Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

It seems like a good day to talk about WordPress. Why? Automattic, the makers of WordPress, and WordPress.com, just got a big chunk of “series B” funding. (Not being much of a capitalist, I don’t really know what “series B” funding means, but I’m imagining it’s a very good thing.) Here is yet another amazing free and open source tool getting a lot of good attention.

Anyway, WordPress is a blogging tool (in fact, the one that runs this blog.) It is  a great blogging tool. It is another of those open source software applications that “just works.” Installation of WordPress is scarily easy. WordPress is expandable with tons of plugins. The best one, by the way, is Akismet, which is also made by Automattic. It basically eliminates comment spam, which, as you probably know, is the bane of bloggers everywhere.

Because WordPress is so easy to use, people have twisted and turned it to make regular websites. I think this is generally a Bad Idea, since there are so many easy, good CMS tools out there (I’ll be naming a few in this series.)

But if your organization decides to blog, and you want to make it easy on yourself, install Wordpress on your hosting account, or go to WordPress.com and set up a free blog. I doubt you’ll look back.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.