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We recently moved this blog over from Movable Type to Wordpress – a combination of reasons caused the shift, but so far we’ve been impressed with the capabilities of the new platform.

Now the latest version of Wordpress – 1.5 – has been released, and the first impressions are promising. There’s been a major rewrite under the covers, but the main difference is the ‘themes’ system – giving much more flexible control over the look and feel of the weblog. Wordpress can feel a little intimidating at first if you’re not familiar with PHP, but the new system does a good job of reducing the complexity.

From the point of view of deploying a blog within a project or knowledge management situation, there’s also an interesting development with the facility to create static pages through the blog engine itself. Previously this has always been a little awkward with Wordpress, but it’s something that’s been built into the new system. If there’s content that’s largely static – reference documentation, for example – the static pages look like a good way of handling this within the content management facilities that Wordpress provides. It’s becoming increasingly like a full-blown content management system, which is all the more impressive when you consider that it’s open-source freeware with an impressive peer support network behind it.

We’ll be upgrading in due course, but any new developments that we’re putting together for clients will use the new platform from now on. If you’re looking for a robust, extensible, open-source weblog and content management system, Wordpress 1.5 is worth a look.

Via Patrick Mayfield comes news that Barclays have adopted Prince 2 as the benchmark for their project managers – Foundation level for the junior PMs and Practitioner for the senior roles. As a Practitioner myself, I’m slightly biased, but it strikes me as a good move on several counts.

Not only does it give them a methodology to use for good or for ill, but it also gives their people some external recognition of their capabilities. I remember having a heated discussion with an HR functionary in a previous organisation about whether I should send my team off for certification training (MCSE in that instance). His position was that no sooner had they got the qualification, then they would use it either to demand a higher salary or go off to another job. I took the view that if they were going to do that, we’d probably be better off without them anyway – and if they weren’t, it was important that they felt that organisation was investing in their skills and development.

Fortunately for my team, I won that particular argument – and no-one left for a good while after they’d got their certifications. In the meantime the organisation got the benefit of their enhanced skills, and the morale boost that an expensive chunk of training can deliver.