Open source software has it’s pros and cons. Our CMS of choice at this time in 2009 is still generally is Drupal, especially for the larger sites, but WordPress has come a long way in the last few years, and although still ideal for it’s blogging roots, has now become a much more versatile CMS. So here are some reasons championing WordPress as a CMS…
WordPress is an extremely flexible and expandable content management system. It is an up-to-date software package, and it’s development roots go right back to 2001. It’s a mature and stable product with a large, worldwide user base. In 2006 there were 1,545,703 worldwide downloads and in 2007 there were 3,816,965. New releases in 2008 and 2009, including the multiuser version – WordPress MU – have continued to develop and expand the software.
Benefits
SEO Friendly
WordPress provides excellent search engine optimization (SEO) for your website. Google’s own Matt Cutts says WordPress is “made to do SEO well”. It uses different functions which allow it to be search engine friendly. For example sending data to other websites, track-backs linking back to your site, SEF URLs, multiple categories, content archiving, tagging your posts and pages and so on.
Plugins Extend Functionality
As a basic installation WordPress is a fast, lightweight platform that can be customised to look and feel as you need, and perform a rich variety of content publishing tasks. However, one of the main benefits of using WordPress is it’s expandability. Using plugins you can expand WordPress to do almost anything such as interact with third party systems, deliver rich media content and enhanced user interactivity. Plugins include; Video players, photo galleries, Google integration tools, anti spam tools, community building, multi platform publishing and content aggregation and delivery.
Standards Compliant
WordPress follows all the Web Standards and keeps your website compliant to all the rules that have to be followed when running a website.
Content
You and your site editors can easily update your website content without having to know and programming languages such as HTML or PHP. WordPress contains and easy to use, familiar Rich text editor that performs all common functions like font styling (bold, italic, colour etc…) as well as insertion of pictures and rich media such as video and audio into your pages. The flexible system architecture also allows you to update content remotely from mobile devices such as phones and PDAs. Content can also be ‘shared’ in a variety of ways to deliver your content to your users, such as using feeds to other sites, feed readers and email.
WordPress Mu
The release of the Multi User version has expanded the user permissions and multi site functionality dramatically, allowing you to setup sub-domains such as http://department.yoursite.com that can be administered from the central CMS, but can also have specific administrators, editors, publishers and users assigned to it, giving you maximum control over your site’s user permission structure.
WordPress is a fast, expandable and flexible CMS, ideal for content publishing and bespoke websites.