Wordpress and Content Management
Wordpress and Me
A long, long time ago, on an internet far, far away called “2005″, I began developing with Wordpress. I had started messing around a year earlier with Greymatter, which had been originally developed by Noah Grey and was a pretty slick piece of software if you didn’t want to use a database. I had limited experience with databases at-the-time and ended up feeling a strong need to avoid them. I was also avoiding Movable Type, because of its free license limitations; I wasn’t about to make any investments until I had tinkered with enough of them to insightfully size up their plusses and minuses.
Soon enough, two things became overwhelmingly apparent:
- Greymatter was done. Noah had pretty much abandoned it and the community had taken over, but there was not a lot of action going on. Also, as I got further along, having to rebuild every single file on the site got fairly tiresome fairly quickly.
- Wordpress was an emerging standard for blogging software. It turned out I wasn’t the only one less than impressed by Movable Type. Plenty of prominent web developers and bloggers began migrating to Wordpress.
And so I installed Wordpress 1.5 on my server and plunged into the world of databases…
My first attempt at a client blog came after pushing and pulling themes and generally learning as I went along. In hindsight, I was lucky to start off with 1.5, as the then-newly developed theme system was unbelievably easy to use. It has only gotten better in the 2.x iterations… well, for the most part.
It didn’t take long to realize just how powerful Wordpress is for a developer. Despite being a relative newcomer to databases, I quickly went from integrating Wordpress-driven blogs into html sites to converting html sites over to be completely driven by Wordpress. Using Wordpress as a content management system (CMS) was making my whole process better and eventually faster.
Before Wordpress, I had been using Macromedia Contribute (Now Adobe of course) to work with clients on updating content. It was easy enough to use and seemed sufficient, but it always felt to me like a bit of a hack. It had a tendency to rely on some ugly code and, without a lot of extra work, tended to be very limiting to a site’s design. Web Standards was all the talk at the time and I had been trying to keep within that mindset because it didn’t take long to see how much better a site was to build and manage with Web Standards applied.
Still Swearing By Wordpress
Two years later, Wordpress and I are like this (see picture).
One of the most important reasons I stuck by it is that I know it. I know it really well. At this point, I have a lot of custom functions and plugins that I have developed for Wordpress that give me a lot of extra functionality, decrease my development time, and generally make my life easier (I am working on getting some of these ready for release in the next couple weeks).
Also, the Wordpress community is a thriving and creative one. Developers are constantly coming up with new plugins and scripts to be used with Wordpress and the forums are enormously handy. The documentation is generally excellent as well, although the deeper you get, the more shadowed things can become.
And Wordpress is fast. I worked with Drupal for a little while, because I kept hearing that it was the only way to properly manage content online. However, I found out the hard way that Drupal has horrible documentation and the community isn’t always as helpful as you might like. More than a few times I would see a Drupal developer respond with something like, “I don’t understand why you are having trouble… Drupal is so easy to use.” Umm, no, actually it isn’t. Of course, the vast majority of the people saying this weren’t exactly developing sites that couldn’t be managed with a simpler interface. My feeling was that there weren’t a lot of people in the community that could truly use Drupal to its fullest potential, and a lot of those who could were busy or offered expensive seminars. Drupal is best described as a content management creation tool, which is to say that it is more about creating a CMS from scratch than it is about being a CMS. In comparison, Wordpress allows users to go from designed to developed to live in a pretty short period of time, which is a rather significant advantage.
Oh yes – and Wordpress is free. At that price, how can you say no? Truth be told, there is quite a lot out there now in the way of respectable, free content management systems and blogging software (Drupal included). The appreciatory donation to help fund your favorite ones aside, there’s really no practical reason to have to pay for any of it.