Investigating using WordPress as both a CMS and Blog

When I was first told that one could use WordPress as a CMS I was thinking inside a very small confining box and thought, “why in the world would anyone ever want to do that?” The basis for this thought was totally from a narrow minded security point of view, “here we go, yet another web application that will allow sites to be hacked, servers to be owned and more sites taken over by spammers and hackers.”

Luckily I don’t live in that box, so I quickly stepped outside of it and started looking at the benefits of using WordPress as both a CMS and a blog. I also wanted to see if we could use WordPress as a CMS for a new site we wanted to launch that was just for our Linux Virtual Private Servers. As with everything there are tradeoffs and risks as well as benefits so let’s start with the 10 benefits of using WordPress as a CMS.

10 Benefits of using WordPress as a CMS

• It’s free – unlike some CMS platforms it is free and well supported by a large group of developers and users.
• It is easy to install and setup.
• It is easy to learn – you can edit pages without knowing HTML. Easier to learn than some CMS systems.
• It runs on both Apache (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) and Windows IIS.
• The cost of the actual site design can be controlled by using free or low cost templates.
• It is fairly easy to take an existing design and move it to WordPress as the template system is well designed.
• Many plug-ins are available allowing you to do things like SEO, generate sitemap files, include multimedia like Flash, Videos and music.
• Captchas can be used to prevent spamming of the blog.
• No need to use FTP or other tools to update your site.
• The WordPress team is interested in security and not only makes regular updates to WordPress but they also make it easy to update both the base platform and plug-ins.

Why not to use WordPress as a CMS

There are good reasons not to use WordPress as a CMS system, here are a few that you might want to consider, before you read my conclusion below.

Five Reasons to avoid using WordPress as a CMS

• WordPress was designed to be a blogging platform, so some hard core developers feel that adding CMS capabilities to WordPress is like turbo charging an Edsel.  It’s still an Edsel when you are done. This does not mean that doing this is bad it just limits the capabilities as WordPress is designed for use in a  single user/blogger environment. If you need multiple authors, extremely flexible categorization of content or a complex site WordPress might not be the best solution for your needs.
• Simple Page/Post/User configuration. In software designed to be CMS systems from the start allow more posting options and the ability to setup multiple users with different levels of access.
• Simplified permalink options which force you to a set link structure.
• WordPress lacks editorial process and workflow controls.
• WordPress may be overkill. If you only need to edit the content on one page there are scripts that will do that with a lot less overhead than WordPress or any other CMS.

When I was in high school the guys in auto shop always seemed to get into a debate as to what was the better car, a Ford or a Chevy. As both sides wore blinders they couldn’t see the other side’s viewpoint and refused to be swayed to the other side. The bottom line is that you are running a business you want to survive so you cannot afford to wear blinders. You have to make decisions that affect your bottom line, your employee’s livelihood and your customers. You also cannot make decisions to embrace a new technology just based on its “coolness” factor. You need to evaluate the features available in WordPress and decide if they meet your needs for near future. If it does, then use it, if not find a better tool that does the job you need done.

Related posts:

1. Word Press as a CMS (Part 2)
2. WordPress as a CMS? Maybe, maybe not. (Intro)
3. WordPress as a CMS (Part 3)

Filed under: CMS, Search Engines, Security, SEO, Web Design, WordPress by admin