I have been out and about networking a little bit more than normal over the last couple of weeks and I have noticed a bit of a common thread when I talk to people about WordPress (the CMS that we use for all of our clients at sennza). The majority of people who have heard of WordPress seem to react with the same answer: “But that’s just a blogging platform”. I want to put those rumours to bed in this post. I think this is a post that I might refer quite a lot of people to just so they can understand that WordPress IS a CMS (Content Management System)! Saying WordPress is only good for blogging is like saying Google are only good for searches!
What makes WordPress a CMS?
In my opinion I believe that any content management system should have the following features:
- A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor
- The ability to easily add new pages to a web site
- Templating (To separate presentation from content)
- Versioning (So that you can track editing history)
- The ability to embed and attach various files (e.g. pdf, documents, images, video)
WordPress satisfies all of these criteria and above all excels in ease of use for the end user. I’ve worked with a hell of a lot of content management systems over the years. These include Joomla, DotNetNuke, Modx, Mambo and quite a few proprietary CMS for companies who I won’t mention. I hate thinking about the difficulty and confusion that I’ve experienced with all of these other CMS when it comes to teaching the client how to update their website. As a designer and developer I understood the systems but always used to dread the handover meetings where I would have to teach clients how to use their CMS. WordPress is so simple and easy to use that we can sometimes just send a client a username and a password and they work out how to update their own site without any training!!!
What can’t WordPress do?
In my opinion WordPress can do anything. That’s right, anything! Let’s have a look at some awesome uses for WordPress:
- eCommerce using plugins such as WP e-commerce or Shopp
- Social Networking using BuddyPress (e.g. Activity streams, groups, forums, friending, messaging)
- A searchable candidate database for recruiters Diva Recruitment (Disclaimer: The plugin for this site was developed from the ground up by our team).
- A Wiki (WordPress Wiki Theme)
- A business directory
Still not convinced? Let me show you some stats!
During a recent video from WordCamp San Francisco 2010 Matt Mullenweg (the founding developer of WordPress) updated us with some amazing stats on just how popular WordPress is on the internet today:
- There have been 21 million downloads of WordPress just last year alone, this number is double that of the year before.
- There have been 70 million downloads for Plugin’s and Theme on WordPress (this doesn’t include 3rd parties).
- WordPress 3.0 has been downloaded 1.7 million times since it’s release on 17 June 2010. Check out the live download counter!
- 8.5% of webpages on the internet use WordPress!
Lachlan pointed out to my a recent talk by Simon Sinek where he talked about the Law of Diffusion of Innovation.
The Law of Diffusions of Innovation talks about the adoption of new technology and what it takes to get to the tipping point before your technology is accepted as commonplace or the norm. If WordPress keeps up its current momentum (which everyone believes at sennza!) it will reach the tipping point at the 13.5% mark.
We’re very proud at sennza that all of our clients are not only innovators, they are always happy because of the ease of use of this CMS!
WordPress: You had me at hello!
I’ve been madly in love with WordPress since version 2.5. I still remember the day I first saw you WordPress, you were sitting lonely across the other side of the internet. I made my way through a sea of blog posts and after a few clicks and our eyes met. I’ll never forget that day. Not only did my design and development life suddenly get easier…my clients lives got easier. And with the recent release of WordPress 3.0 it’s easy to see why!
Edit: Matt posted a great link on his blog to the showcase on WordPress.org for all the sites tagged with CMS.
WordPress is definitely more user-friendly then most of the other CMS (Yes it definitely is a CMS!) packages out there, but remember that there is a limit to how far you can expand a package with plugins before you’re _forcing_ it to be the same as an existing package.http://www.goodwebpractices.com/other/wordpress…This URL is overly simplified, and doesn’t touch all bases, but it’s a good starter reference.Always choose the right package for the right job.I constantly get asked why I constant recommendlu Joomla to people, and the short answer is: I don’t !I use the right tool for the right job, and have many clients running Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, and even DotNetNuke… and *not* all of the WordPress sites are “blogs”.Bronson is quite correct: WordPress is not just a blogging platform, but has many other uses that it’s well suited for.It’s ease of use makes it the fore-running choice for your next CMS project.
Great reply Jabin and thanks for the link to that blog post. I’m just about to post a reply to them about their WordPress Cons list!
I am still yet to play around with Drupal seeing WordPress has always met my needs. What are some of the advantages of Drupal over other CMS in your experience?
Not the OP, but IMO the advantage of Drupal is its power and flexibility. You can do some pretty insanely complicated things in Drupal with little to no coding. For example, a couple weeks ago I set up a system that uses a custom content type (with all kinds of custom fields) creates an XML feed listing all the nodes in that content type (with an arbitrary location and format) to be fed to a pre-built SWF, all with zero custom coding.
Ahh nice. Thanks for the comment Mike. I am curious to have a play with Drupal. I know I’ll never break off my love affair with WordPress. From a chat with Jabin about Drupal on Facebook the other day he’s got me thinking that I might be nice to use for intranets because of the user intergration. I must admit for a couple of clients I have had to modify/”hack” into the user profiles of WordPress to achieve some more advanced user roles and that is probably the only thing that was tricky to get my head around first up. Could you possibly give me a link or two for some good Drupal community sites so I can have a bit of a read up on Drupal customisation?
Cheers!
If you are looking at drupal, certainly look around and at the docs….. but you might want to pop into drupalgardens.com (I thnk that’s the address)… they have a free service up, an excellent point to get your feet wet.
They allow you to “export” your installation once completed up there as well, so if you need to add elements that drupal gardens doesn’t include, you can just move it to self host and go crazy with it.
cheers,
Vince.
Ahh fantastic! Thanks very much Vince! I appreciate that!
Glad you’re willing to keep an open mind. I know way too many folks who are fans of a single CMS and are unwilling to try anything else. As for learning Drupal, my recommendations are here: http://mikethecoder.com/2010/02/24/how-to-learn-drupal/
Three things to remember when learning Drupal:
1) It’s going to be really hard and seem really complicated at first. Much more so than WP (or most other CMSes for that matter). Just stick with it.
2) Drupal core, by itself, does very little. Almost all of Drupal’s power comes in the contributed modules on Drupal.org. There’s a mentality of “I have to install a module to do that?!” for newcomers, but you quickly get past that and realize that this is a feature, as it allows core to be much more flexible since you can pick and choose modules that do things different ways.
3) There are almost no Drupal sites that don’t use two main modules: CCK (which allows you to add custom fields to custom content types), and Views (which allows you to have custom listings of nodes). Learn these two modules well.
Yeah I guess I’m different because I’ve used many CMS in the past. Thanks for the link to your post on Drupal. I’ll check it out in the next couple of weeks.
Sounds like the Drupal core is nice and stripped back then. That’s what I love about WP. It’s nice and basic and you add some essential plugins then build from there. I think most newcomers have the same mentality for WordPress as well…and Joomla for that matter too. I used to code in Joomla a fair bit and got a bit sick of the MVC side of things because for a lot of my clients it was overkill. It was great on huge sites though but the development time was too slow for my liking. It’ll be interesting to see what Drupal is like. Thanks again for the reply I really appreciate people taking time out to help others learn knew things!
Thanks for the post. You can do a lot with Title, Description, Category and Tags. Use your imagination!!
Ok…duplicate post. Come up with something witty, since I can’t delete.
WordPress is just a generic CMS when you get past it being a popular blogging platform.
One short example: http://www.ethosmarketing.co.uk – its wordpress as pages and it works very well for the client as is.
Excellent link! I love the clean look and feel of the site and the inner pages are great with the fast facts, press releases, photo gallery and newsletter. Very nice example!
Is wordpress ever used as a Marketplace i.e. users can sell their products. I know it can be used but is there any site using it that way?
Hey Mushi,
That’s a great question. One I’d love to know the answer to as well! It could definitely be achieved but hopefully someone has done that before and we can have a peek to see it in action.
While we don’t use it as a marketplace for multiple sellers… we do use it quite successfully for our own store.
Before moving to wordpress from an html site… we worked long and hard with joomla, drupal, and even C5, and Zen Photo. After looking at the options, it came down to drupal or wordpress.
At first we thougth drupal was the way (social users built in)… but simply could NOT wrap my brain around the jargon and thought pattern — views, content types… etc.
In the end, we used wordpress, and with a little php magic created our own system by hacking up a theme to our specs. We use php for special searches, user logged—in/out widgets. etc.
We’ve even included a member’s discount (10%) based on wheter a user is logged in or not.
At the end of the day… I learnt php faster than I could learn the basics of drupal.
our result is seen at http://greenspotantiques.com or http://twojjs.com
Feel free to try it, register, log in… and notice the pricing. We’re very happy with this. So far… seems profitable to us
I’ve been trying to get a site off the ground for a little while now that is in need of some sort of CMS. Primarily it is content, but the users are very inexperienced, so getting something as simple as possible for them to update their content is a critical need for me.
Would you say there are any barriers to size/content/structuring that would limit or constrain a WordPress install? For instance, if you needed to have a hierarchical structure of pages 3 levels down, or something to that extent?
I’ll admit that the more I play with WordPress for some smaller sites and find plugins that serve specific needs, the more I’m liking WordPress. I’m just looking for an “upper bound” if one exists.
Hey Dillie-O,
WordPress is perfect for inexperienced users. That’s the thing that I love about it most. I’ve been able to train clients who find sending emails challenging within minutes with WordPress.
I haven’t found any barriers that would constrain a WordPress install. To give you an idea of how scalable WordPress is, 11.4 million blogs are hosted on WordPress.com as of June 2010 and that’s a single WordPress install. It used to be WordPress MU but that’s now WordPress 3.0 (with mulitsite enabled). If you know a little PHP then I recommend you check out this series of video screencasts by Drew Douglass http://blog.themeforest.net/screencasts/new-wp-video-series-and-free-rockstar-book/ That’ll teach you about how to install WordPress and how to start making your own theme.
In terms of the hierarchical structure of pages. I’ve never had to go past three page levels but I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who have gone deeper than that. Hopefully someone else here might be able to answer that one for you.
The plugins are definitely one of the great things about WordPress and the community is fantastic as well.
That’s good to know! Thanks for the video. I’ll work on getting an install in place tonight!
We just launched blendtec.com on wordpress and WP E-Commerce
The new blendtec.com runs on WordPress and WP E-Commerce, and in spite of heavy traffic, it’s doing wonderfully. My hat’s off to the awesome people at Automattic & getshopped.org who make this possible.
I love the Blendtec YouTube vids. It’s great to know that WordPress powers their new site. The latest WP E-Commerce has such a fantastic shopping cart. It looks great on blendtec.com! Good work Velda!
Thank you!
d’oh. I’m sorry for the duplicate post as well! I didn’t realize selecting my twitter account would post without giving me a chance to finish writing. Feel free to just keep the middle comment.
i built vezign.com on wordpress
and i sell wordpress sites 
Os envío un macroblog (blog de blogs) que acabamos de lanzar en telecinco. Just launched en Telecinco. (only wordpress) http://www.divinity.es
That’s a gorgeous looking site! I love the design! Thanks for sharing that
I’m right there with you man – WordPress is the best CMS I’ve tested — and yet, many clients have completely the wrong Idea about it. Often their issues: not having tested it themselves so they’re concerned it might suck; they think since it’s open source it isn’t safe for enterprise; they hear that bloggers adopt it, so think it’s for blogging.
Of course, to outweigh all these concerns: the agility of wordpress.
I totally agree! I used to have to work with Joomla a couple of years ago and I didn’t like the UI, the community wasn’t all that strong, the updates were slow and the changes from version to version weren’t anything all that special.
WordPress on the other hand is fabulous on all fronts. Every time WordPress release a new version it’s like Christmas Day for me. I’m always excited about it and I’ll install a beta build to see what’s coming and how I can tap into it for the next project!
I also love Matt’s transparency and appreciation of the community too. It’s great when he calls in to the WordPress Weekly podcast too just to let everyone know what’s going on.
When an article is shared by Matt Mullenweg himself on his blog, it is a must-read ! I can now say that it is an amazing article ! Good work Bronson.
Thanks very much Sebastien!
I had to do a double take when I saw my post show up on Matt’s Facebook Page then when I saw the link was from his own site I was even more amazed!
Cool post…tell me, where do you get the “8.5% of webpages on the internet use WordPress” stat? I find that very interesting and cool as a fellow lover of all things wordpress, but it’s kind of hard to believe.
Matt Mullenweg spoke about it in his keynote at the annual WordPress conference in San Francisco http://wordpress.tv/2010/05/12/sotw2010/ Definitely worth watching
I too love WordPress. And I am nothing but an absolute beginner. It is so easy to create your pages and change the design whenever you feel like it.
WordPress is so much more than people give it credit for. If they would open their minds a little, they might see how well the system actually works. Utilizing WordPress, I’m able to accomplish by myself what would normally take a team of coders.
We just launched a physician search site at http://www.utphysicians.com using WP as a full CMS. It takes us about 30 minutes to get someone fully trained on using WP and enables them to easily manage their content. Not only that, but it’s easy enough to remember how to work in the system if it’s not something you have to do every day.
Good to see someone else plugin in a unique search feature onto WordPress. Great work!
Yeah 30 minutes is about all it takes for us to train someone in WordPress too!
great article and i agree it is very frustrating to talk with people about using WordPress as a CMS rather than just for their blog. i am taking a number of your points here and using it when talking with clients, thanks!
Thanks very much! Glad to help you out halfacat!
If WP was a girl I would buy her flowers
Kickin – chicken…..I think that says it all really.
Nice post Bronson!
I would also add because of WordPress’s popularity it is fairly easy to find answers to your questions. It is much more than a blog platform, it is a true content management system.
Thanks Joseph,
I also think its more the WordPress community rather than its popularity. There is something really special about the WordPress community where everyone tries to help everyone out. Hopefully we are doing the same.
We have build a Portal with wordpress at http://iurd.pt, it is running since WordPress 2.7, so.. people really have a bad idea about wordpress.
Last week i contacted some companies, and all of them told me that joomla is the best, what in my opinion, and some users that we have, joomla is a headache.
Wow. I’ve never seen that Google AJAX Translation plugin before as I’ve never had to do a mutli-language site before. That looks very cool!
Yeah I’m always still amazed by the number of companies who still think Joomla is the best CMS. We’ve had a couple of clients switch from Joomla to WordPress and once they’d started using WordPress they NEVER want to go back to Joomla again
I actually just turned down an in-house position because the hiring manager wouldn’t consider WordPress a CMS. When I showed him my portfolio and the range of projects covered in it (which essentially proved him wrong), his response was “but it’s only used by bloggers”.
Haha I love that you turned it down because of that. I can’t believe all the hours I used to have to spend getting a Joomla template and components written. A site would take a month in Joomla at least with custom components and with WordPress it’s under two weeks.
I bet those guys will see the light in the Late Majority bracket of the graph in my post!
LMAO!! Some people have no idea how powerful WordPress is and what it can do. WordPress can pretty much be anything you want it to be and so much more.
Love it Love it Love it. I’m using it as much as my clients will let me…
Without WordPress, we wouldn’t have Event Espresso
http://eventespresso.com/
Ooohh that looks like it’ll be a nice plugin. When will you be adding a link to download the free version for a trial? I’d love to have a play around with that.
I can picture a few clients needing a nice event management system like that in the future. The Extra Shot looks like it would be very handy!
Well. I have the original version called “Advanced Events Registration” available for download on my blog (http://shoultes.net/wordpress-events-registration-with-paypal-ipn/) and on WordPress (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advanced-events-registration/).
I have been developing this plugin for over a year and a half in my spare time and I have taken feedback from hundreds of people and compiled it into the pro version over the course of the last year. I just released the “Advanced Events Registration” pro version about six months ago.
I have to admit the free version is a little clunky at the moment, but it is getting a face lift very soon. Hopefully very shortly after I release the newly renamed plugin (Event Espresso.)
Event Espresso is actually version 3 of the Advanced Events Registration Pro, with a new name. It is almost a complete redesign of the current pro version. So far the beta version of Event Espresso has 2-3 times the features of version 2.33.
I have also started integrating Facebook events with Event Espresso, so that when an event is created, it auto-posts an event to your Facebook account and your profile.
Shoot me an email (http://shoultes.net/contact/) and I will send you the Event Espresso beta to play around with, if you like.
Seth
By the way. Sorry there I don’t have more info on the Event Espresso website. I have been in development mode for soo long, it is hard to write content. lol. I am so excited about this plugin though. I think it is going to help save educators, bloggers, and speakers lots of money by having a built in registration system on their WordPress blogs.
Just sent you a “quick” contact message. The plugin has come a long way from the look of the screenshots.
Yeah you’ve definitely created a great events plugin to fill a whole in the market. For the site I mentioned above we were looking at http://www.eventbrite.com/ but seeing the site is a charity we needed to so something cheaper so I modified your old plugin to do the trick
Haha guess what Seth? I just realised I used and modified this plugin of yours http://shoultes.net/wordpress-events-registration-with-paypal-ipn/ on a charity site I did about a year ago. http://www.digitalangels.org.au/ I had to whip up something in 4 hours so it was a speed development.
I’m so glad you’ve built on that plugin. It’s great. The exporting to CSV was great for the night!
Download counts, popularity, flexibility and ease of use just convince. And from version to version it seems to get better and easier to work with. Also the choice of handy plugins is really amazing.
The only thing I dread is the built-in editor. I use a desktop app to prepare my blog posts. It is much easier and takes out the strain of trying to align content elements with html. WP does mix code up terribly.
Hey JanJaunas,
Sounds like you might like a new feature in WordPress 3.0 then. Add a add_editor_style(); into your functions.php theme file and you can import some styles into the TinyMCS editor.
Check out this great post for more details about that: http://www.onextrapixel.com/2010/06/21/8-new-exciting-wordpress-3-0-features/
So many thanks for this post ! Nice way of summing up what we obviously all think here
Thanks very much for reading it! I’ve been meaning to post something like this for a while. Looks like I timed it well seeing it’s just on the back of the 3.0 release! Thanks for the comment!
This is my first time setting up my own website, and first time using wordpress. I can just say I’m very much overwhelmed with how easy it is to implement all the nice features and the look I want to make my site look pleasing and friendly to my visitors. I’ve always heard my fellow designers have their own websites using wordpress and I was a little hesitant in buying my own domain because I suck at coding. I chose the right path when I installed wordpress
Hahaha yeah that’s the great thing about front end designers…you know HTML and CSS back to front but you hate the thought of PHP I bet!
Then WordPress waves a friendly “Hello” and all you need to know after that is the basics if the WordPress loop and you can make (or tweak) a theme and you’ve got yourself an easy to update website and a blog in no time!
Thanks for your comment
i like this video but can you tel me pllz if i can add some pukging in my site
http://www.usht-bm.com
this site site is false my site is http://www.isht-bm.com
Sweet post, bruthaman! So true- even though our site just launched as a BLOG, we chose WordPress because we know our site won’t always be a BLOG. We eventually plan on integrating eCommerce, kick ace pages, password protected content and much, much more! Here’s our shameless link so you can see it’s just a BLOG for now. Pfft… http://www.thirdoptionmen.org
Thanks for that! I love your site
Gorgeous design! Nice and clean and great use of white space.
Hey! My shop uses WordPress for all of our clients, too! I wrote about this same topic, in response to all the posts I saw proclaiming that WordPress 3.0 would “finally” enable people to use WordPress as a CMS. http://emrl.com/?p=3765
Nice post!
. Good to see we are both on the same page with WordPress being an awesome CMS!
Big WordPress fan here as well. In fact, it’s the only CMS (that’s right!) that I have extensive experience using. Since I can’t compare it to other CMSs, I’d like to get your opinion:
Compared to other CMSs, how fast is WordPress? Related to that question, are there any extraneous features inside of a default WordPress install that bog it down in any way? That could be deleted/eliminated? Or is it a finely-honed system already? Of course, I’m asking from the sole perspective of WordPress-as-CMS.
Thanks for this post.
Hey MidCentGent,
You’re lucky WordPress is the only CMS you’ve used then. You’ve started with the best one out there!
To address your other questions, firstly the speed of WordPress varies depending on your hosting and the amount of plugins you have active. In terms of a default install of WordPress serving a webpage to a browser it’s fast. If you have a lot of database calls you can install the WP Super Cache plugin to speed things up: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/ Secondly, in terms of extraneous features…you need not worry. This is something that Matt and the team really think about. They keep the WordPress “core” as lean as possible so it only contains the common features that everyone needs (expect Hello Dolly haha but Matt’s said that’s staying in there forever seeing it was his first WP plugin). WordPress’s plugin architecture is coded with the intention of making it easy for developers to bolt on extra features. So the core is as lean as possible because of this process. I think this is yet another advantage of WordPress over other CMS that are built to do everything at once from the start.
I couldn’t agree more: especially when it comes to the CUSTOMER actually using it to manage and create their own content. It too have tried other “true” CMSs (Drupal, Joomla) and have been really disappointed: terrible for the end user!
I can’t comment on Joomla, but the problem with comparing Drupal to WP in terms of the administration interface is that the Drupal admin UI is meant to be configured whereas the WP is meant to be used as is. There a bunch of admin themes, admin toolbars, admin modules, etc., for Drupal, all of which are meant to let you give your client exactly what you want to. With WP, people usually just stick with the defaults. So while it may be true to say that the DEFAULT Drupal admin UI isn’t very user friendly, it’s sort of a pointless statement. It’s like saying that the default WP front-end theme isn’t useful for every site…of course it’s not. That’s the point…you’re supposed to customize it.
http://wiki.zooid.org/wiki/SMW_as_Lego_blocks
Just kidding, really.
http://wiki.zooid.org/wiki/SMW_as_Lego_blocks
Just kidding, really.
i agree
My, my… thank you so much for this article. I was just about to upgrade my freelance writing service to my customers and add basic WordPress development for Small Medium Entrepreneurs (SMEs) so that they can manage their site easily. This is one article that I will promote in my services page. Thanks so much for the pointers
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@sennza
It’s interesting you say WordPress can not be used as a forum. Since that is exactly what Matt is proposing over at the bbpress community which is causing all of the heart burn for that project.
Hey Jacob, I think you took my “What can’t WordPress do?” heading the wrong way. I was implying that WordPress can and does so all of the things under that heading which is why I’ve linked to all the WordPress plugins that do that. The BuddyPress forum is in fact bbPress.
I didn’t think that that heading could be read the wrong way. Sorry about the mix up with the way you read it!
Awesome post Bronson – I’m a huge fan of what WordPress too – my CMS of choice!
Although one area I don’t use WordPress for is on larger eCommerce type sites. WordPress just doesn’t have the ability (or a plugin) to fully manage, run and report etc. on sales, products an online retailer usually wants. This is where I’d go for something like Magento.
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I wasn’t aware of some of the information that you wrote about so I want to just say thank you.
Good read. I identified your web site from a google search, and was glad i did. The info has helped me immensely.
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