WordPress 3.6 was fully released just over 2 weeks ago and, after an extended beta programme, we’re very happy to be upgrading clients’ sites over the next few weeks. There’s nothing to see at the pointy-end, the update is all about improving the management of the platform with a better UI, improved revision management and post-locking.
The most significant change we’ll use is revision management (with a neat compare versions mode), it also provides an excellent history of the document which, over time, will end up looking a little like the History used on Wikipedia.
WordPress is a cornerstone of the VNX Framework, updates to the framework are planned to be completed by the end of August. At the same time we’re rationalising support for other CMS and dropping support for pre-version 3.1 Joomla and deprecating support entirely for Drupal, which hasn’t had a major update for over two and a half years.
The future of CMS
Five or six years ago there was a whole plethora of options when choosing a CMS front-end. The major players at the time were WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. The landscape has changed since then, with WordPress becoming the dominant platform of choice. Drupal and Joomla both suffer from being too complex for most non-techies to use, negating the benefit of being a CMS in the first place. The future of content management, we believe, is opening out access for everyone and wrenching control away from traditional IT and computer programmers.
There are other players in this space, but none as significant as WordPress. We hope this changes as we’ve seen in the past poor innovation triggered by a lack of choice. On of the great benefits of the VNX Framework is that it can operate on (most) open CMS platforms, so we’re not tied into a single one. However, for the moment we’re focussing on WordPress.
By Penny Driscoll & Steve Schlange
