Technologies that support and enhance the social, scientific and cultural sectors and projects.
From content management systems and collections management, to multimedia and VR solutions, computer and internet technologies have changed the game of visitor engagement completely, both on the ground and off. Here we explore common tools and tactics.
Much of our digital world depends on a little technique discovered out of necessity in the early days of computing. This paradigm of how digital devices communicate and co-operate, makes the entirety of the internet possible and efficient. So to understand information technology and online content delivery methods, you must understand what client-server architecture is.
WordPress is one of the biggest success stories of both the open source and CMS world. In part this is thanks to their very active development schedule that has resulted in a steady stream of improvements, bug-fixes, security updates and new features, which have kept the community of its users satisfied and growing.
Over the past few years WordPress has maintained a fairly regular release schedule of a couple of major releases per year. In 2010, they released the long awaited version 3.0 which finally integrated the multi-blog fork of WordPress into the regular version and introduced the new default theme Twenty Ten, along with many improvements to do with custom post types. Having done that, they decided to take one release cycle off to work on community building and the WordPress forums, theme repository and other ancillary bits. So needless to say, the next major release, version WordPress 3.1, was enthusiastically awaited.
Stories and posts arranged in a decreasing order of freshness has been a model followed by many networked information sites since the fledgling days of public computer networks. BBSs and discussion forums worked on that model and blogs inherited it. In forums, where new posts could be added every few minutes by a large membership, it became clear the administrators needed a way to keep important posts displayed on top of the list permanently, not being displaced by newer content. So they invented the sticky post.
WordPress needed plugins to produce a similar effect of marking a post as sticky until version 2.7, which had a the feature built-in. This is how it works.
For me, Drupal is one of the granddaddies of the open source CMS world. While it might not be the oldest by any means, it is the first one I tried, and loved. Even at the time, I heard a lot of complaints about how impossibly difficult it was to get to grips with. While I never shared that sentiment, and setup a reasonably active blog-like site for myself and some friends, which served us well for a few years, this accusation of unfriendliness towards the average user has continued to plague Drupal. So, it came as no surprise that when they set out to plan and design a whole new major version of the software over 3 years ago, they made the usability their main mission.
