Does anybody use word press for a web site?

[master J]

A friend of mine is helping me out with a little web site seperate from my TF site...we are using a program called Word Press....does anybody have any experience with this program for building web sites and what is your opinion(s)....I am not that crazy about it, its limited and kind of slow, but it is free, I guess you get what you pay for, ha ha....anyway just wanted to hear if anybody else has used word press, thanks !

 

[12BucksFor2Dozon]

Wordpress is a top open-source content management system (CMS), and is very powerful for many things like blogs and galleries. It is not, however, a very good choice for an e-commerce site.

WP is not *slow* per se...its probably much more likely that your web hosting company is not very good. I have built a few sites with WP and find it to be a very solid choice for a CMS package.

Learning the "web stuff" is no easy matter...keep at it and you will see results.

 

[Mark Anderson]

Just out of curiosity Mark how would you rank it against a commercial application like Movable Type or another open source alternative like Blojsom? I have found Movable Type to be awesome and Blojsom to be fairly limited - I'm looking for something in between.

Thanks.

 

[12BucksFor2Dozon]

Well MT has its fans, but its non-open source roots makes it a non-starter for me. I need to be able to dig through the PHP when need be, and twiddle away at the bits.

MT4 seems like a nice product, tho. If it is working for you, then why switch? It's not the software that makes the blog, but its the content that makes the blog...

 

[Mark Anderson]

MT4 seems like a nice product, tho. If it is working for you, then why switch?

I do volunteer work with a couple of non-profits and they don't want to spend the money on Movable Type. I've been trying to find an OS solution that is a little more powerful than Blojsom.

 

[12BucksFor2Dozon]

Well, then, IMO Wordpress is the obvious choice. It's pretty much the current champ of open source CMSs these days, though a more complicated OS product called Drupal is a close second.

 

[theRKF]

My two cents: I've used WP and MT a fair bit. The Real Florist Blog we publish here at FC is currently based on WP (used to be b2evo). All the corporate sites and ecommerce sites we publish at RKF use Movable Type (the monthly hosting fee includes Movable Type and an e-commerce shopping cart called SquirrelCart).

MT is available for free for personal use, even before the open source release of version 4.


In the end it comes down to personal preferences between WP and MT, the two leaders in the blogging world. My preference is for MT partly because of the interface being cleaner and easier to navigate, and partly because of the reliability of the plugins developed for it.

Both WP and MT use plugins to expand the features - it's been my experience that while OS platforms allow for great expandability through plugins you're at the mercy of the developer as to when and if they provide updates to the plugin, and if they will support it continually. I've had more bad experiences with Drupal and WP plugins than with MT.

To be fair, even with a commercial app like vBulletin that FlowerChat runs on, sometimes the add-on modules developed don't keep up with the latest version of the app, meaning we have to lose that feature to keep up to date with security patches or take a risk to keep the feature.

Ryan

 

[Mark Anderson]

Movable Type has been awesome for my commercial stuff. You put me on to it Ryan and I am very grateful - it really has been a dream come true.

Thanks!

 

[RJD]

What changes has WordPress made to turn it into a CMS? It started as a blogging package, and I haven't been watching its progress lately. Does it have an events calendar? How rich is the third-party extensions marketplace?

 

[12BucksFor2Dozon]

Lots of Wordpress widgets and info here.

 

[theRKF]

What changes has WordPress made to turn it into a CMS? It started as a blogging package, and I haven't been watching its progress lately. Does it have an events calendar? How rich is the third-party extensions marketplace?

When you think about it, any blogging platform really is a CMS. You're using a template and entering only the page content, and voila - a page is born, published in the segment or category that you want.

The biggest thing to consider is changing the template from blog style to website style.

Ryan

 

[RJD]

I would say a CMS can include blog functionality, but a blog isn't in itself a CMS. Have you worked with Drupal or DotNetNuke or any of the CMSs out there? Thay have so many more capabilities, access levels, etc. beyond a blog.

 

[theRKF]

I have - I've worked with CMS platforms for a long time, although not with a wide breadth of them. MT does have some access level control, and with plugins can greatly expand the range of fields available.

Ryan