If you believe the time stamp on the message from Pope Benedict XVI- he not only says that members of the cloth should blog- but he says it from a few months in the future- May 16, 2010:
Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.
via Message for the 44th World Communications Day, Benedict XVI.
And with that message from the big guy- and from the future- we proudly present our next Websitetology Seminar on Feb 16, 2010.
To make it even more interesting- I’ll extend the discount of $99 for the day to any members of the Clergy in attendance.
Sign up ASAP because, well, the big guy is watching you.
And don’t worry, this seminar is also great for anyone that needs a website that works- that they can self-manage and self-update.
A local site is using Dolphin 7 to build a community site. Check out www.themiamivalley.com and see what Dolphin can do.
While the installed base of Drupal and Joomla both exceed where Dolphin is today, with the way things change on the web, it’s hard to say what will be the leader tomorrow.
From the Dolphin site:
Open-source, independent, downloadable, scalable, customizable, full-featured, free software for building social networks, dating sites and web-communities.Loaded with video chat, recorder, video player, forums, groups, events, video messenger, mailbox, desktop app, video sharing, photo sharing, iPhone app and much more. Build your own business or advance your hobby with Dolphin!
They have an intro video that has a voice over that’s almost comedic in it’s tone- but, shows a level of sophistication in marketing that other Open Source CMS systems have yet to reach.
Note, Dolphin isn’t entirely free- to remove links back to their site and totally own the brand you have to pay- but, compared to the cost of trying to assemble the whole thing in another CMS- it may be worth it.
We haven’t crawled under the hood of Dolphin yet- but we plan to. If you have any experience with Dolphin compared to Drupal or Joomla, we’d love to hear your feedback.
Need a quick introduction to the new features in WordPress 2.9- watch the video:
For the first time, I didn’t need to use viper007bond Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin to post this, since embedding is covered for a number of video sites. However- it’s still not as easy peasy as they say- I had to switch to HTML view to paste the “embed” code- to get it to work. The little filmstrip button which is supposed to “embed” media- still asks for the user to figure out what type of file they are embedding.
Somehow, even with Automattic (the publishers of WordPress) having a UX person on staff- the user interface is still more complex than it needs to be. I’m still looking at the four “Upload/Insert” buttons- and wondering why they need four buttons for the same controls (I thought I’d written a post about this- but, couldn’t find it).
Other cool features are the ability to crop and rotate images, update and compatibility check all plugins, and a few other cool little fixes. We’ve installed it on our sites- without problem so far (5 days). We’ll report any changes on that as we find them.