Here is an interesting post about the 5 most interesting new features in wordpress 3.0: http://mashable.com/2010/05/10/new-features-wordpress-3/

It certainly seems to be going in the right direction - I will be interested to see what can be done with the new custom content types.  This could lead to the use of wordpress for the development of richer websitse and web applications.

Now if they would only fix up what has to be the world’s most frustrating WYSWYG editor! Mind you I haven’t yet come across a web WYSWYG yet that could be described as complete.

In this gloomy climate it’s great to see some good news - and the Irish Times reports here that Google has seen a sharp rise in its profits for the first quarter of this year - more evidence they say that the web advertising and technology sectors are bouncing back from the recession. It seems that revenue rose 28% which is the the biggest rate of growth since the third quarter of 2008.

 
Good news indeed for Google’s many Irish employees, and good news also for the online industry if this trend continues - it certainly seems that ‘online’ is where we all need to be as there aint much moving and shaking in the traditional marketing arena!

Our web design partners at Pride Design have put Paula Rowan’s new website  www.glovesbypaularowan.ie live, I worked very closely with Shane at Pride Design to bring the site to fruition and I am very happy with the outcome!  Paula sells a (self designed) range of luxury gloves through her new website.

The website is (once again) built on Drupal 6 with the eCommerece functionality provided by ubercart.  Ubercart worked out very well on this project and it is quickly becoming our preferred eCommerce solution as it provides modern and flexible shopping cart functionality along with the power of drupal.

Anyway, if you’re feeling a bit on thee chilly side on this dark and cold month of December why not pop over to www.glovesbypaularowan.ie  and see if a luxury pair of leather gloves can help!

Today our partners at Pride Design in Cork put the new Gael-Taca  (http://www.gael-taca.com/) website live, once again we worked closely with pride on its development.  It is fully content managed site built on drupal 6, but the really interesting thing about it is that it’s multi-lingual - as Gaeilge agus as Bearla! (in Irish and English).

In general Drupal proved itself to be well up to the job of multilingual website development, there were just a few strange things to look out for along the way.  One thing I would say though is don’t attempt multi-lingual development without first installing the drupal Internationalization (i18n) module, it is a must!

Good news, this just out on the wire - Drupal has won ‘Best open source PHP Content Management System‘ for the second year running!  Congrats to our favourite CMS and thanks to all the many who volunteered their time to make it so great!

The new Flame By Design (http://www.flamebydesign.ie) website has gone live.  We worked closely with Sinead at Pride Design to get it up and running.  It is another classic content managed drupal 6 website - setup so that the client can easily add and manage the product line up and associated data via a set of specially tailored administration menus.

We used the Dynamic Display Block module (ddblock) to present the alternating images on the home page and great use was made of drupal’s taxonomy system to organise and categorise the products. 

We wish Flame by Design all the best with their new website!

Here’s an interesting thing, the Register reports that the whitehouse has moved its website over to drupal - http://www.whitehouse.gov/

It’s a fairly pedestrian website but it’s good to see that the fledgling administration know their web technology!

Chris Horn will give the Engineers Ireland presidential address tomorrow at Clyde Road. The talk is entitled “Software Engineering: how can we make it better?” It is great to have Engineers Ireland address software engineering topics and Chris always has something interesting and worthwhile to say and he is a no-quibbles heavy weight in the Irish Software Industry!

Having said all this I can’t go as I have to mind the kids tomorrow evening, but I would love to hear how it goes if anybody would like to report back…

Man oh Man it can be though keeping a blog on the road, and some of yee may have noticed that as well this Blog, I have been keeping a Web development blog on Pride Design for the past while now, this blog deals mostly with the fanaticising (!) world of web development and the issues that I encounter while working with Pride developing our content managed websites - As there are only so many hours in the week and as I don’t think that duplicated content servers any purpose, I have decided that I will publish most if not all of my webby stuff on my pride blog from now on, and keep this blog for other software engineering and development stuff.

So if you get a chance why not pop over to my pride blog and take a look, but don’t forget to visit this blog as I am working on some very interesting non web-stuff at the moment too and hope to keep this blog up to date too - thanks!!

Pride Design (www.pridedesign.ie) has put the new Adare Bridal (www.adarebridal.ie) website live.  Once again we have been working closely with pride on the development of this site.  The site is built using drupal 6 and uses custom CCK types and drupal views to model (pun intended) and display all those fantastic designers and their bridal gowns!

The site is a full CMS solution, the client can add, edit or remove content on the site including designers, dresses, special offers etc. by just logging in and using a simple content administration interface.