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: 3.0
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 It becomes easy to add plugins for functionality that may become outdated or stop working when WordPress updates.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
- WordPress Sports Team Theme A WordPress theme for high school, college, and little league teams.
- WordPress Family Blog A WordPress theme for mom bloggers, proud dads, and close families.
- WP Shopify Show your Shopify products on your WordPress site.
- Suggest a Link
Related Site News:
User Reviews: Submit Your Own
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Voting has been open for this CMS since Friday, November 21st, 2008. There are a total of 7 Reviews for this CMS. You can follow future reviews through the RSS feed if you'd like.
Review by Chris June 11th, 2013 7:59 pm
Review by andy March 13th, 2013 1:29 pm
Strengths: good documentation with a bunch of inbuilt functions that makes it very easy to build almost any website. Very simple to setup and configure as a dev/admin, simple to update for a user.
Weaknesses: multi-themes inside the same website not possible due to widget areas not shared between themes.
Review by Simon January 28th, 2013 5:33 pm
Strengths: I use wordpress for my website and for 3 other people. This is so easy to use and to create great looking websites. The support that is out there is brilliant.
Weaknesses: None really. This program helps people who dont know any code!
Review by Del August 16th, 2011 3:41 am
Strengths: All my mates swear by WordPress and refuse to use any other CMS platform. the WordPress community is the best I have seen. There are many top notch themes out there.
Weaknesses: I have tried many times to build a site with WP and always run in to issues that makes me give up and search a more suitable CMS.
Review by DaveC November 22nd, 2010 5:00 am
Strengths: Quick development, flexible format and loads of extensions … makes setting up a straightforward website with a combination of dynamic and static content very quick and simple. Cornell is correct that there are some projects for which it is not suitable, but isn’t that true of any “off the shelf” system?
Admin interface is great and very user friendly.
Updates are regular and security is high on the agenda for the many community developers around the world.
Overall I love the way WordPress operates.
Weaknesses: The lack of a rollback facility is something of a concern, as it is not always possible to check each and every theme and plugin for compatibility with an update without actually making the update.
Whilst the number and variety of plugins available is staggering, I would like to see WordPress include more CMS-style functions “out of the box” rather than offering only blog and static page options on a fresh install. In partcular, I would like to see some of the “typical first plugin” extensions made a full part of every install, for example the Akismet anti-spam plugin.
That aside (and given what I use WordPress for), there are no other real weaknesses.
Review by Connell September 23rd, 2010 5:39 am
Strengths: A great tool for fast development with lots of extensions.
Weaknesses: I might offend the WordPress crowd. But this is still a blogging platform. The fact is for some projects this simply will not work, particularly enterprise driven business needs.
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!
Strengths: For me, WordPress isn’t as cutting edge as programs alike are. It’s kind of hard to keep up with all the updates. Recently, well a year ago, I started using a program Oxcyon has called Centralpoint.
Something in particular I like is the module, ‘Media Files’. Basically what it is is a module in which you can upload a zip file that has multiple images to your website. Man is this a time saver. Far too often, my company has wanted to upload photos to the site and it just took way too long to do it one by one. It’s super easy just uploading a folder. You can place your script where you want on your website and the images can play in a slideshow. You can also fine tune the dimensions of the image desired or the timing of the slideshow.
Weaknesses: Problems building a site, navigation. I gave up and found a new CMS(Centralpoint).