Using WordPress as a CMS

Any developer using WordPress nowadays and a great part of the Web community knows that WordPress is useful for much more than blogging.

One of the places where i had use WordPress more in the last 4 years is in CMS scenarios, not only in my private projects but also in the company where i Work.

Knowing many CMS’s and being Technology agnostic make the decision of what is the right technology for a CMS scenario a technological rational decision, in this post i will try to explain the rational i use when i am deciding to use or not WordPress as the CMS platform of a project.

WordPress as a great advantage the fact that offers a simple and User Friendly way to manage and write contents, along with Images or media files.

Almost all the scenarios out there that you have for the web could be build using WordPress. But let’s not forget the importance of choosing the right weapon for your war in technology there’s no panaceas as we well know, so let’s take a look in what makes WordPress special for a case.

When our need is

– No licence need;

– Fast and easy to use and learn as a content manager or administrator;

– Easily extendable ( via widget or plugin);

– High customizable from a design point of view;

– Search Engine friendly;

– Good enough to edit  and treat images;

– usability is a priority;

– Full editorial site scenarios;

As you can see WordPress have a dreat potential for the almost all cases in the web today, but…There are other scenarios where we should think in another alternatives, like in the cases where:

– You need to consider Workflows;

– Scenarios where you have a lot of integration;

– When you have a very deep content tree;

– A lot of cases to consider as  templates;

– A strongly need of using Taxonomy hierarchies;

– A need of Modular solutions;

– The need of product support ;

– sophisticated Site Search needs;

– Intranet and extranet scenarios;

There are also other things to consider like the amount of private contents per example. Basically  WordPress is a great solution for CMS scenarios but sometimes we much consider other options. It’s clear that the advantage of quick development and big design capabilities are important but we should not be blind we have to consider that if we have a complex problem the solution should pass for more structured and modular CMS’s like Drupal, Sharepoint, Kentico , Umbraco and other’s.

Basically for today web quest’s WordPress is a big player and i believe that it will continue to grow using their extensible mechanisms like widget’s and plugin’s to be usefull in other scenarios.