WordPress Can !

Hi Blog & All,

Over the past few years I have spent an increasing amount of time working with wordpress. Most of the time, Wordpress is what the client specifically asked for as the CMS system. A few times a specific theme was even selected.(Thesis, Genisis).

I have been keeping my skill set fresh with PHP/Curl custom projects, but I find the Wordpress software to be of great help. WP is becoming more of an All-In-One Content Management System, and less of a Blog system. With things like Tags, Categories, and the ID system; you can easily management / publish most of the common types of resources.

Links, Pages, Posts, Sidebar Widgets. Seems so simple, but now with wordpress you can easily build anything.

• Forum (PHPbb/bbpress)
• Social Network System (BuddyPress)
• Ecommerce System (MagentoPress)
• SEO System
• Email Marketing System
• CRM System
  • Contact Management
  • Communication Tracking
  • Task Oriented- System
• Email Marketing System

Wordpress is also continually getting souped up.Version 3.2 will be out soon. It essentially fixes the wordpress 3.1, and it debugs/redesigns many of the problematic modules of the system. (See bottom). Just like wordpress 3 fixed menus, and child theme development. 3.2 will be a completely different experience for the future of updating the software. It has always been a bit buggy, with the plugins/system support compatibility. Many times requiring the user to backup data, and database components while updating the system. Also disabling the plugins between wordpress updates has helped, but these things are annoying to have to repeat whenever the wordpress team decides to update the system.

Overall, this piece of software has been around for more than 8 years. It continues to gain popularity with the mainstream community, and has always made up a great part of the internet. Its ease of use, and the ability to turn this CMS system into basically any kind of web app has given it power over the competition (MovableType, TextPattern). It has changed dramatically, and harness the power of Jquery/Scripting languages with great simplicity. Simple is better 9 times out of 10. This software solutions is probably better for a web project 9/10 times a client would like control over the content. It is very common for people to pick up the skills needed to change their website content very quickly. Picking up speed through the backend develops as well.

If you have existing software that uses Joomla, Magento, Drupal, Zend Framework, etc. Don’t worry about it’s compatibility with worddpress. It connects, and can be coupled with just about any existing web build. This includes ASPX, and .NET (MSSql) apps.

Another great part about using Wordpress is the commitment of the open source/ GNU GPL, LGPL community. You can rest assure that the time spent learning this system will be an asset to you in the future. It won’t be going away any time soon like FrontPage or any other ‘industry standard-like’ tool. Its a mature collection of highly configurable apps, and the best part is the mobile phone features for creating unique user-agent specific views.

Those are my bits,
ROb