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Windsor Digital

Handmade digital strategy from the heartland.

WordPress: It’s a great CMS

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So, WordPress.

Depending on the day, it’s the smile on my face or the knot on my brow. It’s probably the simplest thing I’ve ever monkeyed with behind the curtain and, yet, it’s insanely complex.

According to those who know, it’s a lousy content management system. And yet, I have to disagree. It’s got some limitations, to be sure, but I’ve found it to be remarkably malleable, bending itself to many of the tasks I’ve thrown at it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Because just a few months ago, I was very much a WordPress n00b, thinking that “customizing” meant ticking off the options on the expensive (and! virally! marketed!) theme I applied to this blog a year ago.

That was before I grew to understand the magic in a publishing platform for which you merely had to type into Google “Whatever crazy feature you’d like your site to have” and “WordPress plugin.”

But again, I’m rushing ahead. First comes the framework.

As Andy Ihnatko said the other day:

Forget about finding a WordPress theme that looks like it’s just a few tweaks and styles away from what I want. Instead, I’ll start with an utterly blank theme with every piece of WP infrastructure I’ll need, and use it as the starting point.

So here’s where I am right now: I’ve downloaded and installed the K2 theme. There are a couple of (old) tutorials on customizing it, and I’ll prolly be dipping deep into that well.

…

What’s the worst that can happen? The worst that can happen is that I learn something.

That’s been my mantra as I try to push and prod WordPress into a CMS: What’s the worst that can happen? Is trial-and-error the best way to teach myself PHP? Probably not. But as long as I pay close attention and make a copy of my files as I go along, the worst thing is, as Andy says, I pick up a little more knowledge along with the bruises.

So, sporadically, I’ll be sharing what I’ve found and, more often than not, begging for help out of a bind.

But know this: I believe WordPress is a great CMS.

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Comments

  1. WordPress is amazing. It’s simple to use, the seo is amazing, theres tons of plugins to do everything you could possibly want, the list goes on and on. WordPress is just awesome.

  2. Yes,I agree with you 100%,I used lots of cms,but at last I choose WP.because it is amazing,You can do any what you want…SEO friendly~~

  5. I came to WordPress as a complete beginner, and nearly panicked when I saw the control panel. However, especially with 2.7+ I’ve learned to love it and work with it. Yes, it’s a total pain at times, but as you said, there’s a theme for absolutely everything you would ever want to do, and if not, someone somewhere has a ‘hack’ for it!

  6. Ive been using wordpress for a good few years, It truly is a piece of lovelyness to build upon. With the help of all the plugins out there, theres nothing it cant do! – actualy, its not quite at the stage of making my tea – but maybe there is a plugin for that too

  7. What I love the most in WordPress is scalability. You can build almost every site with this CMS: picture gallery, tube site, automatically updated news site, paysite, blackhat seo site… etc.

  8. Hello, I´m using WordPress since a few years. It is a great CMS with awesome functions. I own a big network of more than 80 websites and I can´t imagine make new projects without WP. With this great tool a can set up a new website in less than 3 hours.