Anyone here use Wordpress for more than just a blog? I'm currently moving one of my sites to Wordpress (all of them will be WP eventually). It's going for the articles database, but I haven't found a good solution for my photo and video galleries. Please share you WP experiences and post your url if you've got WP managing your content. I'll be posting mine once the move is complete.
Your move is perfect, as wordpress becoming now good one cms system.. they have alot of plugins... For Video you can check... :http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/02/17/video-music-podcasts-audio-and-multimedia-wordpress-plugins/ For photo gallary, there are alot of plugins "just search like" wordpress photoblog plugins wordpress photo gallery plugins
there sure are a lot of plugins out there for wp now, lot of good ones, search in the forum and you can find some already discussed .
I hope Richie_Ni doesn't see this post as I know he knows that I love wordpress )) but I do believe a true CMS is what you need for a website that is meant to be built on CMS. Otherwise be prepared to face lack of plugin support, if you're planning on a big project of course. Smaller websites may be a different story though.
that is true if you want a good cms Wordpress is the way to go if your strapped for cash but if you have cash I recommend that you hire a php coder to make you a cms
I hightly not recommend this option. The thing about a custom code is, what about updates? With a premade script on the market, such as Wordpress, they will always be performing updates. But with a custom code, the updates are non existant unless you keep that hired freelancer to upkeep with the code again or fix any bugs. This is the only drawback, also finding someone that you can trust is an important issue, and you would need to find someone who can help you keep up with updates and future modifications as you need them.
A custom paid solution is needless I'd say. You've got Joomla or Drupal that will do the job just fine, and you can line up for future updates as well as browse their plug-in lists which are huge. And most of them are Free.
I've worked on a few sites which use WP as the CMS. I can be done easily, but I think WP as the CMS can be successful with small sites only. Maybe sites which are 15 - 20 pages. Anything more than that, you should go for a professional CMS like Joomla. Very large portals cannot be handled by WP because of the customizations and features you might want to add to the site.
Hello! Wordpress is easy to use. It's also easy to make your own design. Tutorial on that here: cypherhackz.net/archives/2006/12/13/make-your-own-wordpress-theme-part-1/ Good luck
WP is a good small-medium sized site cms... I know a bunch of really successful developers (wouldn't call them bloggers) who make niche sites with WP and get along great... For niche articles WP is good. But with more multimedia you may want something else
I'm not trying to be dense here, but... What specifically are the features of a CMS like Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, Nuke, etc... that WP doesn't have? In my mind WP is GREAT for Blogging which is a no brainer as that's what it's made for. Also in my mind there's no difference between a blog post and an article... BUT if there is how would the WP static page not fit the bill? WP wins this one. After that the next question that usually arises is lack of gallery / forum / name the function support... When it comes to ANY CMS there are going to be things which aren't supported out of the box which means regardless of the CMS you're going to HAVE to add in plugins. That being the case, I would think it would be of vital importance for the package to have a larger userbase. WP wins the userbase battle. SO what about the specific plugins? When it comes to a gallery plugin, this is a no brainer... Menalto's Gallery2 has built in WP support... http://gallery.menalto.com/node/27880 if Gallery2 is too much of a package there are dozens of other smaller gallery plugins available. Just to be fair I'll call this one a draw. What about forum integration. This is the one spot where WP is lacking as compared to some of the other packages. HOWEVER... BBPress is starting to take off (This is the software that's running the WP forums...coincedentally made by the WP team). I'd love for phpBB to provide an eaiser integration path but it doesn't. For the point of this I'll let the other CMS packages win this point. As far as I can tell these are the BIGGIES when it comes to a CMS package. In my mind WP is a CMS in it's own right. Furthermore, because other major packages are beginning to offer built in WP integration I can't help but believe that going forward WP would be the better choice for most sites. I also don't get the WP is good for little sites but a "real" CMS is needed for a larger site. Most CMS's have serious cacheing issues. WP has a great little plugin called WPCache which effectivlly solves this. I don't know if the others have something like this, but that's not the point. The point is that WP scales well as the site grows. (Just as a point of reference, I'm redesigning a static site and using WP as the CMS. It's not live yet but should be in the next few weeks. In total it has over 1200 pages, multiple payment processors, draws in about 10k uniques a day. It's a large site.) The major reason I would consider using something other than WP for a database driven site has to do with user rights. WP is seriouslly limited in the number of ways in which a user can be assigned rights. Out of the box it has 5 settings to expand that is a challenge and there's no good solution. So if I know ahead of time that a site is going to need to have multiple user roles I know I'm not going to be using WP. So which CMS has all of the features available above but also does the best job of assigning user roles. There's only 1 and it's not any that have been mentioned so far, but GeekLog. Site design for GL is a bear though.
When it comes to user rights and user roles, Drupal has many options. Out of the box, it comes with a decent set of access control permissions that control what content users can see, create, and edit. But the real power of Drupal lies in the many modules that extend the access controls. Not only do they offer more granular control of user rights, but there are modules that offer everything from public forums to controlling what parts of an article users can edit. If user rights is one of your major needs, Drupal is a far better solution that Wordpress.
Remember these sorts of questions from the SAT? drupal is to module as wordpress is to plugin Once you make the decision that you're going to have to extend the install past the base package you're accepting that the CMS you've chosen doesn't have all the features that you need. And as such the broader the base of support the better. WP can't be beat when it comes to installed user base and active development. WP as well "Out of the box, it comes with a decent set of access control permissions that control what content users can see, create, and edit." With Plugins you can extend this... but as I said earlier, the solutions aren't great. There's a category visibility plugin which can limit visibility of posts and pages based on WP's standard user hierarchy. And there's a user level plugin which can be used to further differentiate access across 10 different levels. For the majority of sites these two plugins will fit the bill, as you can effectively have 41 different user level settings (technically 50, but anyone with full WP admin rights can bypass any user level setting) when combined. If permission levels need to be expanded past this it's obvious that your site needs to have some serious permission based settings. This would need to be implemented at the base package level. When it comes to permission based settings Geeklog is by far superior to any other CMS out there, as that was one of the 2 major focuses behind the initial creation of the package. I'm not making this up... take a look at a drupal convert statement... http://drupal.org/node/5618#comment-9061 Now even after saying all of the above, I fully recognize that WP isn't for everyone. That's the beauty of having multiple open source packages to choose from. Drupal / Joomla / possibly the Nukes have some great features and make for some excellent sites. The only purpose for my above rants is to point out that the preconceived notion that WP isn't a CMS is flawed. There was a point in time when this was true (which is probably where this notion came from) but with the release of 1.5, WP began to transition from a blogging app to a more full featured CMS. And since the release of 2.1 I find it hard to distinguish WP as anything but a CMS.
... How does Joomla work better? I think that's the question that's being asked. Just saying it does doesn't offer any differentiation.
Hi, I am on your side on this issue. I have asked the same question many times on Drupal and Joomla forums, and have never received a congent answer. Just generalities. But a couple of ideas on points that you have raised: 1) Plugins: I have found the vast majority of plugins to be buggy and not well maintained. Some expose the plug to huge security issues, so I tend to stay away from all plugins unless they are heavily adopted by the community. 2) Backward compatibility: What bothers me most about Drupal and Joomla and other competing CMSs, is there appears to be a lack of concern with backward compatibility. Upgrades between versions seem to be far more complicated than typical Wordpress upgrades. This is great for consultants and developers who will be paid by site owners to upgrade to new versions of the platform, but really bad news for site owners. Wordpress is reasonable in this regard, but CMS products such as ExpressionEngine seem to do the best in this regard because they depend upon a paid subscriber base. There development/support teams to be very professional and highly aware of what it means to support a user over the long-term. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for. Rich
richrf - I agree with you whole heartedly on the plugin issue. And I think this helps prove a point also. Because of the large installed user base you're starting to see other major open source projects specifically offer support integrated into their projects for WP. I specifically mentioned Menalto's Gallery2 and BBpress because those projects are providing the integration pathways, not a third party which might decide that they don't want to keep up with it. As to your second point, I have no experience with non open source CMS packages so can't begin to decide how right or wrong you are on the matter. However with the release of 2.1 WP and the upgrade nightmares that were unfolding I'm ecstatic that WP decided to provide support for the 2.0.x line through 2010, thereby ensuring backward compatability.
Hi SpringCypress, Yes, I agree with you. A large user base usually encourages other product developers to provide direct integration into that user base - e.g. with plugins. I personally have found that software companies that have a large paid user base are more likely to be concerned with backward compatibility, since they do not want to lose the revenue stream of the user base. With open source, like Joomla and Drupal, I believe, users are more or less at the mercy of the loosely knitted group of developers who may, or may not, provide backward compatibility, depending upon what is tickling their fancy at the moment. In my own investigations, I found that Movable Type is very popular among the very large commercial CMS sites. I cannot say exactly why, but I believe that support/product evolution, etc. has to be one of the primary considerations of any large corporation. It certainly was when I was making large software decisions back when. BTW, I still have not found anyone who is able to provide me with precise reasons that they prefer Joomla or Drupal over Wordpress. I am sure there are such reasons, I just can't find anyone who is able to articulate them. Rich
Large site switches from Joomla to WP And she does an excellent job of explaining why. The benefits and disadvantages of WP. The "WP doesn't do large sites well" notion seems to be a lot of bunk.