General Internet News

Developers are usually in two camps of whether WordPress should be used as a CMS or not. For those who are in the camp of “WordPress is not a CMS” must now eat their own words.

Even though WordPress was originally built as a blogging platform, with many development deploys since then, it has now become a fully functional, robust content management system.

WordPress announced today that they won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Last year they weren’t even shortlisted within the top 5, however this year they are rubbing shoulders with Joomla and Drupal.

WordPress is an excellent CMS product for small and large businesses alike.  From a SEO perspective, most WordPress templates with a little bit of tweaking are search engine friendly, allowing search spiders to crawl the content of the site. The ‘All In One SEO Pack‘ is a useful plugin allowing meta data to be customized for each and every post.

The blogging functionality of the site allows website owner to post news, blog posts, media releases and more. Fresh content encourages search spiders to visit more often and thanks to WordPress, content can be added easily.

Congratulations WordPress on your win!

The British found it quite hot last week as they experienced a heat wave and in a bid to keep cool, they hit Google enmass.  The term “paddling pools” was one of the fastest terms sending traffic to HitWise’s Shopping and Classifieds category.

Other fast moving retail search terms included:

“swimming pools” (3rd)
“air conditioning units” (4th)
“air conditioning” (7th)
“fans” (8th)
“air conditioner” (12th)

The chart below shows that the seasons certainly do have an impact on our search behavior and buying habits. You can see that the traffic for these search terms have been the highest since 2006.  (Closer to 0% is higher than 0.015%)

Mozilla Labs has been working on a new plug-in called “Weave” for Firefox that allows users to log into any website account that supports OpenID.  Users don’t even have to have an existing account with the website, thus making it easier for site owners to increase sign-ups.

From a users’ perspective, it makes the logging in or signing up process much easier than ever before.

To enable this function, the user simply logs into their browser so that Weave will know who you are.

Weave also supports normal username and password logins to create a single login experience.  It allows the user to select whether they want to be automatically logged in next time when they click the login button on the related website.

Love the work you are doing Mozilla – keep up the excellent work!