Rumors of Wordpress as a CMS

No, I have not disappeared. I am testing the contention that in order to survive, blogs must have continual content. I actually gained a couple of subscribers in my two month hiatus.

Actually, I have been building and testing an Instructional Technology support site with many CMS qualities to it, on the Wordpress platform. It has forced me to come face-to-face with the innards of WP and its database design and code, though fortunately, much of the grunt work has been done by a very able workstudy student, and much of our content will be ported from our internal support wiki.

Conclusions: WP is not ready for prime time as a CMS. Not at all.

It is still a very post-centric beast, masquerading as a content management system. The so-called CMS like features added to WP core (tagging, pages) are all incomplete and lacking in some respect or another.

However, at almost every turn, the WP Community has rescued WP from this situation.

An amazing array of plugins cover almost every current deficiency of WP. 

To wit: Tagging, Categories, Searching are all post centric and don't cover Pages in WP 2.3 series. How can you have a CMS without that? Fortunately, we have been saved by some very nice plugins:

• Dan Cameron's Search Everything
• Amaury Balmer's Simple Tags
• and Pixline's Category Page

which make up for WP's core lacks. Without these, the claim of WP is CMS worthy are ludicrous. Imagine (in the analog world) being able to search your day-timer for information but not your file cabinets.

One day, WP will catch up: it always does. But it does so because its community has been there ahead of it.

We have added Forms management, LDAP authentication (very stable so far), and an Events calendar, too, as well as plugins to ease the posting and playing of audio and video, and a few eye-candy plugins.

Now, we are filling up with data from our department wiki, collected over two years of work. This means sifting selectively for what users will find valuable. The work continues. When ready, I will post the URL.