Writing in O’Reilly ONLamp, John McCreesh has an excellent review of WordPress as a replacement for a content management system.
His feature walks through the steps he took to set up a WordPress-based website complete with his analytical approach to why he wanted to do this plus screenshots of what he did.
McCreesh’s bottom line:
[…] Could WordPress be used for full-blown websites as well as blogs? I believe the answer is definitely yes. WordPress lets users do an awful lot of things without requiring any knowledge of the underlying technology […] The end result is the best of both CMS and blog worlds, with flexible content layout arranged under hierarchical menus such as a CMS, plus all the nice features of blogs such as ease of maintenance, RSS feeds, comments, and permalinks.
A good example of how WordPress can be deployed in this way. A credible contender among blog platforms such as Movable Type, even though Six Apart don’t regard it as a direct competitor.
3 responses to “WordPress instead of CMS”
Yes, I found that article a really interesting read. I have been looking into various systems recently for a project I am getting involved in, and keep meaning to do a round-up on my blog. This has made me seriously consider WordPress, which as you know I love, wheras before I thought it might be a little lightweight. The one I had identified as a possible goer was PHP-Fusion, which is full featured and easy to use. WordPress might yet win now though!
Just for interest, I did recently sign up for the WordPress hackers mailing list, just to get an insight on what people involved with the project are talking about. What has shocked me is the amount of flack that the project leaders get, people like Matt Mullenweg and Ryan Boren. They get some real stick, which I just can’t believe.
Such is the world of the developer community, Dave. I don’t belong to the hackers list, just the general support lists. That’s bad enough!
I think John McCreesh’ story really is a very good one. Yet there must be similar stories out there illustrating a role Movable Type (say) is playing in a similar scenario. One advantage WordPress has is its out-of-the-box ability to have a a site where non-blog content (static pages, I guess we’d call them) are integrated with the overall content in the same database as the blog pages. MT can’t do that.
Indeed, I know of one company in the UK who are testing MT as an integral element of their primary intranet. They didn’t consider WordPress, though. From what I know of what they want to achieve, they ought to.
If you post about your experiences, I’d love to read what you have to say.
As far as I’m concerned (just techie enough to be dangerous) WordPress is a CMS. And, if you work with a good designer/developer (as I did) it’s amazing how versatile the software truly is.
When I renovated my site, I choose to go all WP – and my site is the blog and vice versa. Terrific stuff.
I’d also suggest you check out Expression Engine for web site design. Incredibly powerful. CMS is a bit more complex but still very user friendly.