Why WordPress Should Not Have Won the Open Source CMS Award | Hacker News Reader

Why WordPress Should Not Have Won the Open Source CMS Award

vancelucas.com

41 pointsvlucas23 comments

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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.

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.

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!)

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.

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

'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!

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

I think the intent of the title is that "real" CMSes shouldn't be so easily beaten by WordPress.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

>the only information he offers in support of that contention is the fact that it won this year's popularity contest.

Did you miss this paragraph and a half?

>WordPress bridges both the blogging and CMS categories due to the ‘Pages’ feature, and is extremely useful for managing a blog-focused website. Mostly. That is, until you want to do something that a CMS should be good at, like have an event calendar, custom form, photo gallery, etc. – which is why WordPress is not focused on being a CMS in the first place. Yet it does such a better job at the basic things like creating new pages, tagging, categorizing, comments, and having custom SEO-friendly URLs out of the box that it edged out other software projects like Drupal and Joomla! whose sole focus is content management. Sad indeed.

>The fact that I can go through literally hundreds of open source content management systems and still end up settling on WordPress because I know it’s the only one that won’t totally confuse my client is what’s sad.

"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.

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...

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

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.

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.

reminiscent of kanye: http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/09/13/k...

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