Packt Publishing announced the winners for their annual Open Source CMS Award in November, and since then I have been a bit disturbed that the 2009 winner was WordPress. My first reaction was this:
“… So a blogging platform won the content management system award? How sad is that?”
My knee-jerk “how sad is that?” reaction comes not because I don’t think WordPress is worthy, but because of what it implies about the state of other open source CMS projects. The reaction comes from the fact that a blogging platform is kicking your CMS’s ass in its own category.
WordPress bridges both the blogging and CMS categories due to the ‘Pages’ feature, and is extremely useful for managing a blog-focused website. Mostly. That is, until you want to do something that a CMS should be good at, like have an event calendar, custom form, photo gallery, etc. – which is why WordPress is not focused on being a CMS in the first place. Yet it does such a better job at the basic things like creating new pages, tagging, categorizing, comments, and having custom SEO-friendly URLs out of the box that it edged out other software projects like Drupal MODx and Joomla! SilverStripe whose sole focus is content management. Sad indeed.
The fact that I can go through literally hundreds of open source content management systems and still end up settling on WordPress because I know it’s the only one that won’t totally confuse my client is what’s sad. Usability and ease of use matter. They are the number one feature to the end user. If you’re involved in a CMS project, you need to do better. A lot better. Right now.
UPDATE: Some commenters have pointed out that the awards website has a specific rule:
Previous winners of the Overall category are not eligible for the Overall category in 2009. Previous winners compete amongst one another in a separate Hall of Fame category designed specifically for them.
Since both Drupal and Joomla! have won the award previously and thus were automatically excluded, I replaced their names with the CMS projects that were 2nd and 3rd behind WordPress (MODx and SilverStripe) instead. The premise of the post still holds true.
I think one of the things to be learned from it is that simple cases are easier to solve well. WordPress has focused on the simple case — blogging — and very very slowly added features that allow it to branch out to slightly more complex applications without lots of customization.
I participated in an interesting exercise at last year’s SXSW – a ‘CMS showdown’ where Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress teams were given a design and a spec by an actual client and asked to implement what they could in a timebox. The results were interesting — The WP team delivered all the same functionality (access control, multi-user blogging, message boards, photo galleries, even calendars, membership groups) that the J! and Drupal teams did. However, the client evaluating the results found the resulting WordPress site’s administrative interface to be the most confusing and baffling for their team.
WordPress is excellent because it is focused. The farther it moves away from its laser focus into the realm of general purpose CMS, the more it faces the problems that tools like Joomla! and Drupal do. And unfortunately, that’s when its tailored, streamlined admin UI becomes an anchor around its neck.
This isn’t a slam on it at all — I’m sitting in the Drupal community fighting for the idea that we need to focus more on specific use cases so that we can tailor 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 reach parity with either of those platforms without addressing that complex challenge.
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”
extracted from http://www.packtpub.com/award
“…Previous winners of the Overall category are not eligible for the Overall category in 2009. Previous winners compete amongst one another in a separate Hall of Fame category designed specifically for them….”
Drupal and Joomla!, as previous winners, were NOT eligible for this award. WordPress will not eligible either next year if rules remain the same!
@webchick, @HarryB
Thank you for the information – an oversight on my part. I have updated the post to reflect this new information, but it still does not change the premise of the post – why then didn’t MODx, SilverStripe, or some other CMS-specific project still win over WordPress?
Well, I’m sure http://www.google.com/trends?q=wordpress%2C+modx%2C+silverstripe has something to do with it.
The premise of the post
>> blogging platform is kicking your CMS’s ass in its own category.
is only true in the context that WordPress is now competing against third/fourth tier content management systems.
The premise will only truly hold when WordPress wins the hall of fame category.
Till such time you mis-spoke and should man up and accept what you did.
Greetings Vance,
I was one of the judges this year that voted WordPress as number one in the Overall category it Packt’s competition. On my blog, you’ll find my reasoning as to why I picked WordPress over the four other finalists in this category:
http://cmsreport.com/content/2009/12/judging-five-overall-best-content-management-systems
I’ve always been hesitant to call WordPress a full CMS except for the fact that WordPress as a blogging application can and does out perform a number of Web applications that label themselves as a CMS. So I think your basic premise does have merit that something is wrong in the open source (and proprietary) CMS industry when WordPress as a blogging application can compete well against them. Now having said this, I think Drupal and Joomla! does have a huge advantage over WordPress as a CMS.
Adding to the discussion here…I think Jeff Eaton’s comments summarizes some of the same issues I see with building a site needing full CMS functionality with an application that specializes in blogging. You would be crazy to not question whether WordPress can continue to advance itself in the full CMS arena. Personally, I see WordPress useful when the requirements of the CMS are well understood and not expected to change. However, when in doubt I’d personally use Drupal, Joomla, and even SilverStripe over WordPress.
@Bhaskar, I agree that WordPress will have to prove itself when it competes directly with Drupal and Joomla. However, I’d hardly rate SilverStripe, DotNetNuke, and MODx as “third/fourth tier content management systems”. WordPress did compete against some quality open source CMS and won, it’s as simple as that. I really think in the next few years there is potential to seeing SilverStripe and MODx stealing many of the headlines that Drupal and Joomla enjoy today. SilverStripe and MODx are still rather young projects but they are rising stars.
I am just digusted at the fact WP won any sort of award because of the security issues the software has had over the course of it’s history.
The codebase is a complete and utter -beep- mess so just how did we arrive at this point? WP is a blog and if you want it to do anything more then you hack it… the general premise in the WP community I suspect.
Out go best practices, domain modeling, proper software engineering, etc. Security? Who cares!
Makes you puke all over the place
Jeff, being also a part of the SxSW showdown, I think the testing/judging mechanism was admittedly anecdotal and heavily biased with WP going third in hours-long testing from a single person who was hungry and grumpy.
I’m fine with people continuing to say WordPress is not a CMS, we keep trucking on regardless. It doesn’t really matter what people call us, we’re not “a CMS,” we’re WordPress, and that evolves and changes every day.
The problem is people vote on this award.. WP has a huge userbase so alot of people vote for it
In my opinion Concrete5 is one of the coolest CMS there is now.. but it has little traction compared to the big ones.
If I am not really misinterpreting the word “CMS”, it means content management system. Now how WP actually differs from that? It lets you write your content, display any way you would like to display it. And most of all, it let you do everything at ease. And who said in the world that BLOG is not a CMS?
Just display your content as it looks like a daily log, and here you go
– You can develop a blog using any CMS, and vice versa, you can develop any sort of Content filled site using WP.
Now I think, you are just narrowing the definition a bit too much. WP is one of the best Content-Management-System I’ve ever seen and worked with.
I am very much happy that WP got what it deserves. Thanks for your post.
WordPress is the best CMS out there, look at the top 100 design agencies, developers, content providers and see which one the majority use. It isn’t a coincidence, the best people like working with the best.
Dan
Do not mistake the best with the easiest; WP is popular because it is free and because the platform is PHP based, there are many people who have learnt to develop PHP off the back of WP.
Sadly using WP as a starting peg to learn PHP is not the best judgement IMHO; to develop software you really do need to learn to do it proper…
Besides, from the very beginning WP wasn’t developed but hacked – bits of script from here, bits of script from over there – you get my point?
That trend still continues today. Pah!
Yea, well, Jeff *and* Matt – I was also in the SxSW challenge as the developer for the Joomla! entry. I created ~24 hours of instructional video, none of which the judge watched.
So, can it really come as a surprise that she wasn’t able to actually save a blog post? I mean, it was as though she expected it to be as easy as WordPress.
BTW – Matt – Jeff is the one who “gave me permission” to call WordPress a CMS as an uber geek who does so, himself. I’ve been and continue to be a huge fan of WP and I’ve also continued to point out the danger in under estimating that project. You guys are doing swimmingly. Keep it up!
Matt -
Thanks for the note. I think each of the teams can produce some ‘how bacon gets made’ stories about those three sites.
I don’t mean to imply in any way that WP isn’t a great piece of software — AND a legitimate CMS. Rather, I was trying to make a point about the payoff and tradeoffs that come with relentless focus on a use case.
The fact that the WP team delivered the functionality requested by the client wowed a lot of people who thought that it couldn’t be stretched to do what needed to be done. But I think it also demonstrated that WP’s stellar UX is stellar in large part because it focuses on streamlining the blogging experience.
It’s possible to do a lot more with WP, but it means building new UX conventions, administrative tools, and UI assets for the newly expanded set of tasks. The broader that task set becomes, the more work it takes. That’s not a slam on WP at all, rather an acknowledgment that projects seeking to ‘make things as simple as wordpress’ had better think hard about what ‘things’ their users really want and need.
Vance I couldn’t agree more with your observation that “the best CMS is one which won’t totally confuse my client… Usability and ease of use matter.”
That’s why we built Refinery CMS, a very easy to use content manager for Ruby-on-Rails. I’m not a technical guy and frankly I find even WordPress to be a little confusing sometimes. When I tell our clients Refinery is easy to use I mean it! When they try the demo they see it for themselves.
Refinery doesn’t try to do everything, but it makes all the basic tasks simple.