This post is one of my favorite kinds of articles: That is, those that arise from real world experiences. A good friend of mine recently moved his personal site over to WordPress. At about the same time I had reason to build a couple of promotional microsites on WordPress. As a result of these two projects I had time to refresh my knowledge of WordPress plugins - and in the process I found some really useful items I’d like to share with you all.
In addition to must-have classics like Akismet or the All in One SEO Pack, I discovered a number of newer extensions that address common real world problems. I took the best of the bunch, added it into the list of plugins that make up our standard WordPress deployment, and put together this short article.
If you have incredibly useful favorites that are not on this list, please use the comment form at the bottom of this post to share your experiences.
Without further adieu, I present to you, my dear readers, a list of incredibly useful WordPress plugins:
Judging the market share of open source content management systems with numerical accuracy is a difficult proposition due to the lack of direct metrics on adoption rates. As a result, in creating the 2008 report, we focused on a number of indirect indicators and then cross-correlated them to reach our conclusions. One of the (many) indicators we examined was the popularity of the primary project site for each particular system.
It's time once again to take a look at the adoption rates and brand strength metrics for the most prominent open source content management systems. In July water&stone will be releasing the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. In the course of preparing that report, I will be posting various metrics and indicators that might be of interest (and stimulate some discussion).
If you remember the conclusions of the 2008 report, the top three systems were WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. One of the key issues we'll be looking at this year as how the race for market share, and mind share, has shaped up between those three strong brands. I was looking today at Forum activity as an indicator of buzz and mindshare. Here's a neat little dynamic chart from Omgili that shows the activity levels for the top three brands across the last 30 days.
I received a request the other day from someone interested in finding social networking-type resources focused on open source content management systems. A good question, and one that I thought might make a useful list of resources.
I did a bit of looking around at the larger networks and found the following. Please feel free to add your own faves using the comments function at the bottom of the article.
(Note: Updated 18 March 2009 with a list of Official Project Twitter sites.)
We released today the first extensive report on market share in the open source CMS market. The report covers 19 of the most popular systems and measures them on a variety of traditional and Web 2.0 metrics.
We found some interesting things, but the key conclusion (for most people) is our determination that the market is dominated by just three names: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal. The report also indentifies projects that may be in trouble and new names to watch.
