Clazh » Open Source

Yes WordPress Is Blog Not A CMS Get Over It

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 05:48:18 +0000

I’ll repeat it WordPress is not a CMS, its a Blog. Its a different issue that it is flexible enough to be used as a CMS. The reason I am using it is because I want a blog not a CMS and I love it because because its the best Blogging software out there. If you want a example of CMS Software then checkout Joomla or Drupal I fail to see what all the brouhaha is about. So we have a small time competing product built on Microsoft technology marketing itself as better than WordPress anything wrong with that? pointing to C-NET, the New York Times, Ford as examples is inaccurate, they use WordPress mostly for their blogs and do you think they are running the default WordPress setup? The codebase might be WordPress but they would have hired a bunch of developers to modify WordPress and extend it. I read through Graffiti’s marketing pitch and I don’t find anything overtly offensive or controversial with regard to WordPress.

Of course Graffiti is built on .NET and truth be told any good developer can make either PHP or ASP.NET code perform. However, we think there are more long-term advantages in Microsoft’s platform and better tools. So for developers familiar with ASP.NET its full power and capability are available to you.

Those are the words from their site. They don’t seem to bashing PHP directly or too much.

I particularly like the comment below by Ian

Hello folks, greetings from “the dark side”!

I have never tried WordPress but at first glance it appears to be fond of MySQL and PHP, both of which make my stomach turn.

Are you suggesting that I should migrate across to an unfamiliar platform in deference to using a solution which runs on my favoured “stack” of Windows, SQL Server, and ASP.NET? Or are you just taking issue with their advertising message? Iâ€™m not being facetious or rhetorical, Iâ€™m genuinely curious.
Personally speaking, I have found this early beta release of Graffiti to be an excellent CMS platform and more than adequate for my requirements of a personal blogging platform on the MS stack.

Best wishes,
Ian

So would anyone like to point out to me how PHP is technically better than ASP.NET. Both Technologies have there advantages and disadvantages. The only reason why ASP.NET seems to be gets bashed is because it made by Microsoft.

Itâ€™s not about what platform you prefer to use (Iâ€™d rather slit my wrists than use IIS, ASP.NET, or SQL Server, for example), but about your approach to how to sell your product. The majority or websites on the â€˜net today run on Linux boxes, usually running PHP and MySQL (or some other database solution and scripting methodology running on a *nix box of some sort), so to dismiss that vast amount of installed user bases and developers so simply and simply to state that one solution is better than another is to miss the whole point entirely.

Otto needs a reality check

Its not a religion people its just technologies. Shame on Matt for linking to a complete non-issue. WordPress is good at what it does but it can’t be everthing, there will always be people marketing themselves as better than WordPress.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 21 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Wordpress Tags: Open Source, Programming, Web-Development, Wordpress

PipesCamp An UnConference

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 04:49:26 +0000

Both bosky and Mayank contacted me to let me know about PipesCamp a one day Unconference centered around Yahoo Pipes. It will held on December 23rd sunday, 2007 in Chennai, India. If you would like to geek out and meet interesting people be there. I would most probably be attending it, would love to meet up with people. Below is the agenda.

Introduction to Yahoo! pipes
History and evolution of Pipes
Yahoo! pipes from a blogger’s perspective
Yahoo! pipes from a developer’s perspective
Experiments with pipes
Workshops / Tutorials
Building a community for collaborating with pipes
Feature requests for Yahoo! Pipes? – api, import/export, more operators, support for 3rd party widgets?
There will also be a contest running through out the day for the “Best Pipes” created / showcased at pipesCamp ,with prizes announced at the end of the day. So create times / check out the yahoo! pipes site or blog, and get started !

PodWorks.in India’s Biggest Event on Audio & Video Podcasting

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: General Tags: Open Source, People, Unconference

Why Are Most Open Source Application And Websites So FUgly?

Arpit Jacob — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 11:23:02 +0000

Lets Start with PHP.net apache.org and w3.org, a quick look at the WayBack machine tells me these sites haven’t changed a bit since 2000(the Apache site is stuck with the same design since 1996). I can understand if these were small fledging projects but projects like PHP and Apache are massive and widely used. What about the w3c site? Would we be making pretty cross browsers sites if they hadn’t set up the standards, yet their own site is stuck in the 80s.

One of the aspects of open source that has been touted is the contributions from the community and people involved in the projects. In the case of PHP and Apache I see a clear disconnect between the developers and users(developers and designers who use PHP). When it comes to huge projects the open source model some how tends to break down since its very hard to keep/manage the communities of massive sizes and take everybody’s views.

There are three projects that I would like to point out which have been massively successful in maintaining the open source model.

Mozilla FireFox
Joomla
Ubuntu

All three of these projects have beautiful sites, great marketing, huge communities.
My first experience with open source communities started with Mambo/Joomla CMS and it really fascinated me how a whole community and developers together left Mambo to create Joomla. As a projects becomes bigger other than development and maintenance it becomes important to handle other aspects of the project. Here take a look at some of the key people who are responsible for Joomla. If you notice out of the 17 key founding members only 9-10 of them are developers and project managers below is a list of other roles.

Sites & Infrastructure Coordinator : Forum Admin
Shop Team Lead
Fundraising Team Lead
Documentation Working Group Coordinator
Events Team Lead
Design & Accessibility Working Group Coordinator
Quality & Testing Working Group Coordinator
Translations Coordinator
Marketing & Media Team Lead

Hey even have a honour roll that shows the list of previous Key members and their roles. the same goes for Mozilla FireFox because the roles and responsibilities have been divided among a few key community members the whole project benefits since these key members can focus on their roles. Have you seen The FireFox Campus Edition website do you think a developer came up with this idea? very unlikely. I love the design and plus what a great way to attract students to use FireFox. All they had to do was create a funky looking WebPage and repackage FireFox with some cool/useful extensions. Shows how important marketing and media is for any projects.

Another thing I really liked about Joomla was their forum which is massive and well organised and structured with a ton of volunteers. All the developers, Volunteers have real pictures in their profiles.

The problem with most Open Source projects is they are started by developers who continue to follow the same process even when the’ve grown big without realizing the need to expand and evolve, they rather take refuge in a restricted mailing lists far from the noobs.

Hey WordPress Devs you need to learn a few things here.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Design, Open Source Tags: Open Source, Web-Design

Top WordPress Blogs And Upcoming Indian Tech Blogs

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:57:02 +0000

Artur Kim has complied a list of Top Blogs that blog about WordPress based on their Page Rank, Alexa and Technorati Rankings. My blog is at positioned at number 10. I want to thank my readers who have made this possible. Mani karthik has also compiled a list of upcoming Tech Bloggers in India. Here my blog was ranked at Number 1.

This blog has come a long way. While I have slowed down a bit on the posting frequency I will continue to post quality content. If any of you would like to do a guest post here on my blog do let me know what you are going to blog about and use the contact form to contact me.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Wordpress Tags: Marketplace, Open Source, Wordpress

Wicked Cool Documentation Manual Inside Habari

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 12:05:11 +0000

I just downloaded Habari Developer Preview 2. For people who don’t know what Habari is, it’s a new Blogging Platform being developed by some Ex-WordPress developers who felt the need to create something more innovative and cutting edge than WordPress. I been keeping a watch over this project since it has number of really cool people working on it and one designer whose work I admire Khaled (same guy who gave us the shuttle project, which is being slowly implemented in WordPress). So far I haven’t seen anything significant that makes me go WOW since more of work has been done on the core, I found the installation Process faster and Simpler than WordPress. But one thing that made me go wow was the Documentation Manual Inside Habari. The documentation is far from complete but it works great. They have decided to use tiddlywiki.

TiddlyWiki is a complete wiki in a single HTML file. It contains the entire text of the wiki, and all the JavaScript, CSS and HTML goodness to be able to display it, and let you edit it or search it. Without needing a server.

Checkout the demo here. http://www.tiddlywiki.com/ We need to have something like this for WordPress too I am tired of hunting around in the Codex. Plus its blazing fast.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Wordpress Tags: Open Source, Software

CS3: Best way to be creative?

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 11:59:36 +0000

I’m Nathan Chapman, Guest Blogging on Clazh from Pixl Design.

Adobe’s Creative Suite is one of the best productivity products of, perhaps, all time. And yet, does it really serve to be the perfect product for everyone?

With Adobe’s not-too-recent acquisition of Macromedia, the next release of a Creative Suite would be sure to include Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks. CS3 sure did, but at a cost: over AU$2,000 (US$1,500) and that’s just for Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Photoshop! For both Macromedia and Adobe’s Products, you would fork out AU$4,445 (US$1,399). There just has to be a better way!

Luckily, there is. There are several open-source and shareware/freeware options out there.

Photoshop

The Gimp is a open-source “photo manipulation program”. With excellent flexibility, loads of plugins and a interface that looks suspiciously similar to the real thing, The Gimp is an excellent alternative to Photoshop.
Paint.NET, which utilises the Microsoft .NET Framework to create a stable, lightweight app with nearly every major function the home user could want, from a Lasso tool to Gaussian blur. The interface is completely familiar, with the added benefit of translucent panels that make it easy to see what’s going on when the windows get cluttered. Paint.NET doesn’t yet support RAW format, however, which certainly limits its range.

Illustrator

The only major free competitor for this vector image editing program is Inkscape, again open-source, which is very responsive and extensible. Easily a very good, well written program. Sure, it looks a bit different, but when it comes down to it, Inkscape’s interface is still very easy to use.

Adobe Acrobat

Adobe’s Own free version of Acrobat. Mind you, it’s laggy and is for viewing pdf files only.
Foxit Reader is the pdf viewer that I personally use, and is very compatiable with different forms of pdf files. It also has basic editing tools, and may, in the future, come with a built-in OCR software.

Dreamweaver

Nvu is an excellent, intuitive program that I was using at one point. The interface is very clean, and Nvu can (like Dreamweaver) edit in WYSIWYG or code view. The produced code is very clean and user-firendly, validates and uses CSS.
RapidWeaver, (Mac only) is very similar to Apple’s own iWeb software in both its looks and designs. The code produced is valid, although not as nice-looking as Dreamweaver or Nvu.

Edit

Notepad ++ is an extraordinarily useful replacement for Note pad. However, its main feature (for me) is that it supports automatic code highlighting, enabling it to be a replacement for Dreamweaver’s Code View. Open-source, useable and light-weight, Notepad ++ is perfect for coders (it supports many languages, Python, HTML, CSS, C, C+ etc etc).

Summing Up

Here are the best alternative that I would use to replace the Creative Suite. However, with these programs, you don’t get the “combined” interface that CS3 has, and there are not (due to licensing restrictions) alternatives for every product.

Me? I use CS3 (a legal copy; remember, pirates are losers) and because I could afford it, I prefer it to these Alternatives.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Design, Open Source, Software Tags: Adobe, Free, Open Source, Photoshop, Software

Flock 0.9 Has been Released

Arpit Jacob — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:49:35 +0000

Flock has come out of beta and they just released version 0.9. It looks pretty neat. Blog editor still sucks (it spits out nasty html code) you can see whats new here http://www.flock.com/welcome and what’s new here http://www.flock.com/compare

Here is a brief list of new things in Flock.

MyWorld: a dynamic home base for all your favorite sites, feeds, and media streams
Flock’s Media MiniBar provides fast access to both photos and videos on Flickr, Photobucket, Youtube, and Truveo.
The new Accounts & Services sidebar offers easier configuration and enhanced discovery and activation logic
Improved Favorites with folders and support for Ma.gnolia and del.icio.us
Blogging: Improved UI, integrated Clipboard, support for all major Blog services including Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad and Livejournal
Security improvements
In-line spell check
Overall Theme upgrade

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Design, General, Internet, Open Source Tags: Open Source, Software

Plotr 0.2.0 OpenSource JavaScript Charting Library

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 02:13:09 +0000

Bas just released Plotr 0.2.0 an OpenSource JavaScript Charting Library. With some signification improvements.

Shadow drawing.
Real line charts.
Adding a legend.
Better usage of PrototypeJS.

Here’s an Idea I had, there is already a really cool Wordpress Plugin that lets you view your Google Analytics Statistics in your Wordpress dashboard called Wordpress Reports. While the Wordpress Report Plugin is great I don’t like the charts it generates. I wish it had the option of drilling down into my data and also to see the data in realtime. I am a bit tired of logging into Google analytics every time to see my stats. So any Wordpress Plugin developer want to steal my idea ? While I think WP-Stats Plugin by the Wordpress.com guys is great, I find its just too basic for my needs.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Open Source, Software Tags: Free, Javascript, Open Source, Web-Development

MovableType 4 Released Does Anyone Care?

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 09:58:41 +0000

MovableType has announced that version 4 is going to be released, and that they plan to go open source with Version 4. MovableType was once the most popular Blogging Platform during 2001-2004, after which they decided to change the licensing, this didn’t go well with most of the blogger’s, and most of them switched to Wordpress which at that time was still in its infancy. It reminded me of a similar fiasco, Mambo Vs Joomla, Mambo was at one time the most popular OpenSource CMS when they suddenly decided to go commercial the developers rebelled and created Joomla ever since then Mambo has been slowly dying. So what does this mean for the blogging world, nothing much since I don’t expect MoveableType to create any dent in Wordpress’s armor. Jonathan Snook took it for a test drive and didn’t seem impressed.

When it comes to Commercialization of Open Source products it has to be done with care we’ve seen it fail in Mambo’s and Sugar CRM’s case. The community has to come first, and they need to feel that they are getting the full value of the product.

Currently I feel Wordpress is superior to MoveableType and way more popular than MT. Just take a look at Google Trends for MoveableType and Wordpress. The Traffic to Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org far exceeds that of Sixapart or MoveableType.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, General, Wordpress Tags: Blogging, Open Source