Re: wordpress powers www.cryingdog.org

On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 03:31:12PM +0100, Michael Staley wrote:
> I recently found an example use of the blogger 'wordpress' employed as a CMS
> in a well done website <a
> href="http://www.cryingdog.org">www.cryingdog.org</a> Wordpress is free and
> 100% customizable. This site shows that it can be used as a fully fledged
> cms!

It shows no such thing.

It shows that blogging software can produce sites that don't look like
blogs - which is not too much of a surprise. Blogs are way ahead of
any other consumer software in terms of separating content from
presentation, which admittedly is a good thing for a CMS to have. The
fact that most people use the default blog format means little.

It also does syndication pretty well with the default options.

It's also open source, and runs on top of PHP/MySQL, so it's likely to
be cheap to modify poorly (qualified people will always cost money,
regardless of the language).

I like Wordpress (in fact, I use it on my blog), but it is lacking in
a lot of heavy lifting features you're likely to want in a CMS:

- It doesn't have a high performance or scalable delivery system. You
  can build a semblance of one with PHP.

- There's no templating system.

- There's no version management.

- There's no image management. You can plug in gallery, which is not
  terrible, but is still lacking in a lot of collaborative features.

- User management is geared towards registering end users for
  submissions, not internal editing structures.

- There's no workflow.

- The default "search" is basic SQL search, not any sort of indexing.

Also, that site in particular suffers from a really bad usability
glitch - rather than using the rewrite rules that wordpress so
thoughtfully included, they use the default numbered article URL and
"hide" it by wrapping the site in a frame. BAD BAD BAD. Maybe they're
running on IIS, which I suppose is a usability glitch in and of
itself.

So they have urls like:

http://cryingdog.org/section.php?cat=2

Instead of, say:

http://www.aquick.org/blog/topics/drm-copying/


Blog software is very basic CMS, and it can certainly be used to
create sites that don't look like blogs. But a) they're currently
pretty limited in actual interesting collaborative editing features,
and b) using free software that's not meant for a particular purpose
is no substitute for having someone who knows the issues. This isn't
going to scale well. Granted, that may not matter.

-- 
				- Adam

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