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Why Wordpress? - the Tumblr Question

January 5th, 2008

I just read the strangest apologia for a new service: Uh, why’s the official Tumblr blog on WordPress?

Simply - all the CMSy stuff it comes with. Blogs are an awesome platform. WordPress lets our entire staff contribute to the same blog, maintain tags and slugs, save and give feedback on drafts, upload and store media, back and forward publish posts, group our archive by month, lets our audience comment, lists trackbacks, et cetera, et cetera. It’s awesome! Blogs rock! But we knew this. WordPress is the perfect way for a business like ours to communicate with our audience.

Sounds good to me. David Karp goes on to write about the advantages of Tumblr: "posting with zero obligations, little or no comment". Great for wisecracking, difficult for communicating.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Mambo / Joomla

August 22nd, 2007

Here is the history of Foliovision with Mambo and Joomla. Our first major project in a CMS (as opposed to SSI - server side includes) was a Mambo project. Dr. Ian Firla and I built a monumental mortgage site with what seemed like our bare hands.

Making Mambo work as well for SEO as flat html files was a monumental task, but one at which we were ultimately successful. After careful consideration of how slow and unwieldy Mambo became in production, we made the decision to move to Wordpress (at that point at 1.2 with 1.5 coming soon).

As you can see, we haven't looked back.

But developers are strange creatures. Our CIO who encouraged me to move to Wordpress back then- after inheriting the mortgage site - later decided that he would like to learn some new programming languages. He even suggested we switch over to Ruby on Rails.

That's something I said no to. We are so conversant now in Wordpress, why would we want to use something else?

There is nothing we can't do in Wordpress and PHP is a flexible and quick language. Of course we have to keep our own set of built modules ready but at the end of the day it makes more sense to stay with what we know and what we can easily adapt.

Stay expert!

Thank you Mambo and Joomla. And goodbye. We won't forget you.

But life is easier apart.

  1. Mambo Embedded Page Menus

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Mambo Embedded Page Menus

April 17th, 2007

Documentation

You can read full documentation for the modern Wordpress version over here: Foliopress Embedded Page Menus.

The original Mambo version was much more limited than the current Wordpress version which basically feeds and washes and walks your dog for you, giving you menus in every nick and cranny of your website with more or less information.

But Mambo didn't need any help structuring a CMS. Mambo Embedded Page Menus were the backbone of the Calum Ross mortgage consulting site, a site which was more or less unchanged from 2004 to 2007, at the core of the Calum Ross Mortage Consulting team, doing millions of dollars of commissions per year.

Embedded Page Menus in Action at CalumRoss.com
Embedded Page Menus in Action at CalumRoss.com 1 January 2008

This plugin was tested with Mambo 4.5.1 and probably needs updating to work with current Mambo or Joomla. On the other hand, the plugin is very simple and leverages core Mambo functionality so it shouldn't be much trouble to update.

Installation

Installation is just like any Mambo module:

Download

mod_embeddedmenu.zip

Mambo Embedded Page Menus is a free download, no registration required.

But if you find Mambo Embedded Page Menus useful, please drop by and leave a link to a page of your site with Mambo Embedded Page Menus in action in the comments. Anchor text encouraged!

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Foliovision Tools

November 7th, 2006

  1. Computers and OS
  2. WordPress
  3. Other CMS
  4. SEO Tools
  5. Marketing

The Foliovision Tools section will include both WordPress and SEO Tools. Currently we are building these tools but some are almost ready and will be launched shortly.

WordPress provides the backbone for this site and all our client sites.

We still have a few stragglers in Blogger and but it's just a matter of time.  We cut our PHP teeth on Mambo and wrote our first and perhaps our greatest plugin for Mambo, Embedded Page Menus.

If you are building websites and you don't use WordPress yet, you should.

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