’s *heavily* modified, but there are *no* core hacks (which I’ve quite proud of).

Not modifying/hacking the core means the upgrade path to new versions of WordPress will be a smooth one, and functionality can be shared across different areas of the site.

Beau adds that:

We’ve also got some forums which are powered by bbPress, and that’s completely integrated including avatars, profiles, etc.

In the coming weeks they also hope to give back to the WordPress community:

I’m hoping to release a number of plugins based on the customizations and things that we did for the site, so I’ll be sure to post info on those in the forums here once I get them out.

To learn more, be sure to check out the excellent tour with video screencasts, and read the latest on their blog.

[Visit MyBabyOurBaby.com - via Ma.tt]