usagijen has an awesome post up about WordCamp Philippines 2009. There was a point that struck me about WP as a CMS.
I was talking to mellow bunny in the #melative freenode channel the other day about this, and I have to disagree with Wordpress as the Ultimate CMS, mainly because it is not “meta-coded” enough, or rather because it is a finite solution at the core; a system for blogging (entries, pages, comments).
Is a CMS an out-of-the-box blog?
If we take a step up and look at the concept of a CMS, it doesn’t really solve the blogging problem until it is instantiated/implemented, but because a CMS is a more general solution it is capable of becoming something Wordpress cannot, take Joomla’s LMS for instance1. From another perspective, if we look at the activity at Drupal, we see that there are blogging modules, but also a whole lot of other stuff.
In short, a fully fledged CMS is more like a framework than a specific solution; WP is downstream (more specified) in development stages. The added compromise of using Wordpress as a CMS for something other than the blogging problem would be that of using a db schema not built for whatever specific problem that needs to be solved (the ability to optimize without modifying the wp tables and without creating an entirely new subsystem is limited imo).
A good example I have interaction with, Melative. There’s no way WP could handle the inter-contextual linking of the backend (talking about the “encyclopedia pages” only). Okay, so that’s not entirely true, because WP could be used to get similar output, and possibly even the linking through plugins… but, by the time all this customization was done, it would have over-specified the solution. The fact that WP is handling page-data becomes pointless, because the page data is not static dynamic and also needs semantic linking to another general system. Not to mention that it would be a thicker codebase.2
So anyhow… just thought I’d share that opinion. Wordpress is awesome nonetheless, it is a role model in “method” for another project I’m on ^^ If considering it a CMS, I’d say it is more of a Static-CMS… maybe most CMS are used that way, who knows, but in my mind CMSs allow more auto/dynamic content and are capable of being adapted into a wider array of solutions, one being a blog3.
Notes
1 - Of course some sort of hacks/plugins could probably force the software to do something it wasn’t built for, but the problem is efficiency.
2 - Perhaps there is a method for using only the hooking system in WP…
3 - A CMS can be adapted into a blog, but they are often not “blogging software” like Wordpress.
* Wordpress is a CMS, but comparatively a more specific kind of CMS.
You should’ve been our speaker, seriously.
I still don’t know much about CMS, but I know for a fact that Wordpress is not built to be a full-blown CMS. A more specific kind, as you’ve said, geared towards people who are primarily into blogging.
Making WP as the “Ultimate CMS” would entail working its way up from a specific to a general CMS platform — the ‘trickier’ transition @_@
Yes! You totally get it, the up/down notion I was trying to express. If WP wanted to do this they most definitely could, but it would entail a couple major steps. The first being a strip-down of all blogging-specific code (possibly leaving only the hooks and modules system). The second being adapting the stripped-down system into what we currently know as WordPress, but [important] having clear code/module separation from WP:CMS and WP:Blog.
^^ yay
Yeah often people use WordPress as a standard site CMS for those small jobs. Unfortunately the site is often not hardened and is left unmaintained after implementation.
I think WordPress should stick with what it’s good at. It definitely try to launch something new and fantastic though. It’s going to lose attention in the next few years if it cannot innovate.