There’s a good bit of discussion here and there, concerning whether Wordpress can act as a Content Management System for a web site Obviously Wordpress is a strong and incredibly popular blogging platform, but how about as a CMS? Some “how to’s” we find around the interwebs would have us believe it is a good bet.
Caution: may require many plugins!
But, is it a good bet to employ a very flexible, extensible blogging tool for the purpose of maintaining “regular” web presence? It certainly possible and tempting. After all, Wordpress has a ton of developers and an incredibly active support community.
But whether you should deploy Wordpress in this fashion may require careful consideration of the complexity of a given site. Is it web presence for a small business with half-a-dozen editors or less? Are we talking a larger organization with multiple departments and business units? If the latter, then we can end up with quite a challenge on our hands. Wordpress isn’t quite designed for hierarchical permissions. I’m referring to scenario where staffer Suzy Q. who edits the “Customer Support” area of a site does not need to have access to edit the press releases or product marketing copy.
Wordpress seperates content into Pages and Posts, and these content types may further be typed by Category. Out-of-the-box (or tar-file as the case may be), Wordpress does not prohibit an editor of one content area from editing another area. Of course there are plugins to help with this, and that’s the beauty of open source. However with extensibility comes the inevitable trade off! Techno-karma has no mercy.
That’s to say, through plugins you can potentially scale Wordpress into more CMS-like functionality by adding the workflow, permissions, notification bits that you’d expect from a “real” CMS. But do not expect that you “add it and forget it” with plugins. Assuming that you plan to keep your WP install current (you DO plan to, yes?!), you enter into a long term commitment with every bit of add-on functionality you install. Do so… with fear and trembling.
For example — check out this list of plugins you might need. Yowza. Be aware that each plugin has its own life-cycle, meaning that in addition to being a good doobie and keeping your core Wordpress install updated, each plugin will need to be updated, and, this is critical: may or may not be compatible with major WP upgrades. It happens.
Coming soon… Wordpress and Google Analytics.
