Wordpress Overview

In this lesson we will be taking a real close look at another popular content management system called wordpress.  The name wordpress has become well known as the official blogging software of the internet, if you want to run your very own blog, basically, you use wordpress.  There are a few others out there but the vast majority of people use wordpress.  The boast arguably the easiest install of any online application we have ever seen using a three step process that takes from beginning to end maybe 10 minutes.  The software really has only one feature, blogging, that said it does it better than literally anyone on the planet.  While some people use wordpress for entire websites and it can work very well for that we find it’s more suited for someone who wished only to publish content, and there are literally millions of people who do that. (over 5 million downloads of the latest version)

Wordpress boasts an impressive collection of user generated tools, for example:

Plugins: Wordpress has hundreds of amazing plugins available, everything you could ever want as a blogger.  Tools to make your blog more useful, friendlier, and more fun are all available at the touch of a button.  It has loads of applications to help people find your blog on the web and to better publish your content.

Themes: Wordpress has an impressive library of free downloadable themes, thousands maybe tens of thousands.  Unlike Drupal and Joomla you will find a much more diverse market place for wordpress themes on the internet.  Wordpress themes are for sale in many places where as you typically only find Joomla and Drupal themes on their parent sites.  Wordpress has a high liklihood of having a theme that fits your needs right out of the box while other content management tools often times require a little tweaking to avoid looking too cookie cutter.

Content Control: It isn’t a specific feature as you might think of it but we found doing things like changing your text, adding colors and pictures were exceedingly easy with wordpress, this is certainly one of the reasons it is so popular.  It basically takes the need for any formal design work out of the equation.  Customizing things is as easy as point and click, adding video, audio and so much more is much easier than anything we have ever used.  It makes publishing content easy and fun.

Support: Support for wordpress in excellent, they have a teaming support forum on their website as well as loads of websites on the internet totally dedicated to supporting it.  Of the three main CMS on the web Wordpress by far has the most novices on it, therefor there are loads of support forums and bugs that have been fixed with the software.  It works for both the designer who wants to have not only a great site but also the novice who just wants one NOW!

The main takeaway here is that wordpress is about as easy to install as anything, it works exceedingly well, has great support but is limited as far as being a total website.  While people do use it as such we just feel after using all three if you want to get a nice looking website up on the internet, don’t ever want to deal with ftp and web design issues Wordpress is the perfect option for you.