
Rethinking WordPress as a CMS - mellasc
http://www.webinsation.com/rethinking-wordpress-as-a-cms/
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clearsite
We have several years of experience with building websites with WordPress for
clients. And indeed most of the clients seem to struggle with managing the
content. Most of the problems occure with the wysiwyg editor and the media
library. Mostly small stuff like disappearing new lines or the other way
around. Even for me it's sometimes hard to figure out why the editor behaves
unexpectedly. Try to make a decent bulleted list and then edit it. My personal
rescue is the html view, but we can't expect that from the customer can we?

But give any unexperienced person a copy of Word and the struggle with the
same problems. The difference is there are not that many client without
experience with Word. They do that every day. They edit the website a few
times a week tops. And when they try WP for the first time they expect it to
be a hassle free ride. What I am trying to say is every piece of software you
want to use in a good way you need to sit down for and put some effort in it.
Sweat and curse just like we all did on Word and then you wil get used to it.

That being said there is always room for improvement in WP. Thanx for the
post.

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gianbasagre
I was introduced to Concrete5 (<http://concrete5.org>) more than a year ago. I
stopped looking elsewhere after that.

It is by far the best open source CMS. It is being actively developed, MVC
backend, and the in-line editing - clients love it.

It has some good caching as well.

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mellasc
That's great to hear that Concrete5 is working so well for you! I'd be
interested to hear more about the "inline" editing feature.

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Nando
If you think you're going to make a custom web solution using Wordpress
without training the customers, your project is doomed. That would apply to
any site project. Replace WP in your post with whatever software you want and
you'll end up with similar conclusions.

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jacques_chester
From an sysadmin POV, Wordpress is awful.

Please don't give the Wordpress project new ideas for ooh-shiny. Please. Just
don't do that. Because they already do that _incessantly_ instead of fixing
bugs and cleaning up the festering rats nest of code it all staggers forward
on.

~~~
mellasc
Thanks for your thoughts. I agree that WordPress is very powerful from a
sysadmin point of view. I also mention in my article that I'm not necessarily
suggesting that things need to be fixed on the back end. However, from a
Client front end editing perspective some things need to be made a lot simpler
and easier.

Also, there need's to be a way for us as developers to create more complex
layouts like 3-Column responsive designs, parallax scrolling sites etc.

I'll be sharing more of my ideas for WordPress and what we as
designers/developers can do to help WordPress be a better solution for our
Clients over the next several weeks.

I'm interested to hear what some of the code bugs are that need to be worked
out.

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mellasc
According to Forbes, WordPress powers one of every 6 websites on the Internet,
nearly 60 million in all, with 100,000 more popping up each day. But have you
ever taken time to think about how WordPress manages content. Not only from an
editing perspective but also from a design perspective.

This article has come about from years of experience with WordPress, talking
and working with multiple Clients, and even being inspired from other
innovative products – like Square. One of the things that really strikes me
about Square is that they are so focused on their users. They are focused on
completely rethinking how payments are done in order to make them beautiful
and easy to use.

Let’s think about the WordPress Admin – is it focused on its users; is it easy
to use; is it breathtaking? I think we’ll all agree that it could use some
work in these areas.

