Why I love Wordpress

Let me get this out of the way right now – I am a wordpress Fanboy and this article is going to be a biased look at why wordpress is so great. 

Still there? Great.  

I used quite a few different CMS’s before I stubmled on Wordpress.  I used Joomla for a while. I’ve been told it’s very powerful and you can do all kinds of things.  I couldn’t ever figure it out though (and my job is figuring out things). I’ve used PHP Nuke, wow what a POS, NEXT!  Where I used to work, we used DotNetNuke. First thing it’s based on .net from microsoft. Second thing, most of the plugins you have to pay for. Third thing it looks like absolute crap! We used it as an Intranet site and it was so terrible that users wouldn’t even visit the site.  I even used Scoop for a brief time. Definetley a very interesting CMS, but ultimatley like the others – hard to use.

So on to Wordpress. Why do I love Wordpress? Let me count the ways…

1.  Wordpress is Open Source, and almost all of the plugins, and most of the Themes are free and open source.  Because of the open-ness of both Wordpress and it’s themes and plugins, it’s extremely easy to customize. It’s hard to find a user who hasn’t gone into their theme to change something.  This really is a big deal. Because it’s easy to understand, it’s easy to change and easy to maintain.  Maybe having a CMS written in Javascript is techncially better (I don’t think so) but nothing beats good old PHP, CSS and XML for being easy to understand. 

2.  Wordpress is designed for users.  Unlike those other CMS’s, wordpress is designed for users, not web developers. I’ve done a manual install of wordpress before, and it’s something I would feel comfortable walking my mom through over the phone.  Now with 2.7 it’s almost too easy to install plugins (Please Automattic, do the same with themes). And the dashboard makes it trivially easy for even the simplest of users to post new content and create pages. 

3. It just works.  Maybe I’ve been lucky but I’ve never really had problems with wordpress breaking. You can add all the plugins and themes you want and it keeps working just fine.  Sure, from time to time I have done something incredibly stupid that’s totally broken my web site but it’s always been easy to fix.

Mostly I love Wordpress because it’s so darn easy to use and customize. I have absolutely no problem setting up a wordpress site and handing it off to a family member to use, knowing that I’ll have to support it.

Still with me? Good. If you haven’t yet, download and install Wordpress today.