224 PART IV • Additional Features and Functionality
IS WORDPRESS THE RIGHT
CHOICE FOR YOUR CMS?
By now you’ve gathered that WordPress is useful for much more than just blogging (if not, just
wait until Chapter 14, “Uncommon WordPress Usage”). Basically, you can do just about anything
that involves managing written content, along with other media such as images, sound, and
video. I often tell newspaper and magazine publishers that there is no newspaper or magazine
site that I couldn’t rebuild in WordPress. Those sites are usually powered by expensive licensed
systems, and whereas it was unlikely that anyone would make that claim a couple of years ago,
today it is taken seriously. Larger publishing companies are already putting WordPress to good
use for their editorial group blogs, and others are powering opinion sections using the system.Picking the right CMS is important because your system should excel at what you want it to
do. WordPress is the right choice if you want a CMS that is◾ Open source and free
◾ Fast and easy to use, with high recognition
◾ Easily extendable and scalable
◾ Convenient for designing and developing plugins
◾ Excellent with text
◾ Search-engine friendly
◾ Good with images — and bound to get even betterBasically, if your site is an editorial one with primarily text content, you’ll be safe with
choosing WordPress. Most image-based sites will work just fine with WordPress as well, as
will anything built on embedding video content, for example.So when should you consider using an alternative to WordPress? Arguments for the potential
advantages of other CMSes include◾ Community features: Previously, other systems offered (possibly) better access to
community features such as forums, but the release of BuddyPress (http://
buddypress.org) and the easy integration with forum options such as bbPress
(http://bbpress.org) or Vanilla (http://vanillaforums.org) have really
overcome this deficiency.
◾ Modular structure: Some of the heavier CMSes (such as Drupal) have a more modular
structure, which means that you can create pretty much anything you want, wherever you
want. This is usually at the expense of usability, so you need to compare features and
workflow before deciding which route you should take. Also, a lot of these things are
possible with WordPress these days, but they require more advanced knowledge from the
theme and/or plugin developer. Lighter modular functionality is easily added through
widgets or additional meta boxes, depending on your needs.