The Potential of Wordpress

First thing’s first. For those who don’t know, CMS is short for Content Management System. Wikipedia defines it as software which

“facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content”.

Yeah that’s the stuffy answer. What does it mean exactly? More or less, a CMS is a tool for managing material (content, graphics, documents, etc.) used on a website. Simple enough. Actually setting up and using a CMS isn’t always as simple. After playing around with a few of the most popular open source apps out there (ModX, Joomla and Drupal)… I decided to see what I could do with Wordpress instead, though naysayers debate its use as such.

There are pros and cons to using Wordpress as a CMS, just as there would be with any other application, even if it’s specifically intended as a CMS. For example, complexity is one disadvantage to choosing Drupal, which in my opinion was entirely unimpressive. Configuring Joomla wasn’t much better. ModX has so far been pleasant to work with, and certainly has the best looking UI of the three. One of these days I want to dig a little deeper and write a full evaluation of these apps, but for now I’m going to focus on Wordpress.

Plain vanilla as it is, Wordpress has a rich enough feature-set and a slew of plugins to make extending its capabilities very easy, without compromising usability or functionality. Furthermore, Wordpress has such a large user base, it’s easy to find help if you run into trouble.

To that end, I decided to write a short series on how and why to set up Wordpress as a CMS, based on my own use and experience while building this site. Stay tuned.

Tags: cms | content-management | plugins | site-management