WordPress wins the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award 2009

Oxagile team is pleased to inform you that WordPress, one of our favorite content management systems has won CMS Award 2009. It’s not a surprise for us, WordPress-as-a-CMS provides great possibilities for themes, templates, widgets and modules development. This victory is a result of hard work, thousands of web designers and programmers created numerous additions for this product, developed high-quality and easy-to-use sites (from simple personal sites and web blogs to corporate portals and even online shops!).

So, here’s the distribution of prizes for Overall Best Open Source CMS Award:

• the 1st place – Wordpress
• the 2nd place – MODx and SilverStripe

The next category is Hall of Fame, it’s a special place for winners of the last years. Drupal and Joomla were the best systems in the year of 2008. This year balance of power remains the same:
•    the 1st place – Drupal
•    the 2nd place – Joomla

And at last we present you the Best Open Source PHP CMSes:

• the 1st place – Drupal
• the 2nd place – WordPress
• the 3rd place – Joomla

It’s a strange fact that the main category has only two prizes: the second place was decided between two “competitors”, and the third place wasn’t given to anyone. We suppose that it was done in order to save money because organizers spent a lot on prize fund (Drupal took more than anyone ).
So we congratulate all the winners and wish good luck to all defeated systems.

Little secrets of better WordPress development

With WordPress conditional statements your blog will stand out against thousands of others
Conditional statements can transform themes in something unrecognizable. Be sure, your readers will be amazed by such features in Wordpress blog design. There is nothing difficult in directory conditioned elements, they based on PHP code. So with the help of php programmers you will be able to realize your ideas. For instance, welcome block at the home page can be done with the following code:
if (is_home()) {
echo ‘YOUR WELCOME BOX CODES HERE’;
} else { }

Theme framework is a timesaver for WordPress template customization
There are a lot of theme frameworks (Guerrilla Theme, Thesis, Thematic, WP Framework, etc.) that will help you to build custom templates in the shortest possible time. Use them with no hesitation!

WordPress widgets for better usability
With widgets you can easily customize the look of your theme, rearrange different blog areas (ad blocks, posts, headers, footers, etc.).

Say “no” to plugins and “yes” to PHP code
Using WordPress plugins you force end-users of your blog to download and install additional software. It’s not a good idea for quick and easy accesses to blog features and published information. PHP solves this problem and it also gives more know-hows for WordPress developers.
Continuous learning is an indispensable condition of qualitative WordPress development

WordPress has a great blogging community, it’s even more then web community. So WordPress-as-a-CMS development can be just fun and easy work with some simple plugins, php code and official teaching material from tutorial sites. You can try a simple hack code that helps to reduce spam. It blocks all comments on your blog written by users who have come with “No referrer” result (for example, spam bots).

function check_referrer() {
if (!isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) || $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] == “”) {
wp_die( __(‘Please enable referrers in your browser, or, if you\’re a spammer, bugger off!’) );
}}
add_action(‘check_comment_flood’, ‘check_referrer’);add_action ( ‘check_comment_flood’, ‘check_referrer’);

The best principles of WordPress customization: theme options panel and shortcode

Oxagile developers love WordPress. By the way our own blog is based on this open source application. And today we are going to share our secrets of successful web development and Wordpress blog customization. Some pieces of advice will take only some minutes to realize them; others will require some more time and more development skills. But you may be sure that all these tips will allow you to provide more qualitative blog customization services for WordPress:
Create your personal theme options panel
You definitely have noticed that WordPress blog themes and template development is one of the most popular services. People all over the world readily seek, buy and download paid, free and custom themes / templates. Moreover some of them want to change their blog design on regular basis. So your ability to provide such a possibility will be appreciated.
A theme options panel will allow you (your clients) to make changes in the current WordPress theme without code correction. This nice tool for quick and easy customization can be used by every theme developer.

Shortcode as a short way to users’ hearts
No one likes long and tricky code. All living creatures aspire to simplicity and harmony. So WordPress website developers can give them what they want – clear short codes for user themes.
You can write short code using theme’s file functions.php. The following function should be added and saved into it:

function wdl() {

return 'Web Design Ledger rules!';

}

add_shortcode('wdlrules', 'wdl');

After that shortcode is your little reliable friend, that definitely will help you to find a short way to your blog users’ hearts.

Microsoft adds new features in Eclipse for PHP and Java developers

Eclipse Summit that was organized in Germany brought fresh news: Microsoft together with its partners Tasktop and Soyatec are going to release a range of tools and updates for Eclipse.

• Eclipse will support Windows 7 and all its new interface functions;
• Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) will be expanded to work with new features in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2;
• The open source tools Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse will be available for PHP developers;
• The open source Windows Azure Software Developer Kit (SDK) will be available for Java developers;
• The Eclipse Tools plug-in will be available for Silverlight.

So, Windows Azure SDK for Java allows leveraging Azure storage service while developing Java applications. Its logical architecture is quite simple:
It is reported that according to the voting (see The Open Source Developer Report 2009 based on Eclipse Community Survey), conducted among Eclipse users, more than 64% are using it in Windows OS. It’s obvious that PHP and Java programmers will appreciate this significant commitment from Microsoft.