WordPress seems to have become all the rage over the last year or so.  More and more businesses and organizations are turning to the open source web software platform to power their blogs and websites, and some are even using it as a full-fledged CMS (content management system).  And this is where the problem begins…

Now first things first, let’s make it clear that WordPress is pretty cool blogging software.  In fact, the blog you’re reading right this moment is powered on the back-end by WordPress.  The software was designed for blogs and it’s quite good at powering a blog with all of the right tools and features built right in.

But to use WordPress as a CMS to power an entire website—can this possibly be a good idea?  Unfortunately, the answer is, “No it’s not a very good idea at all!”

WordPress was designed to be blogging software, not CMS software.  Here are three specific examples:

1. WordPress is awfully “heavy.”

In other words, the software is loaded up with a feature set that is great for blogging.  But these features just kind of add extra baggage when it comes to using the system for CMS—they can really make a site sluggish.  Also, because of the extensive blogging feature set, the user interface is full of options and features that will only serve to confuse a CMS user whose primary goal is to add or update website content.  On the other hand, a well-designed CMS system is very clean, simple, and straightforward to use for even the novice user.

2. CMS requires more plug-ins.

To effectively use WordPress as a CMS requires the use of numerous plug-ins.  While using a couple of plug-ins is okay every once in awhile, the fact is that each different plug-in developed by different programmers with different skill sets interfaces in a different way with the blogging software and with other plug-ins that are installed.  The end result can be a compatibility nightmare—especially when a new release or update to WordPress comes out and all of the plug-in developers must scramble to get a new plug-in version together to be compatible.  We won’t even mention the plethora of potential security issues that arise from this scenario.

3. It’s not designed to organize large amounts of information.

Because WordPress was designed primarily to be blog software, it does great with categories and tags—the foundation of blog organization.  The problem with using it as a CMS for a larger website lies in the fact that it depends on the installed theme to establish a proper website navigation structure, and most available CMS themes just don’t handle the task very well at all.  Although it’s the standard for blogs, using time-based content presentation (where newest content forces older content down the list into obscurity) is not a good way to organize most website content.

Sure, go ahead and use WordPress to power your blog (or the blog portion of your website).  This is exactly what it was designed to do, and it works great for this purpose.  But be aware of its pitfalls and limitations before planning to deploy the popular blogging software as a full-fledged CMS.

Tags: CMS, WordPress

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 1:54 pm and is filed under CMS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.