WooThemes 4-for-1 Special

Here’s how I got my 4 themes: My lucky night.

After over 2 years away from WordPress workings, I quickly figured out that with my limited time there’s no way I would be able to catch up with all the new, and more complex, innards of WP, and manage to construct a decent website.

I had a quick look around the ‘premium’ professional WP theme services (and there’s some good stuff out there) as well as the few still-free themes or theme frameworks that look professional (Carrington and Thematic caught my eye).

In the end, I settled on WooThemes who impressed me (as far as one can tell without actual access to the themes!) with their combination of feature-rich as well as eye-catching, balanced design. The fact that I got more bonus themes than I had bargained on is … an extra bonus!

Filed under: Blog Tools, Web Development, WordPress

SPIP – a content management system

I’ve known about SPIP for some time; but never evaluated it because it was only available in the original French version. By chance, I noticed that it’s mushroomed into many language versions now, including English, thankfully.
Plus, they operate a Subversion repository, so that makes evaluation on my local machine a cinch. Goody!

Filed under: Blog Tools, WordPress

Serendipity Review by Perun

Perun checks out the Serendipity weblog software (you need to be able to read German).

Serendipity is one of the few blog apps I keep updated via subversion on my local machine. It’s an interesting piece of software – but also quite annoying at times. I haven’t yet come across a Smarty-powered weblog script where the templating wasn’t cumbersome for the end user.

Filed under: Blog Tools

pLog has officially become LifeType

I must’ve just caught the site, literally, the minute they were switching over … one moment I still had the old pLogWorld website – a minute later I refresh and there is the LifeType page!
You can also reach the site via LifeType.org.
Talk about a historic moment.
Here’s the background to the switch: pLog now called LifeType

I’ve been following the pLog development with great interest for some months now. I am very impressed with the software, how the project is working, and also the community.
If you don’t know pLog/LifeType yet – you’re in for a treat. Do check it out.
I am thinking of setting up one of my community hosting projects/sites with it.

Filed under: Blog Tools, LifeType

Benchmarking Weblog Software

The results in a nutshell:
- Lightpress has the edge (without any caching plugins) and Textpattern comes in second, then Serendipity and finally WordPress.
- Textpattern comes in first with caching plugins enabled (although there is none for Lightpress).
- Textpattern also generally has a relatively low memory footprint (albeit not as low as Lightpress).
TextDrive Forum: Comparison of TP and WP

Sencer.de conducted WordPress vs. Textpattern – a quick performance benchmark in March 2005, with a follow-up in May.

He also discovered a security hole, back in July 2004, and what’s interesting about that is the way the two core developers reacted: WordPress, Textpattern and Security.
Hmmm.

Filed under: Blog Tools, WordPress

Successful test install of Typo

I can’t believe it really worked … I’m still chuffed

Typo is weblog software that runs under Ruby on Rails.
Dreamhost recently made this technology available to their account holders.
Since I happen to have an account (mainly for odd-job testing purposes) there, I thought I’d give it a try. Without spending much time on reading up etc., I dived in. And it worked – more or less out of the box.

I’ll write up the installation process and how it worked for me – plus first impressions of Typo – soon. The test blog is at Sardines on Toast.

Filed under: Blog Tools, Ruby on Rails

Comparing multi-user blog tools: Drupal, Elgg, Manila, Movable Type, WordPress MU and pLog

Multi user blog tools – overall ratings and reviews – not very in-depth, but a useful ’state of the nation’ snapshot.

Filed under: Blog Tools