Open Source CMS Award: why WordPress is the big winner

Why WordPress Should Not Have Won the Open Source CMS Award? This article is omitting the fact that Drupal and Joomla were specifically disqualified from the same award that WordPress won, because both projects have won it multiple years running and it was starting to get a little boring. They were instead given their own category to compete in: the “Hall of Fame Award”

Why WordPress Should Not Have Won the Open Source CMS Award? Packt Publishing appear the winners for their anniversary Accessible Antecedent CMS Accolade in November, and back again I accept been a bit abashed that the 2009 champ was WordPress. My aboriginal acknowledgment was this:

“… So a blogging belvedere won the agreeable administration arrangement award? How sad is that?”

My knee-jerk “how sad is that?” acknowledgment comes not because I don’t anticipate WordPress is worthy, but because of what it implies about the accompaniment of added accessible antecedent CMS projects. The acknowledgment comes from the actuality that a blogging belvedere is blame your CMS’s ass in its own category.

WordPress bridges both the blogging and CMS categories due to the ‘Pages’ feature, and is acutely advantageous for managing a blog-focused website. Mostly. That is, until you wish to do something that a CMS should be acceptable at, like accept an accident calendar, custom form, photo gallery, etc. – which is why WordPress is not focused on getting a CMS in the aboriginal place. Yet it does such a bigger job at the basal things like creating new pages, tagging, categorizing, comments, and accepting custom SEO-friendly URLs out of the box that it belted out added software projects like Drupal MODx and Joomla! SilverStripe whose sole focus is agreeable management. Sad indeed.

Open Source CMS Award: why WordPress is the big winner. The actuality that I can go through actually hundreds of accessible antecedent agreeable administration systems and still end up clearing on WordPress because I apperceive it’s the alone one that won’t absolutely abash my applicant is what’s sad. Usability and affluence of use matter. They are the amount one affection to the end user. If you’re circuitous in a CMS project, you charge to do better. A lot better. Right now.

UPDATE: Some commenters accept acicular out that the awards website has a specific rule:

Previous winners of the Overall class are not acceptable for the Overall class in 2009. Previous winners attempt amidst one addition in a abstracted Hall of Fame class advised accurately for them.

Since both Drupal and Joomla! accept won the accolade ahead and appropriately were automatically excluded, I replaced their names with the CMS projects that were 2nd and 3rd abaft WordPress (MODx and SilverStripe) instead. The apriorism of the column still holds true.

I anticipate one of the things to be abstruse from it is that simple cases are easier to break well. WordPress has focused on the simple case — blogging — and absolute actual boring added appearance that acquiesce it to annex out to hardly added circuitous applications after lots of customization.

I alternate in an absorbing exercise at endure year’s SXSW – a ‘CMS showdown’ area Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress teams were accustomed a architecture and a blueprint by an absolute applicant and asked to apparatus what they could in a timebox. The after-effects were absorbing — The WP aggregation delivered all the aforementioned functionality (access control, multi-user blogging, bulletin boards, photo galleries, even calendars, associates groups) that the J! and Drupal teams did. However, the applicant evaluating the after-effects begin the consistent WordPress site’s authoritative interface to be the a lot of ambagious and abstract for their team.

WordPress is accomplished because it is focused. The further it moves abroad from its laser focus into the branch of accepted purpose CMS, the added it faces the problems that accoutrement like Joomla! and Drupal do. And unfortunately, that’s if its tailored, automated admin UI becomes an ballast about its neck.

Open Source CMS Award: why WordPress is the big winner? This isn’t a bang on it at all — I’m sitting in the Drupal association angry for the abstraction that we charge to focus added on specific use cases so that we can clothier the way WP has been able to do. But the problems J! and D face are about specialization and generalization — WP will not, IMO, be able to ability adequation with either of those platforms after acclamation that circuitous challenge.