In an elaborate Aprill Fools Joke, the WordPress Development Blog announced that WordPress and TextPattern had merged and formed a new venture called WordPattern. The release notice on WordPress.org states, “Our respective websites are being decommisioned so it’s best to go there (wordpattern.org) for new information”.

WordPattern was being billed as “is an entirely new application based on both Textpattern and WordPress.” One of it’s supposed new features was a “CMS-management system”, meaning that you can managel multiple Content Management Systems (CMS’s) from within the same interface — a feature which is sorely lacking in WordPress.

I find it really unprofessional that this supposed “Press Release” was not only on the wordpress development blog but continued to display in every WordPress user’s dashboard as if it were fact up until mid-day April 3rd. On top of that, when I tried to go to wordpress support to confirm that it is indeed an april fool’s joke, you’ll get the equally unprofessional error message of, “WordPress.org is taking a lunch break.” (the entire site is down).

I’ll admit it - they got me (doh! Always read through the site thoroughly before reporting something as news!) Nonetheless, does anyone else find this to be in rather poor taste? While those of us who are higher level in their techie skills would immediately have recognized that references to such things as “Bjax” were clearly a joke, there ARE members of the WordPress community who likely would not have realized it was a joke and may have panicked with regards to what the implications of this supposed merger would be for their wordpress sites, specifically since the press release referred to wordpress.org being decommissioned.

I get emails regularly from people who are fed up with TypePad and looking to switch to WordPress but find it to be too intimidating. A prank such as this one is only going to alienate Average Joe bloggers who aren’t coders but still want to use the best blogging software out there. That said, as far as April Fool’s Pranks go, this one was certainly pulled off very well!

I’ve come across a number of amazing articles, which I’ve yet to fully process in my brain, on doing your entire site using Movable Type, including static pages - which means you can use Movable Type as a Content Managment System (CMS) in addition to it being a weblog. This greatly expands the power of Movable Type, and with some plugins, it’s almost unbelievable how versatile and expandable Movable Type is.

Here are the links to articles that will (hopefully) help me (and you) to get MT working in a more robust capacity:

Brad Choate’s Doing your whole site with MT allows you to ‘make use of Movable Type’s search feature to search any page f my site instead of just my weblog content. I can also enable comments, trackback or whatever for any page I’d like.’

Brad Choate has created an amazing plugin for Movable Type that allows you to create and reference additional fields, making it more easy to use Movable Type as a semi-full featured CMS System