Blog Tipz

There is an ongoing debate about whether WordPress is a CMS (a content management system) or whether it is just a complex blog system with powerful features. To one, it might be a CMS, while to another, there are limitations and they instead refer to it as a blog platform.

If you are still using a developer-hosted blog platform, you might not be aware that there are more complex solutions out there that are still easy to use, but include many of the tools necessary for expanding in the future.

In this post, I’ll be explaining why you might need a CMS and why the disputes exist.

The term CMS can be defined as a content management system, or an application (offline or online) used to create, edit, manage, search, and publish various kinds of digital media and text.

Features of Content Management Systems

There are several key differentiating factors between a CMS and a regular blog system.

• Identification of all key users and their management roles.
• Categories and types have different roles and responsibilities.
• The creation of content has a defined workflow, so managers are alerted to the changes.
• Multiple versions of content are available for viewing changes.
• The ability to publish content to a repository.
• Separation of content’s semantic layer from its layout.
• All content is displayed in one, central location.
• There is a document management system.

In general, many CMS system offer a wider array of features, but are generally more complex and harder to manage if your sole purpose is to run a small blog.

Features of Non-Content Management Systems

You’ll generally find that many services that you are able to sign up for on the web are extremely limited and don’t consist of the same level of features that CMS systems have. This may be one of the largest reasons why organizations of large-scale and individuals that need advanced features move away from or never even consider the smaller systems.

At the core, the following features are missing:

• Ways to manage multiple users.
• Ways to easily manage all the content that has been uploaded.
• Versioning of posts and content that have been uploaded.
• Methods of controlling what is displayed by member level and status.
• Other limitations make it impossible to be effective when there are more than one author and you want to branch out of the one blog.

Onto WordPress: Some Problems

To some degree, WordPress competes against Drupal and Joomla, which are both heavily regarded as the premier CMS systems used by many larger companies. However, at the same time, the three platforms offer different services from one another.

The average user thinks that WordPress can only be used as a blog system, which simply isn’t true. Think about where the system is today compared to when it was started – it has come a far way. There are 4,245 plugins officially hosted on the WordPress site, along with an infinite number of additions, in both plugins and themes available by people who might be interested in coding them. What makes WordPress complete is this ability to use the system to your advantage.

Here are some ways that you could address the “problems” that WordPress has, and why some don’t yet consider it a CMS.

• Page Structure – The most common feature of WordPress is the post, which makes sense. Some want to change that to the page, which makes more sense when managing a content-rich website. You will have to change the page order of your pages starting with a homepage of zero and working up from there, with 99 being the blog, or a form of it. More instructions for doing this can be found here.
• Categories – Make it easier for people to be able to focus on categories by using “custom category templates” within your theme. More focus is placed on these categories than tags and sub-categories, for example.
• Post Styles – Many content management systems have custom page templates, and this is the direction that WordPress is heading. Premium themes (with more features) are tending to incorporate custom page and post templates for adding video or images to your site, which is a start in the right direction.
• Access to Your Archives – You’ll need to focus on your archives, as a part of content management systems is allowing visitors to see all the content that they have published on their site. This may involve some coding and organizations, including separate pages for archives by month or by author.
• Author Templates – When you have multiple authors on your site, you want to make it possible for each person to have their own format for their blog area. This might appear obtrusive to the overall goal, but is necessary in a CMS. To some extent, there is the ability to do this with WP, but it’ll take some time for coding and launching it. An author profile doesn’t always cut it.
• User Roles – Even though there are a few ways to control who publishes and sees the content published to your blog, there really isn’t a way to control them on a scale from 0 to 10 as many systems work. However, there are plugins like Role Scoper available.
• Spam Management – There are certainly ways to control spam with WordPress, but it isn’t as easy if you don’t have funding to create your own system (you’re stuck using the methods and plugins provided).
• Multimedia Management – The WordPress Media Library page does give you some options as to viewing your uploaded content, but there are some features that it is missing for more complete management.
• E-Commerce – Extensions to other CMS systems allow you to integrate a shop or e-commerce area to your site. In the past year, I’ve seen the number of plugins and themes that do the job pretty well increase dramatically. Additionally, you could code your own system to work with WordPress.
• Modules/Widgets – Other systems tout the ability to add thousands of modules to your site. This is semi-true for WordPress, because you can use any number of widgets and customize where they are displayed (you might need to do some coding), making it easy to add elements and advertisements to your site.
• Forums/BBS, etc. – WordPress may be giving this idea more focus as of recently, with Buddy Press, which allows you to integrate the system into a regular WordPress site.
• Statistics – I don’t really know why sites would want to have statistics built into the back-end of their site unless they have a huge amount of extra resources at their disposal. Third-party services do the job, and Google Analytics (or a variation of it) is used by many large enterprises.
• Site Maintenance – One of the features of CMS systems is that you are able to easily maintain the site. WordPress is once again lacking this ability out-of-the-box, but available through a number of plugins.

In Review

Planning on using WordPress to manage multiple authors and areas to a site can be difficult to say the least, to get started. You really have to know what you are doing. My personal opinion says that it is possible to make WordPress thousands of times more complete and complex, depending on how you look at it. With the wide array of plugins and advanced themes available, you can customize everything from the admin login page to the way tags and categories are managed.

Even though I didn’t want to get into the reasons why WordPress isn’t the best CMS, you can see that it is certainly possible to make the system act more like a “CMS” than a blog platform, as intended. After all, there are many large sites using WordPress MU that have taken the term to a whole new level.