Wordpress
Wordpress is technically a blogging system, but it has grown into a formidable CMS by adding good page management features, media uploading and management, as well as numerous other features that help it to manage content.
Current Version: 2.7
Cost: Free
Development: Community Driven
Specialization: Blog
Hosting: Own Server, Free hosting
Source: Open Source
License: GNU GPL
Language: PHP
Database: MySQL
Our Impressions:
Wordpress is best for bloggers, but is certainly capable of much more. The new administration pages really make managing your site a breeze. The ease of installing and upgrading make it a great fit for non developers. It has everything it needs for what most people want and need for blogging: Posts, comments, media, links, simple pages, users, etc. The new 2.7 admin interface is slick and very customizable.
Wordpress (like a lot of open source applications) is updated often and is in constant change. It becomes easy to add plugins for functionality that may become outdated or stop working when Wordpress updates. It can handle simple websites splendidly, but has limitations for bigger sites and when there are needs for more complicated kinds of content.
Helpful Links:
- Wordpress Home The official home of Wordpress
- The Codex The documentation and help files
- Wordpress.com Where non-technical users can go to sign up for a blog without a webhost
- Support Forums Where you can go to ask a question
- Wordpress Planet A collection of Wordpress blogs
- Suggest a Link
Related Site News:
User Reviews: Submit Your Own
Voting has been open for this CMS since Friday, November 21st, 2008. There is 1 Review for this CMS. You can follow future reviews through the RSS feed if you'd like.
Review by Ben Holmen March 17th, 2009 7:36 am
Strengths: The new 2.7 interface is dead simple to use, even for inexperienced users. Very slick, polished, and any custom functionality can be integrated into the same interface. Plugin management and system upgrades are very easy to perform.
The system is flexible enough so that you can avoid the “this must be a ____ CMS site” look that plagues some CMS systems.
Theme development is fairly easy to perform and the theme structure is very scalable. If you only want one layout for all pages in your site, you can do that. If you want several for different pages, it’s easy to do that as well. Only building what you need in a theme is a great feature!
Many, many, many free plugins. They’re not crap, either.
Weaknesses: The distinction between Pages and Posts can be confusing for inexperienced users. I’ve had a challenging time explaining this to users.
If I had more weaknesses, I’d list them, but I really haven’t run across many shortcomings when using Wordpress for what it is designed for!