The Harvard Gazette is now on WordPress, with a beautiful magazine-style design. There’s a whole meme/argument going around a few blogs and Twitter saying WordPress isn’t a CMS. Who cares what you call it, look at the amazing sites you can create. (And manage content on.) Who woulda thunk it. I thought WordPress was only good for “just a blog” — what are these Harvard gonzos doing? Fie! I say.

I have to agree.  I use WordPress to most everything!

There is already another community built on photos and videos on the web, and I think WordPress would be better off to work with the Gallery community than to build media uploading and gallery capabilities into a blogging project.

My entire idea is:

I propose for WordPress to operate/integrate better with the Gallery project:

http://gallery.menalto.com/

I believe the next version of WordPress will have lots of new features related to media, editing pictures, and things of that nature. Many (including myself) view that as bloat. Instead of building these features in, why not support another open source project like Gallery which has many of the needed features already in a project dedicated to photos/media.

Either in the core or in an included plugin, allow for posting of an entire photoalbum in Gallery into a WordPress post (in the same fashion that Ma.tt currently has album-type posts) and allow people to connect their WordPress installation with a Gallery installation.

By doing this, WordPress users would get better photo/media integration through a dedicated project (Gallery), the size of the WordPress package would remain small (for anti-bloaters,myself included), and WordPress would support the Gallery open source project (I’m sure WordPress developers would work more with Gallery if there is integration and bring some improvements).

I would really like to hear feedback on this idea.

Gallery3 is still in beta, and the API isn’t documented very well, but I think an infusion of developer support from a project like WordPress could easily conquer this problem.  Even with the lack of API documentation, I am already looking to integrate WordPress and Gallery.

Army Live, the Official Blog of the United States Army, launched in April and uses WordPress.  The site has actually been up since April 7th, 2009 – here is the welcome post from the Army’s Chief of Public Affairs.  The WordPress Publisher Blog has coverage here.

I think this is pretty neat, especially looking through the posts.  I think more and more, folks (and governments) are learning that WordPress (and other open source CMSes) are easy to use and cost little to deploy.

First, I am writing this in version 2.8 of WordPress.  WordPress 2.8 is an incremental improvement on 2.7, but it really rocks.  Here is the post announcing WordPress 2.8 (check out the video for the highlights) and here are some tips and tricks for using WordPress 2.8.

And because of the new WordPress release, I have fixed up a few things around here.  I disabled WP-Super-Cache (this takes a bit of load off the server by generating static HTML pages instead of querying the database ever page load) because it was messing with the Twitter bar on the right (really old tweets were showing up).  I will likely reenable this is traffic every picks up, but for now the site doesn’t need any caching.

I have also changed the byline of this site (again).  It began as Life in Athens, GA, then switched to Life in Lawrence, KS (when I moved to start grad school), then to Life in Jefferson County, CO (again, when I moved to Colorado).  These were all adequate descriptions of the site, but it needed something more.  WordPress includes that byline in the page title, so it shows up when you search on Google.  So I decided to use a more applicable byline for what I’ve been writing about.  Now the page title (and Google) read Chris M. Lindsey: Technology and Social Media in Public Administration.  I’m not completely sure about this, but hopefully it will last for a while.

Now for the links:

• This article from the New York Times introduces the country to a 31-year-old Brian Deese, who is a major player in the automotive industry recovery.  Great article, and great job for Brian.  I hope more young people can make it into positions of influence, because I know we can bring a lot to the table.
• The City of San Francisco is accepting complaints from citizens via Twitter.  I think this is the biggest of all the links, because it shows a city trying to connect with their citizens in the ways they communicate.  And you know what, this probably didn’t take very long or cost much (if any) money to implement.  Here is the Twitter user that is accepting the complaints.  More governments need to be doing this.
• The New York Times says that smartphones are a necessity.  Especially if you are out of a job (sarcasm).  Seriously, why do jobless people need to be spending the money for a smartphone?
• Ars Technica reviews the Palm Pre smartphone.  What I find interesting here is the discussion on the second page about having better contact integration.  It doesn’t necessarily need to be syncing (because who wants to have all of their Facebook friends or Gmail contact listings on their cell phone address book), but you should be able to access the contacts on these services.  And search all of them from one place.
• Time has a great article on whether computer nerds can save old-fashioned journalism.
• Gina Trapani linked to this great article in the New York Times that profiles Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great.  If you’ve read the book, read this profile.
• Last but not least, the Athens-Banner Herald covers an Eagle Scout project.  Paul (a fellow Eagle Scout) sent me this link.  Jamie Jackson of Athens went above and beyond the call of Scouting and created a fish habitat from discarded Christmas trees.  The fish habitat is quite needed at Lake Chapman (in Sandy Creek Park, Athens) because of the way the lake was constructed (pretty much all lakes in Georgia were man-made), it cuts down on natural fish habitats.  Way to go, Jamie Jackson!

That’s it for today.  I hope to be writing more as I get into a more regular schedule with work.

I look at quite a few government and related sites in the course of my day (for personal, work, and school related reasons).  I take notice as to what content management system (CMS) is being used on the site, and it is generally easy to determine which sites use open source CMSes (here is a list open source CMSes).  I recently started keeping a list of these sites, and I have decided to share this list.

I was trying to limit the list to only governments and agencies, but I have included some big names that use open source.  If the list expands, I will likely remove those in the efforts to keep this list to merely the administrative branches of government.

Hopefully someone somewhere will find this useful, whether for work or scholarly research.  I will continue to update this page on my own as I spot new government websites sporting open source.  If you notice any or know of any, contact me or leave a comment and I will add them to the list.

I’ve been looking around for the past, well, months for a new theme, and I’ve finally decided on Hybrid News.  It is a great looking theme, it’s very professional, and I hope everyone here likes it.  And if you don’t, let me know.

If you notice any problems with the site, please PLEASE please contact me or post a comment.

I’m going to mention what I customized after the jump.

I’ve done a bit of customizing to get the Hybrid News theme functioning in a manner I like.  I’ve been addicted to asides recently, so I added some CSS to allow for more inline asides (I basically hide the title of the post and the post meta information).  Here is the CSS to do that if you are interested:

.home .category-asides .entry-title {

display:none;

}

.home .category-asides .byline {

display:none;

}

.home .category-asides .post-meta-data {

clear: both;

display: block;

font-size: .9em;

font-style: italic;

color: #777;

}

.home .category-asides .entry-content {

overflow: hidden;

height: 100%;

margin: 0 24px 0 0;

padding: 3px 0 0 24px;

border: none;

}

I also adapted the same code from earlier (with a different background color) to highlight my comments. Here is the code for that:

.bypostauthor {

background-color: #009ACD !important;

}

These CSS code snippets can be added to the style.css file.

I also am not too big a fan of the highlighting of categories under the header (look up top). But all I can really change are the categories that show up. So I’m using the following code to highlight certain categories:

function news_category_menu_args($args)

{ $args = array(

/* 'depth' => 4, */

'include' => '9,12,13,153,6', );

return $args;

}

That code replaces the existing php element in the functions.php file.

The Hybrid News theme is a bit hard to customize.  A lot of the functions are hidden away in different files (I had to look through 8 files to figure out what code was showing my email address on an author page that I don’t really need but can’t get rid of).  Part of the difficulty with customization is that the Hybrid News theme (like many these days) has so much functionality built-in (what was once plugin functionality) and there are so many options.  These make for a beginner-friendly theme, but it can be difficult for the more advanced WordPress user to customize.

The City of Albert Lea, Minnesota (more on Wikipedia), recently updated it’s website’s look and converted to using WordPress (open source software that runs this site and millions others) as a content management system.  Head over to their site, it looks great.  Staff at the City of Albert Lea estimated that they would have to spend $20,000 for a new website, but a city resident volunteered to do the work for just $720.

There is a really good article in the Albert Lea Tribune about the move to WordPress.  A good quote:

It is a Web-based content management system that allows officials in each department to change their pages without needing much knowledge of Internet language, said Teresa Kauffmann, the city’s public information coordinator.

And about the ease of updating the new website:

The old site was created in 2004. Hosted by Austin-based Southern Minnesota Internet Group, it left city officials several hoops to jump through for basic changes. Basically, SMIG had the keys. The new site’s host is an Internet company called 1&1 but because of the CMS nature of WordPress templates, Kauffmann and city officials have the keys. No more calling Austin. Now, they simply go to a special administration site that manages the main site.

And the most important part is that they aren’t finished yet:

She said she will head focus groups comprising Albert Lea citizens. She said she seeks members of all ages, backgrounds and computer skills. People interested in being on a focus group for the city Web site can contact Kauffmann at 377-4380 or tkauffmann@city.albertlea.org.

This is really great.  I’m going to keep a lookout for more local government websites using WordPress.

H/t to Ma.tt.