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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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 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