The Curious Case of WordPress as a CMS

WordPress is ...

1. a SAAS blog application
2. a content management system
3. a social media tool
4. all of the above

I remember when I first heard about blogs. Actually, I hated it. I'm a private person in general, and the thought of writing my journal online was absolutely horrific. I don't even write a regular print journal, so I couldn't fathom why anyone would want to share their inner-most thoughts with the world.

Of course, I was only thinking of things from my perspective. A lot of people wanted to share their thoughts with the world on a thousand, million different subjects, some of them private, most of them not. And blogging, as a precursor to social media as a whole, was really what drew people into technology. It's a bit of a hyperbole, sure, but in my opinion, blogging humanized the Internet.

So, people now wanted to blog, and the early entrepreneurs did it by hand. These old HTML-masters simply created the next entry and posted it on their site ... the old fashioned way. As more people joined the conversation that was growing on the web, entrepreneurs created software to make blogging easier, allowing people to create and manage their content without having to write code from scratch.

As far as content management systems go, then, blogs really pushed the adoption of CMS applications by creating a very real, very immediate need. So it's curious to me why WordPress, one of the grand-daddies of blogging software (though an admittedly hip and still relevant grand-daddy) is continually questioned about its validity as a CMS.

The key is to think about what people mean by content management systems and to understand that as our needs become more sophisticated, technology becomes more complex. When we can do more, we want more, and so it's an endless cycle of technological progress. Nowadays, we need to do more than just manage content. We want our software to manage workflow, define process, integrate with social media networks, juggle multiple web sites from one administrative interface, support multi-channel publications, manage users and permissions and groups and security and ... whew. I get exhausted just thinking about it.

But here's the thing. In essence -- in it's pure, basic form -- a content management system managed content. That's it. The end. And if there is a simple management need, then we don't need anything very complex. WordPress is great for individuals, small businesses, casual groups, and anyone else who has very straightforward needs. It's a CMS that, when used in the right situation, can be very powerful and cost effective.

That's the first question we always need to ask: what is appropriate? Right-sizing a solution to a problem is fundamental to creating the right solution. Don't discount an application just because it doesn't come with all the bells and whistles; sometimes that's just sound and fury signifying nothing.

* BTW, yes, I realize the cognitive dissonance I'm inspiring by writing about WordPress from a Blogger-based blog. Such is what keeps life interesting!