Move over Gutenberg

As I mentioned in my previous post, I attended the UBC e-Strategy Town Hall "20/20 Visions of 2010" on Thursday, June 22. Representatives from UBC Enrolment Services presented on WordPress, which is a "semantic personal publishing platform," according to WordPress. Translation: a cool tool for blogging! How cool? Check out what UBC is doing with WordPress, and read on.

The speakers were describing WordPress as a "content management system" (CMS), which puts WordPress in the company of other open source CMS, such as: Drupal, b2evolution, TikiWiki, MediaWiki (hint: MediaWiki powers Wikipedia), etc. Wikipedia offers a CMS comparison page. What's a content management system? A tool for web publishing that can be customized with plugins from the open source community. Translation: you can publish a web page in a few minutes for free! With WordPress, all you need is access to a server with PHP and MySQL,

With plugins, one can quickly and easily add neat features to your blog, wiki, or web site. Here are the WordPress plugins that UBC Enrolment Services found useful:

1. Category Icons
2. A spam filter (by WordPress creators)
3. A bread crumb trail
4. A backup
5. Ultimate Tag Warrior

As the speakers noted, plugins must be carefully evaluated before installing them. Read the version history or development notes, FAQ, user comments, privacy policy, and terms of use, etc. Here are some lists of WordPress plugins.