WordPress Wins Best CMS Award

I was somewhat surprised to learn that WordPress won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in Packt Publishing’s 2009  Open Source CMS Awards. It’s because I’ve never thought of WordPress as a CMS. It is a blog software, and certainly a very good one at that. It’s hardly what I would call a CMS. So when news of the award broke, I thought I was reading something wrongly, or that there was a catch somewhere that I misunderstood. But no. WordPress really came in number one as the overall best open source CMS.

It’s just so strange to me that WordPress would be considered seriously as a CMS, let alone winning a CMS award. The core functions of a CMS (which stands for Content Management System in case you did not know) is about managing the authoring, editing, publication and maintenance of content such as articles and stories. WordPress, as a blog, would definitely qualify as a CMS in it simplest form.

However, we typically expect many more features out of a serious CMS. No doubt WordPress will still fit the bill in some limited areas, but seriously, I expect a lot more out of a CMS: media management, multiple authors, multiple editors/moderators, workflow, revision, staging, etc. I have no idea if the multitude of 3rd party plugins will turn the core WordPress software into something I would be comfortable to call a CMS, but I imagine even if it were possible, it would have been so much simpler to adopt something that was designed to be a CMS at its core. Something like Drupal, or Joomla.

Drupal works really great as a CMS, and I chose to use it at work. While it is great as a CMS, it does have many things to learn from WordPress in the area of site administration. Something I really loved about maintaining a WordPress site is the ease of upgrading plugins just be clicking through the web interface. With one click, an updated plugin can be downloaded and installed, automatically, including all the other administrative steps that has to go along with a plugin upgrade. In fact, with one click, the core WordPress software can also be upgraded. It’s simply amazing.

I wasn’t actually going to blog about this WordPress award, until I heard something at my work place, that someone had actually considered using WordPress as a CMS for their website. I was thinking that, wow really, people do think very highly of WordPress.

It didn’t take me very long to choose WordPress as my blogging platform when I launched this current blot site about 2.5 years ago. It’s a lot harder to choose a CMS. But if you are just looking for a blog software, WordPress is it. Now oddly affirmed by winning a CMS award.