Bloem Adriaan Bloem

WordPress 3.0 released: Bzzzzz.

2-Jul-2010

Tags: Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Web Content Management, Marketplace at Large, Open Source, Selecting Technology, Drupal, Drupal Commons, Movable Type, WordPress, WordPress

Well, it was to be expected: after a long wait, WordPress 3.0 got released just when I was on a short holiday. (WordPress admins shouldn't be allowed to take holidays for that exact reason.) I still managed to get my comments on 3.0 out there, but in case you missed that: here's the two point summary of what makes this a change from minor to major:

  • Folding WordPress MU (multi-user) and regular WordPress into one system means you'll now be able to run multiple blogs from an install. This means WordPress is now more like Movable Type:
  • "Custom post types" mean WordPress can now do other content types than just "posts" and "pages" -- this seems trivial for most WCM systems, but it's not something to take for granted. This means WordPress is now more like Drupal (and its CCK, to become part of Drupal 7 core).

Is this great news? I'm sure many would think so. And I like WordPress as blog software (even though I think Movable Type may still be the better choice for running multiple blogs). I can also see its appeal as simple web CMS (it's more user-friendly than Drupal, but can be made to do pretty much the same things). As the WordPress blog says, "Arm your vuvuzelas!" -- to which I'd like to add: "bzzzzzzzz."

Let's face it, the main reason so many have started to use WP as a CMS to power sites other than blogs is simple: because it's easy to use. (For blogs.) Every feature (and every plugin) added to WP threatens that same ease of use. And as soon as you start making it jump hoops to do more complex things than it was designed to do, you completely loose the advantage. Use it for more than dozens of pages, more than two languages, or more than just a handful of sites, and WP will begin to hurt.

I'll keep repeating my mantra: WordPress is great for a blog. But there's a real risk of it being turned into a very mediocre CMS. It really depends on your scenarios, and there are many reasons you'd want to look beyond WP. Don't mistake WordPress for a cheap and simple alternative to just any other system in our Web Content Management research. That would be like using a vuvuzela to play Brahms and Ravel.

    Excerpt from the Drupal Evaluation

    Web Content Management Report looks at... Integrated Site Search in Drupal

    "The integrated full-text search functionality is adequate for searching text-based content, though file-based content is not indexed -- making Drupal arguably less useful for an intranet. The default search configuration has a basic search and an advanced search that can look for keywords, exact match phrases, and can restrict by content type. Searches tend to return too many results rather than too few. Note that the index is refreshed by a scheduled script running on the server, rather than every time content gets updated. On the whole, this is quite weak..."
    (p. 441)

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