Wordpress.. Is it a CMS?

Question

I recently was contacted by a client who simply wanted to increase their organic rankings in Google. My approach was to do the following:

A) Take them off of their overpriced host and move them to a nicer, cheaper, more feature-rich hosting solution which included a simple Wordpress install.

B) Apply a theme to WordPress which followed the look and feel of their existing website.

C) Train my client on how to login to their copy of Wordpress and create/manage pages/posts.

This took me very little time.. Most of the work in converting asp forms into php and tweaking a theme to fit their design.

Now my client is able to create/manage as many pages or posts as they desire.

I believe, for this purpose, Worpress was the easiest solution.

Would you categorize Wordpress as a CMS?

Similar:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/250880/is-there-any-cms-better-than-wordpress-or-should-i-roll-my-own
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1101818/wordpress-as-a-cms-option
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/490899/which-cms-to-choose
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/629203/is-it-advisable-to-use-wordpress-as-cms-closed
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1451326/is-wordpress-good-for-building-a-large-cms-site-with-many-pages-about-over-100-00

External:

• http://codex.wordpress.org/User%3ALastnode/Wordpress%5FCMS
• http://wordpress.org/development/2009/11/wordpress-wins-cms-award/

Answer 1

no, Wordpress is a blog. If you want a CMS, you need to look to XOOPS, Drupal, Plone, Mambo or similar.

Whilst many of these things overlap in functionality, there's a lot more available in the CMSs that the blog-type apps wouldn't want to provide/support.

Bottom line though - if the user is happy with the new system, who cares what it is.

Answer 2

Good CMS. Easy to deal with. He has to take care and install new versions regulary to keep the punks away but otherwise a good choice.

You may want to tell your customer as well that just having a wordpress installed won't increase the page rank - Content increases the page-rank and lets people come back to the site.

Answer 3

Wordpress is a specialised CMS. While you can coerce it into a more generalised role, you are probably better off choosing a more general CMS if you are doing more than blogging.

Answer 4

Yes as CMS = Content Managed System which is exactly what wordpress does, allows you to manage content on multiple pages of varying types. Yes it may be specialised for blogging although as you've pointed out this can be easily manipulated for other means.

Answer 5

WordPress is a system that allows you to manage content. That makes it a content management system. A simple one, perhaps, but one nonetheless. Plenty of people are using it in a CMS role.

For obvious reasons, its utility as a CMS for any given project depends greatly on the project involved. You wouldn't want to run Microsoft.com or CNN.com on it, for example.

Answer 6

Wordpress is a CMS. It did started as a blog centered software, but now includes many CMS features. It is listed in wikipedia List of content management systems and won a Packt Open Source CMS Award.

Wikipedia defines Content management system as a system which may support the following features:

• identification of all key users and their content management roles;
• the ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different content categories or types;
• definition of workflow tasks for collaborative creation, often coupled with event messaging so that content managers are alerted to changes in content (For example, a content creator submits a story, which is published only after the copy editor revises it and the editor-in-chief approves it.);
• the ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content;
• the ability to capture content (e.g. scanning);
• the ability to publish the content to a repository to support access to the content (Increasingly, the repository is an inherent part of the system, and incorporates enterprise search and retrieval.);
• separation of content's semantic layer from its layout (For example, the CMS may automatically set the color, fonts, or emphasis of text.).

While having very limited workflow, wordpress does support most of those features.

For more complex scenarios, people usually prefer a more powerful CMS such as Drupal. I tried both and usually goes with wordpress where possible.

Answer 7

In its default setting, no, WordPress is not a CMS, it is a Blogging platform.

However, like with any other popular scripts (vBulletin, phpBB, Coppermine, etc) they can be tweaked and modified to your hearts content. If you add the necessary plugins and modify the template to look like a website and not a Blog then you effectively have a CMS that'll allow you to publish new pages as WordPress Pages or Posts.

WordPress is as much a CMS as vBulletin or phpBB, so to those who seem to disregard my opinion, please explain why WordPress is a CMS and how come we don't just call everything that handles content a CMS?

Answer 8

OK, Let's see how I get voted down by all Wordpress fans by giving a negative answer. Wordpress is probably the best solution out there for publishing content, whether it is a blog or not. However, I don't think it is a CMS.

For me a CMS must give you the option to create a web application, not just a web site with content. By web application I mean ability to add various forms for collecting user input, have public users and profiles on the site, maybe sell some products (e-commerce module), manage the URLs of your pages/resources, have metadata about them, manage and have a workflow for media and non-text resources, have the ability to extend and customize the system to your needs. I don't see these features in WordPress. And there are of course many more enterprise-level features that would be normal in a CMS but are missing from WordPress.

So I know how much users like Wordpress, and in fact it is a very good content publishing platform. But not a full-featured CMS.

Answer 9

WordPress is a CMS, but it's perhaps best used when your content is effectively like a blog. For small sites that you have to hand over to clients, it's ideal, since the user interface is very easy to use.

Answer 10

This took me very little time.. Most of the work in converting asp forms into php and tweaking a theme to fit their design.

That is: your expertise (distinct from capabilities of a system).

create/manage pages/posts.

That is: an expression of the extent of your client's use of the system.

I don't use WordPress but from Google I see that it describes itself as a

Blog Tool and Publishing Platform

and that does seem to fit your client's requirements.

My own choice of CMS (Plone) was informed by the 'roundness' of the software and community, and the degrees to which the system truly manages a broad and extensible range of content -- without dragging me into system management issues.

Personally, I would not describe WordPress as a CMS. But that's not a criticism :)

Answer 11

I believe, like many other posters here, that WordPress is a CMS by definition of what it can do/does. A limited CMS maybe, but most clients that I build WordPress sites for would never come anywhere near those limitations.

In my experience, it has worked well for me as an extensible, customisable, simple CMS for most client sites.

Answer 12

In my view - bogging systems are a subset of content management systems. So, Wordpress is one of that kind.

Answer 13

I think this pretty much sums it up. ;)

Is Wordpress a CMS? Who cares.