Each business has its own needs and criteria but from this side the following criteria were important:

• customization: API quality, documentation, programming language and support. A system like Sitecore is for sure the max but there is also a steep learning curve. On the other side of the scale, there are thousands of interesting CMS system with poor API or documentation.
• availability of plugins. WordPress has a practically endless amount of plugins while SiteFinity is a bit thin in this respect.
• choice of themes and skins. Here again, a system like SharePoint seems an all-rounder but assigning a brand to a site is, well, a project on its own.
• ease of deployment and setup requirements. A great systems requires a great environment, whether in terms of security or in terms of cost, one cannot avoid administrative issues (aka requirements) with larger CMS systems.
• costs This one is relative, of course.
• integrations: can the system integrate with other systems (billing, PM, mail…)?
• maintenance effort With the ubiquitous HTML5 wave and JavaScript madness one has to be prepared for changes. How does a CMS system evolve in an ever changing IT landscape?

There is also the fact that

• if you have used a CMS before you probably have already a database full of content; can this content be transferred to another system and what does it take?
• each system has a certain workflow or mechanics which one gets used to. Changing CMS means changing habits and rethinking e.g. the categorization (ontology) of the content delivery.
• look-and-feel is to some extend bound to the underlying site logic. A theme from WordPress is not necessarily easily transferred to SiteFinity or vice versa.

On a technical level there are obviously also certain aspects to consider like; .Net or PHP or Ruby, MySQL or SQL Server, WCF enabled or XML-RPC…?

So, choosing a CMS is really a project on its own and when chosen the real hard work is ahead; customization, content (re)formatting and so on. In as far as this small company is representative for you, our considerations were the following:

• we have used WordPress in the past seven years and fully satisfied with it. Content transfer and upgrade is reduced to nill in this case.
• there are tons of themes, plugins, community articles and site using WordPress. Whatever you are looking for, someone already made it and WordPress has an easy plugin system to adorn your site to your taste with these themes and plugins.
• cost and deployment are small. No need for high-end servers or special administrative priviledges.
• it’s PHP and MySQL (though you have SQL Server and Azure solutions) but the learning curve is smooth. In fact, PHP is fun and MySQL is a wonderful RDBMS.
• the biggest issue is integrations and the possibility to mix-match things with either home-made systems or third-party system. This is our compromise.

This said, systems like SiteFinity or Orchard are really a joy and well worth a look. It just depends what you need and your business context.

In WordPress you go to Dashboard > Appearance > Editor and then select the Header.php file. Of course, you need write access to the file or need to change it locally before overwriting it through FTP.

Add something like the following to the header:

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Use an icon editor to create some RGB/A icons (Axialis IconWorkshop is great, by the way), it will make things more appealing.

According to some rumors a pinned site increases traffic:

Microsoft says that site owners who have implemented the new feature have seen an increase in site visits, anywhere from 15% to 50%. “It shouldn’t surprise that much,” Brian Hall, general manager of Windows Live business group, told CNET in an interview last week. “If you think about it there’s a reason people have competed aggressively for default home paging for years and years and years. That default home page was the thing that you saw every time you started your browser,” Hall said.

but this remains to be seen. Personally I think these pins are more useful to get a direct access to Silverlight applications which are not OOB (out of browser).

References:

• Jennifer Marsman seems to know everything about pinned sites. Note that many more possibilities are explained here than the simple additions described above.
• See the official intro to pinned sites
• Internet Explorer 9′s ‘pinning’ feature boosts sites traffic
• Buildmypinnedsite is a helpfull tool to create pinned info

When setting up a WordPress site you normally have to pass through the “WP-admin/install.php” but for some strange reason II7 will intercept this as an error. That is, if you disable showing errors. Once you enable showing detailed errors the normal WordPress setup will pop up.

Just open the IIS Errors page settings

and instead of the “Detailed errors local requests” only of the erros, select the “Detailed errors”. Smile, now you can continue the setup of WordPress.

See also the official IIS site for more on this and Mike Volodarsky’s post.

• GetTags
• GetComments
• GetPages
• GetPage

and an easier API by defining the credentials as constants.  All this allows you now to consult and manage your WP blog through calls like:

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WP wp=new WP();
Page[] ps = wp.GetPages(3);
Page page= wp.GetPage("655");
Post post = wp.GetPost("1068");
UserInfo info= wp.GetUserInfo();
CommentFilter f = new CommentFilter() { number = 12,offset = 0,post_id = 1068,status = "approve"};
Comment[] c = wp.GetComments(f);
Post[] p = wp.GetRecentPosts(3);
Category[] cats= wp.GetCategories();
TagInfo[] t = wp.GetTags();
 
Image im= Bitmap.FromFile(@"C:\temp\thumbup.jpg");
byte[] barray = WP.ConvertImageToByteArray(im, ImageFormat.Jpeg);
MediaObject media = new MediaObject() { name = "wpapi.jpg", type ="jpg", bits = barray};
MediaObjectInfo minfo = wp.NewMediaObject(media);

You can download this Visual Studio project and don’t forget to fetch a copy of the XML-RPC.Net library from Cook computing (there is a version in the VS solution though).

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

While upgrading and consolidating some older stuff to WP 2.5.1 I needed a .Net wrapper to the metaWebLog API of WordPress. The XML-RPC.Net library helps you a long way in achieving this but the last bits are somewhat tricky and each new version of WP is altering things. So, I cooked some code together which you can find below.

The API is self-descriptive but the novel thing is the possibility to upload media straight to your blog, like the following:

WP.Publisher api = new WP.Publisher("admin", "Unknown");
WP.MediaObject media = new WP25API.MediaObject();
media.type = "jpg";
media.name = "test.jpg";
 
media.bits = WP.Publisher.ConvertImageToByteArray(new Bitmap(@"C:\temp\SomeImage.jpg"),
    System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Jpeg);
 
WP.MediaObjectInfo info= api.AddMedia(media);

Easy. Would in fact allow one to use the blog as a file repository (I noticed my host moved the max to 380GB recently).

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using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using CookComputing.XmlRpc;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Drawing.Imaging;
using System.IO;
namespace WP25API
{
    public class Publisher
    {
 
        #region Properties
        public string UserName = "admin";
        public string Password = "Unknown";
        #endregion
 
 
        #region Constructor
        ///<summary>
        ///Default constructor
        ///</summary>
        public Publisher(string user, string pass)
        {
            UserName = user;
            Password = pass;
        }
        #endregion
 
 
        #region Methods
        public static byte[] ConvertImageToByteArray(Image imageToConvert, ImageFormat formatOfImage)
        {
            byte[] Ret;
 
            try
            {
 
                using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
                {
                    imageToConvert.Save(ms, formatOfImage);
                    Ret = ms.ToArray();
                }
            }
            catch (Exception) { throw; }
 
            return Ret;
        }
        public Post GetPost(int postid)
        {
            IWP proxy = XmlRpcProxyGen.Create<iwp>();
            string[] args = new string[] { postid.ToString(), UserName, Password };
            return proxy.GetPost(args);
        }
 
        public List<post> GetRecentPost(int amount)
        {
            IWP proxy = XmlRpcProxyGen.Create<iwp>();
            string[] args = new string[] { "0", UserName, Password, amount.ToString() };
            Post[] posts = proxy.GetRecentPosts(args);
            if (posts == null)
                return null;
            else
            {
                return posts.ToList<post>();
            }
        }
        public string AddPost(Post post, bool publish)
        {
            IWP proxy = XmlRpcProxyGen.Create<iwp>();
            object[] args = new object[] { "0", UserName, Password, post, publish };
            return proxy.AddPost(args);
 
        }
        public bool UpdatePost(string postid, Post post, bool publish)
        {
            IWP proxy = XmlRpcProxyGen.Create</iwp><iwp>();
            object[] args = new object[] { postid, UserName, Password, post, publish };
            return proxy.UpdatePost(args);
        }
        public List<categoryinfo> GetCategories()
        {
            IWP proxy = XmlRpcProxyGen.Create<iwp>();
            string[] args = new string[] { "0", UserName, Password };
            CategoryInfo[] ret = proxy.GetCategories(args);
            if (ret == null)
                return null;
            else
            {
                return ret.ToList<categoryinfo>();
            }
        }
        public MediaObjectInfo AddMedia(MediaObject mediaObject)
        {
            IWP proxy = XmlRpcProxyGen.Create<iwp>();
            object[] args = new object[] { "0", UserName, Password, mediaObject };
            return proxy.NewMediaObject(args);
        }
        #endregion
    }
 
 
    [XmlRpcUrl("http://www.whatever.net/xmlrpc.php")]
    public interface IWP : IXmlRpcProxy
    {
 
        #region MetaWeblog API
 
        [XmlRpcMethod("metaWeblog.newPost")]
        string AddPost(object[] args);
 
        [XmlRpcMethod("metaWeblog.editPost")]
        bool UpdatePost(object[] args);
 
        [XmlRpcMethod("metaWeblog.getPost")]
        Post GetPost(string[] args);
 
        [XmlRpcMethod("metaWeblog.getCategories")]
        CategoryInfo[] GetCategories(string[] args);
 
        [XmlRpcMethod("metaWeblog.getRecentPosts")]
        Post[] GetRecentPosts(string[] args);
 
        [XmlRpcMethod("metaWeblog.newMediaObject")]
        MediaObjectInfo NewMediaObject(object[] args);
 
 
 
        #endregion
 
 
    }
 
 
}
 
</iwp></categoryinfo></iwp></categoryinfo></iwp></post></iwp></post></iwp>

Looking at the stats of Akismet you can see that on an average day around 5.000.000 comments are being filtered out of which only (…speechless..) 500.000 are so called ‘ham’ messages, i.e. meaningful data. Looking even further via Whois and other systems you’d discover that the biggest Wiki spam is from Asia. With a blooming economy comes a deterioration of ethical principles…?

Whether spammers think they can fool the Google rating system or manipulate the idle minds on this planet, I guess it’s all part of an eco system which reflects very much the viral world where in effect the net result is that immunity and defense increase of the attacked organisms. As much as our evolution is driven by random mutations and viral forces, the internet is getting better and data with real informative content is better protected as time goes by. Company like Akismet are doing a priceless job, much like white blood cells in our bodies.