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Today for the first time I posted Menubar 3.0 on the WordPress Plugin Directory, and the community response so far has been very encouraging.

Now, if you are still using an older Menubar version, the Plugins page of your WordPress blog will kindly remind you:

“There is a new version of Menubar available. View version 3.0 Details or upgrade automatically.”

But wait! The automatic upgrade overwrites the previous plugin version so, before upgrading, you are advised to backup the whole wp-content/plugins/menubar folder. This way you’ll be able to recover your customized menu templates or any other file you might have modified.

Happy Menubar 3.0 automatic upgrade!

Note: on some servers the automatic install or upgrade procedures might not work properly; if that’s your case, just perform a manual install or upgrade procedure, see the WP Menubar documentation.

SkyBlueCanvas is a lightweight CMS developed by Scott Lewis and released as open source in March, 2008.

SkyBlueCanvas is designed to be easy to use, and is intended for small web sites with relatively simple requirements. That means sites with about one hundred pages, two or three page layouts, and typically a non-technical site administrator.

The software core is extensible with modules, plugins and even Google gadgets, and offers a skin system to customize the site presentation.

What’s missing? Well, given the target audience, SkyBlueCanvas doesn’t require a database, and doesn’t provide user management and content hierarchies like Sections or Categories.

SkyBlueCanvas is a PHP application, and is licensed under the GNU General Publc License 3.0. A service package for business owners including site setup and design is also available from the Developer.

If you would like to see Menubar 3.0 in action, but you don’t have the time to download, install and test it, you can now visit the WP Menubar demo site.

The site is based on WordPress 2.7, with a default theme and a Menubar 3.0 installation. The test menu contains all the menu item types (FrontPage, Home, Heading, Page, PageTree, Category, CategoryTree, Post and External) and you can choose the menu template and stylesheet to apply.

Enjoy!

WP Menubar is the WordPress plugin that lets you add one or more configurable menus to your WordPress site. You can create both flat and hierarchical menus, and you can style them with customizable menu templates.

After one year and seven beta versions, WP Menubar 3.0 is finally available. Your help in finding bugs and your suggestions for improvement have been and are invaluable, so I wish to thank you all for your contributions.

Version 3.0 is almost identical to 3.0 beta 7, I’ve just fixed a few (last?) bugs and added the menu templates formerly available in version 2.3. Regretfully it’s not possible to import in Menubar 3.0 menus built with Menubar 2.3, you’ll have to reenter them from scratch. If you are already using a 3.0 beta version instead, you shouldn’t have any problem upgrading.

I think Menubar 3.0 is user friendly enough and doesn’t require you to study the documentation, which is available anyway in WP Menubar documentation. You are more than welcome to give this version a try (Download) and I look forward to hearing your suggestions.

Happy menus, with WP Menubar 3.0!

The year 2008 has seen a concentration of interest on just a few CMS or blog platforms, with an increasing distance between the most popular ones and the followers.

As in 2006 and 2007, I’m using the data from the Most visited CMS site report, based on the Alexa traffic rankings. We can see that there is a large gap between the first four and the fifth in rank.

The first places in the popularity chart for 2008 belong to the same trio who won them in 2006 and 2007, that is WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.

WordPress released its major versions 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 in 2008, Joomla! released its major version 1.5 in January and many minor ones during the year, while Drupal released the new 6.0 version in February and many updates afterwards.

Actually this wonderful trio holds the first, third and fourth position; the second position is unexpectedly conquered by PHP-Nuke, whose latest release is version 8.1 of August 2007.

The fifth place belongs to a brilliant new entry, TYPOlight, a very active PHP5 project led by Leo Feyer. TYPOlight released version 2.5.0 in December 2007 and version 2.6.0 in August 2008, with almost monthly updates.

Xoops rises to the sixth place, up from the seventh in 2007. Xoops released its major version 2.3.0 in September 2008, and apparently hasn’t suffered from the ImpressCMS fork that also happened in 2008.

The seventh place is for Movable Type, who held the fourth place in 2006 but dropped a bit under the radar in 2007. Movable Type released version 4.1 and 4.2 in 2008.

And, last but not least, the eight place is for Zikula, a reincarnation of PostNuke. Zikula debuted in June 2008 with version 1.0.0, the new name for the long awaited PostNuke 0.8.

Four platforms were present in the 2007 top eight, but dropped under the radar in 2008: Pligg, ExpressionEngine, Mambo and MODx.

They are possibly suffering for some reason. Pligg visible activity was lower than usual in 2008, version 1.0.0 RC1 has been released only in January 2009; ExpressionEngine kept its fans waiting for the major version 2.0 redesign, unexpectedly delayed; Mambo activity was also low in 2008, and the impact of the MiaCMS fork is being felt; and MODx also kept its fans waiting for version 2.0.0.

Another possible explanation is the new traffic ranking system that Alexa deployed in 2008; the new system averages many popularity factors, giving results sometimes very different from the former ones.

As usual, this article doesn’t make any claim of scientific accuracy, it’s just an attempt to discuss what happened last year in the wonderful world of Content Management Systems.