New version 2.2 of popular open-source blog software Wordpress was just announced. Wordpress is the blog app of choice here. Wordpress is freely available, open source, and written in php with a mysql database. Wordpress.com also offers a hosted blog application, in the spirit of the Blogger.com model.

I think the coolest feature in the new version is a Blogger.com import wizard, allowing for a quick transition to Wordpress from Blogger. Blogger is a good service, but doesn’t let webmasters tweak things under the hood like we can, running Wordpress on our own servers.

The short list of what’s new:

Blogger.com importer
Protection from plugins and template edits that will break the site - I’d like to see how well this works!
speed improvements
goodies for developers - better documentation
improvements in API will allow other web tools and applications to update your Wordpress blog for you

We recently launched a new blog landing page, or aggregator page for Getty Images. They currently maintain 4 different blogs: Creative, Sport, News and Entertainment. The blogs run on a dedicated server, each is a separate Wordpress instance. While Wordpress is an excellent blog platform, it doesn’t have the capability to maintain independent blogs from the same backend.

The new landing page was designed so that it would have a maximum amount of content ‘above the fold’ and require minimal scrolling. Being an image company, graphics are very important and should stand out. Each blog snapshot shows a snippet of text as well as a thumbnail of the latest image from the blog. All of this is put together with custom php code along with some Wordpress functions.

With the spirit of tagging, each snapshot displays the most recently updated content categories from each blog. Handy RSS links also allow visitors to quickly subscribe to a blog in their favorite reader for future enjoyment.

See it for yourself.