

Why WordPress Should Not Have Won the Open Source CMS Award - vlucas
http://www.vancelucas.com/blog/wordpress-and-the-open-source-cms-award/

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snewe
The author wants an event calendar:

<http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-manager/>

and a contact form

<http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/>

and a photo gallery:

<http://codex.wordpress.org/Photoblogs_and_Galleries>

Wordpress does all that with simple plugins or built in functions. Perhaps it
is a CMS.

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adoyle
Another area WordPress wins is in upgrades. A few years ago I was burned by a
Plone upgrade that failed. That made me stop upgrading the site because I
couldn't figure out how to move forward. I finally pulled the plug on the
site. I have a bunch of WP sites and upgrading may be a pain because of having
to disable the plugins, it's always worked (knock on wood!).

WordPress also has an understandable database structure (it may make any
serious DBMS person gag, but it's simple and malleable) and there's enough
info out there that you can learn how to do just about anything if you look
hard enough.

Unfortunately, I'm about to need something more CMS-like than WP for some
upcoming sites, so I have to figure out what to do.

~~~
falldowngoboom
I've heard about easy Wordpress upgrades, but never experienced them. Here's
my cheatsheet:

    
    
      * download latest.tar.gz and rename
      * untar
      * mv wordpress ../wordpress-x.x.x
      * cd wordpress-x.x.x
      * cp wordpress-current/.htaccess . [only if wordpress is in site root]
      * cp -r wordpress-current/uploads/ .
      * cp -r wordpress-current/themes/ .
      * cp wordpress-current/wp-config.php .
    

What am I doing wrong?

(Also moving from a development install to production is also ugly. I have to
search and replace hostnames in the mysqldump of the database!)

~~~
easp
Well, you could turn that into a shell script...

But what I think you are missing is the upgrade option that pops up in your
dashboard. Yeah, there are some downsides, like security. I just chown the
file tree to the webserver user for as long as it takes to do the upgrade and
then back.

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robotron
Good point, but crappy title. "Real" CMS packages could learn a thing or two
from WordPress.

~~~
yannis
'Absolutely'. As the author notes usability and ease of use matter. They are
the number one feature to the end user. There is one more and this is more for
developers, wordpress database is made up of ten tables! Within these ten
tables they have managed to slot in a multi-blog feature. This compares to
over 50 for Drupal for example. As a developer, I can get into the internals
of WP and make modifications fairly easily - in most cases there are plugins
to assist as a starting point.

Overall WP has managed to carve a sexy niche in the hearts of users and
developers even if the code is not so beautiful and sexy, not to mention the
language!

~~~
robryan
You could argue though that having a table like wp_usermeta can actually be
more confusing that having explicit tables for things. I guess it's all a
trade off, personally when hacking away at it I'm not a big fan of how
wordpress is laid out internally but I do have to say it's a lot better than
something like Joomla

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tjr
I was really impressed with the overall usability of the RadiantCMS software,
but most of the features beyond having simple static pages were provided by
3rd-party plugins... many of which were out of date with the core software by
the time I tried them, and failed to work in mysterious-to-newcomer ways.

~~~
tremendo
I like Radiant's simplicity. A PHP port of it is FrogCMS. I don't see myself
using Wordpress as a lightweight CMS again, Radiant/Frog are easier to setup
and maintain, and the code is well organized so they're hackable too. Every
time I need to dive into the PHP of Wordpress I get frustrated with it's
spaghetti-ish ways.

~~~
jamesbritt
I've been working on a large-ish Radiant site and grabbed a few plugins. So
far all have worked as expected, except for one for page-level user access
control.

The problem with that one was that the author did not account for having
thousands of users and a hundred or so pages. I added pagination for the user
list, and created my own plugin to handle page groups so I could assign page
permissions en masse rather than one by one.

It's _way_ nicer than having to poke into any PHP I've dealt with. Biggest
complaint so far is that I often cannot find docs clear and complete enough to
help me understand something before I go and hack my own solution.

But the upside is that when I later realize I should have gone another way
it's easy to refactor, and using rspec and selenium tells when when things
break.

------
GiraffeNecktie
But the award is just a popularity contest. WordPress is merely the best blog
platform. Blogs are the most common use case for a CMS. So more bloggers means
more WordPress users means more votes. Doesn't have much to with how capable
or useful it is for a general CMS.

~~~
steveklabnik
But, as the author says, it's still the best general CMS, even though it's a
good blogging platform.

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
He claims that it's the best general CMS but the only information he offers in
support of that contention is the fact that it won this year's popularity
contest. Last year Drupal won. Was Drupal the better CMS last year and
WordPress the better CMS this year? They've both improved but the relative
differences between the two are much the same.

~~~
vlucas
Actually, WordPress has improved leaps and bound this year while the public
release of Drupal has remained fairly stagnant. WordPress has a new dashboard
look and feel, automated system upgrades, automated upgrades for plugins, etc.
Many things that make it super easy to use for non-techies.

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
Well, if your only criteria for a CMS is making things super easy to use for
non-technies, then I grant your point

------
param
"Previous winners of the Overall category are not eligible for the Overall
category in 2009. Previous winners compete amongst one another in a separate
Hall of Fame category designed specifically for them."

This is ridiculous. Since all products evolve, we need to recognize continued
dedication/improvement in the products. Also, once you've done these awards
for 4-5 years, you will end up awarding the top prize to ridiculous entries.
Its not that WordPress is the best CMS. its that the award is flawed.

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tyohn
WordPress is awesome! It's very simple for inexperienced users learn and
simple for geeks like me to dig into the code and make it do all sorts of
things that if I had to create from scratch would have taken me weeks. I've
used Drupal and it's ok but not nearly as user friendly as the WordPress
dashboard. I know PHP is the red head step child in the minds of the Rails
develpers - but when you take into account PHP's simplicity and then add in
the WordPress code ex, it becomes a very powerful combination...

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officemedium
Drupal should have won. It should win everything.

Drupal can create boring blogs like wordpress...but what about it's power to
create something like...umm...a SaaS Business Social Collaborative
Application?

<http://www.officemedium.com>

100% Drupal Goodness

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niels_olson
You can now embed the WPμ engine within a Joomla 1.5 install via a plugin. No
iframes. In our case, users are all authenticated through the university LDAP
server. Joomla + WPmu within one consistent skin is very, very nice. Yeah,
it's php, but it works.

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tokenadult
How does Textpattern

<http://textpattern.com/>

compare as a CMS? I know at least one webmaster who vastly prefers Textpattern
to WordPress, and the website I manage that is run on WordPress is far, far
from being easy to use.

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ogrodnek
reminiscent of kanye:
[http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/09/13/k...](http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/09/13/kanye-
west-storms-the-vmas-stage-during-taylor-swifts-speech/)

