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Is WordPress a CMS?

March 3, 2010 — 11:36am ET | By Ron Miller

Tony Byrne has a short post on the CMS Watch Blog today about a Twitter debate over whether WordPress is a "true" CMS or not. Byrne says since companies are using it as such, that makes it a CMS.

As a WordPress user, I have to agree. It may not be a sophisticated web content management system, but it does everything you need a CMS to do. It provides a structure for entering and managing your content and administering the back end of your website. You can add analytics tools to monitor your website traffic and you can design and build in search engine optimization. You can customize it to create a design that reflects your organization's look, feel and brand.

What's more you can manage your media and even do some light editing. It's not exactly digital asset management at its most advanced, but it does the job. If you are using it as a blog, you can control the comments stream and WordPress has an excellent comment spam filter. 

So it might not be the most innovative CMS around, but CMSs as whole sit along a spectrum of functionality. If it offers what you need, it's good enough. If it doesn't, you need to look at something that meets your needs. For a small business or an individual, a tool like WordPress is highly valuable. Just because it isn't necessarily suited to the needs of a larger organization is no reason to write it off.

For more information:
- see Tony Byrne's blog post

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Comments (4) | Post a comment

Comments

By Jill Chongva | Posted 11:37am | March 4, 2010

One of the things I like most about WordPress as a CMS is that clients can learn it easily. They can then change, update and remove content as needed and with the huge array of plugins, clients can extend the functionality of, and customize, their website easily and quickly :)

By rmiller | Posted 3:41pm | March 7, 2010

Hi Jill:
Thanks for the comment. I agree completely. You only need a limited technical understanding to control the Admin back-end of a WordPress site. Once it's in place, it's fairly straightforward to add content and use plug-ins.

Ron

By Sally Strebel | Posted 5:06pm | March 23, 2010

I agree with you. WordPress is a CMS. I like WordPress so much that I built a company called page.ly around it. Also, We've been building large company sites on WordPress and our clients love it. It's perfect for beginners.

Thanks for the post.

By Anonymous | Posted 10:32am | July 17, 2010

I'm a little late to this conversation but thought i'd add my opinion!

I would definitely have to agree with you that Wordpress IS a CRM.

My non academic, simple definition of a CMS is pretty simple - it's a system designed for managing content in a simple manner by the end user, without having to delve into code.

Wordpress fits that definition perfectly. Was it originally designed as this - no. Has it grown and adapted to suit user requirements - absolutely. Not everyone uses Wordpress as a blog, it can be many things. You can build a whole site based on pages, and in fact that's what all the templates over at www.studiopress.com are based on, and they definitely take Wordpress in some interesting directions.

Wordpress can manage text pages, manage images via gallaries etc, include other media/forms of content such as video etc. Content can be stored within the system and then put together and published as required. This can be done without coding if required.

So, in my very humble opinion, is it a CMS - definitely - it can be used effectively to publish and manage content and has features built in for this purpose. Is it the most advanced tool for this task - absolutely not. But do many small businesses who only have small amounts of content to manage in simple ways need something more advanced? I would suggest in a lot of cases they don't.

Thanks for the article, it was a great read.
Matt

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