This is an archived post from my old technology blog, which I’ve imported here as it relates to PHP. It was originally published on 02/08/2008.
Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS (via: Matt)
I’ve been looking for a half-decent content management system for some time, as until now I’ve been writing my own code for each site that I run. This is a real pain, as I never have the time to write an admin interface — and therefore end up using phpMyAdmin — and I’m not as good as designing interfaces as other people. However, I have thought several times about using WordPress as a content management system — even though it started as a blogging platform — which is why the above article is particularly of interest to me.
Reasons why I would consider using WordPress as a CMS:
- Spam protection: Akismet is by far the most effective anti-spam solution I’ve come across, it probably performs better on blog comments than SpamAssassin does on my email. Sure, there are plugins available for several other systems, but with WordPress the support is practically built-in. Yes, it is technically a plugin, but it comes shipped with the distribution, so there’s one less step to mess around with.
- Familiarity: I use WordPress on several other blogs, so I’m comfortable with the interface and the way the software does things. In a similar vein, readers of my sites/blogs are also more likely to be familiar with the commenting interface for WordPress than for other content management systems
- Theme availability: WordPress seems to have more themes available for it than any other blog or content management system I’ve seen. You can download thousands of free themes, pay less than $100 for an off-the-shelf professionally designed theme, or cough up for a designer to create a unique theme especially for your site — there are plenty of companies and individuals around who offer this service. What’s more, WordPress themes can make your site look unique — one of my major bugbears with Drupal is that all of the themes tend to look like Drupal sites.
- Plugins: Like themes, there are thousands of plugins available, enabling pretty much anything you could possibly want to do with WordPress — from formatting posts with Textile to cross-posting to other sites (e.g. LiveJournal) automatically. I’m not aware of any other system with the same variety of plugins (though Drupal probably comes a close second), and I suspect this is largely due to the ease of creating and installing plugins for WordPress.