Review of WordPress Content Management System (CMS)
WordPress is quickly becoming the most popular CMS program for a reason: it has a ton of features and is easy to use. As I mention on the SiteForStarters home page, I initially used Drupal for my CMS website, but later switched to WordPress because of how user-friendly it is.
Note: WordPress has a CMS version and a blogging version. I will examine the CMS program in this article, but you can read my overview of the WordPress blogging software in the Free blog hosts article.
WordPress basic information
WordPress is a free, open source software built on PHP and MySQL and licensed by the GNU General Public License. WordPress might just be the easiest of all the CMS programs around. First of all, it is pretty easy to install WordPress using what they call their “famous 5-minute installation.” Although installing any CMS program is a bit confusing if you haven’t done it before, installation of WordPress is much easier than most. If you have trouble with the installation, I will create a full step-by-step WordPress installation tutorial soon.
WordPress features a very logical and easy to follow “dashboard,” which is the main page where you make all of the changes to your site.
Automatic filters make creating article “posts” very simple. These filters create automatic formatting and styling of text without the need to dive into the HTML code. For those who are comfortable with code, you can easily switch over to code view to make edits.
WordPress has a templating system that allows for quite a bit of customization. A rich array of plugins allows users and developers to extend its functionality beyond the features that come as part of the base install. They also include widgets that can be rearranged without editing code. In addition, they have well over 1,000 visual themes that you can choose from to change the look of your site.
Other features include integrated link management; a very search engine-friendly design, clean permalinks and cron, and the ability to assign multiple categories and tags to articles. Also, upgrading to newer versions of WordPress requires hardly any work at all.
Finally, if you have questions or need help, WordPress has a pretty good support section. I was particularly impressed with their getting started tutorials. You can find many answers using their FAQ section or through their discussion forum pages.
My thoughts
In my opinion, if you don’t want to create your own site from scratch, but don’t just want a simple blogging platform, I feel WordPress is the way to go. It is much easier to use than some of the other content management systems, yet offers a lot of advanced features and customization options.
