As you may have already noticed, I have just redesigned this blog. I was never entirely happy with the last redesign, so decided to freshen up the site with a new look. I hope you enjoy it!

I have also switched from Textpattern to WordPress. I was very happy using Textpattern, and it is an excellent content management system suitable for blogs. There are lots of really cool features and an excellent community of dedicated users. The reason for the switch is that in my day job, I create and maintain content management systems, so I figured it would be a great idea to familiarize myself with and learn a different CMS.

One of the greatest benefits of working with open-source content management systems, is that you can learn alot by looking at the architecture and source-code of others. It becomes a great source of inspiration in working on my own projects.

Textpattern – the content managment system/blog software that runs this site – has officially left beta and been released as Textpattern 4 Stable. Textpattern is very cool software and worth checking out if you run a blog or site based on a CMS.

Simon Willison has just announced a new web application framework for Python named Django. It is an open source framework that he developed while building sites for Newspapers. It is based on MVC patterns and excels at content management. It seems similar to Rails in some of it’s methodologies, but as Simon states, development of Durango started before Rails and he thinks it is a testament that both Rails and Durango are doing things right.

Clay Shirky is sharing a presentation he gave recently at the O’Reilly ETech conference in March 2005 titled Ontology is Overrated—Categories, Links, and Tags. I listened to the downloadable audio version and it is really a fascinating presentation that looks at the past and present of categorizing content.

Bud Gibson is proposing a new xFolk: An xhtml microformat for folksonomy that hopefully will create a standard that will let users share and export their tagged data more easily. The article is a very interesting read and makes use of existing technologies like XHTML and XMDP.

Bud’s work is inspired by panels at SXSW 2005 by Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik that discussed emergent semantics and extending xhtml.

xFolk is an open xhtml microformat that allows users to publish their own folksonomy classifications for aggregation by the services they choose. As such, it starts to give back users control of their own data. A side benefit of xFolk is that users may designate explicit semantics for their folksonomy tags, providing a link to the more formal practices of information architects.

Peter Zeidman offers a multi-part article on Creating PHP-Based Content Management Systems.

Are you looking for a good Open Source Content Management System? Check out this comprehesive Listing of CMS’s that is organized by backend technologies (ie. PERL, PHP, etc).

While visiting the SpreadFirefox.com website, I noticed that the site is powered by CivicSpace Labs. CivicSpcae is a new content management system that is being developed by the veterans of the Howard Dean campaign. If you remember, Dean built a Huge grassroots following by building a fantastic online community.

CivicSpace is a custom distribution of the Drupal open source content management platform and is completely GPL’d.

The developers of CivicSpace are:

We are busily completing work on CivicSpace, a grassroots organizing platform that empowers collective action inside communities and cohesively connects remote groups of supporters.