Yesterday Wordpress 2.0 was released. I haven’t tried it yet, but hopefully soon I will have time to give it a spin on my test site. The main thing is that some of the plugins that I use might not work yet with WP 2.0, so it might be wise to give the plugin authors a bit of time to update them.

Since my current project is using WP as a CMS for my church web site, I am especially excited about a few of the features.

• WYSIWYG Editor

This new editor will make it even easier for non-techies to create/edit posts or pages. Now they can easily format text without having to insert html tags. One of our design considerations is that ministry leaders should be able to edit pages without knowing any html. But if you don’t like it you can turn it off (sometimes I would rather edit the code).

• User Roles

Here is an explanation of this feature from Asymptomatic:

The “user level” concept of security has now been replaced with Roles. WordPress associates a Role to each user. Roles have Capabilities such as “edit posts” and “activate plugins” that allow certain actions. There is no more concept of hierarchical users, but plugin authors can now create whole new Capabilities to apply proper permission management.

One of the big challenges of a CMS in a volunteer organization like a church is the need to assign limited permissions to different users so that they can edit their section but not mess up the whole site. With WP 2.0 it is possible to define the capabilities of custom designed roles, and to assign more than one role to a user (although there is currently not an interface to support this). This will make Wordpress much more powerful as a multi-user CMS. You can read more here.

I discovered that the subscription feed was not working correctly. It has now been repaired.

Welcome to my new technology blog! There are already millions of technology sites, but this site has a much more narrow focus. It is dedicated to thoughts about technology and Christian ministry. Right now I will post mainly about Wordpress, since I am using Wordpress for my personal blogs as well as for the update of my church web site.

As I learn new things working on my web sites I will post them here. I have copies a few technology posts from my other blog. Hopefully the lessons that I learn will be of help to others. I am especially interested in helping other pastors and churches develop or enhance web based ministries.

Right now the theme for this blog is very spartan. I wanted a different look from my other blog,
Reflections. In time I will be able to make improvements to this theme and showcase some of my CMS techniques for Wordpress.