Over the past few days I’ve installed and tested numerous CMS systems for a potential project down the road at work. Drupal, Geeklog, Joomla, Mambo, SiteFrame, Typo3 and Xoops. They all fall pathetically short of WordPress. It’s not a very complicated project. A simple site that I need to make weekly updates to. Probably about 10 static pages total. There’s also the potential of a second, far more in-depth and advanced site later on. That’s why I was searching for a CMS system. It’s really pathetic that WordPress is so great in the areas of content managment, theme creation and ease of use that I’m willing to mess with more advanced plugins for that system rather than try to use one of the other systems that are designed for more “enterprise” type sites.
My problem of course is convincing hardened developers that WordPress is a viable CMS and not just a “little blog toy” as one of them tried to point out. It’ll all come back to what the client actually needs in a website in the end, but I’d much rather push for a free WordPress install with some heavy-duty plugins than a $20,000 piece of enterprise grade CMS software that no one can work with. I don’t have a staff of 100 web guys to work on something like that. I need to be able to develope a site, roll it out and make updates to it without pounding my head against a wall every time I try and publish a page.
What I really need to do is find BIG sites that run just fine off of WordPress. Something really complicated, with interactive stuff, shopping carts, photo galleries, all that stuff. If I can find a couple examples like that, then maybe I can push for WordPress when the time comes.
I should probably dig deeper into creating a theme as well, but that’s a whole other ball of wax.
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