Comments on: What makes different WCM different?

By: CMS Vendor Navel Gazing | Jon On Tech

CMS Vendor Navel Gazing | Jon On Tech — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:14:55 +0000

[...] I have sinned. It’s been 8 weeks since my last blog post. And in that time many people have slandered WordPress, accusing it of not being a Web Content Management (WCM) platform at all. But [...]

By: Irina Guseva

Irina Guseva — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 05:15:08 +0000

it’s all matters of terminology, but, yes — WP is a blogging tool rather than a WCM system. it can “manage” web content in terms of publishing it out, but it doesn’t make WP a Web CMS. i do not believe WP can be “turned” into a true WCMS . PS: it’s irina not irena

By: Philippe Parker

Philippe Parker — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:56:32 +0000

Jed, I don’t want to shift the goalposts too far, but is a WCM really about managing content assets? I know there’s a clue in the name, but bear with me for a moment.
There are loads of tools that will publish content assets to the web or to other channels, but you wouldn’t call them WCM: file systems, product management systems, CRM, templating kits, etc.
What makes a WCM useful is its ability to link content according to business rules: you add some content and you get different kinds of presentations and navigation structures auto-magically. There’s got to be a way of distinguishing between the way a leading blogging tool handles this compared to other WCM products. So without straying too much into the Peter Monks / Jon Marks territory, perhaps WCM is a completely invalid term. If your qualification is correct — it’s certainly logical — then the term WCM is rubbish, because it doesn’t allow you to make that distinction. But my view (and it seems that’s Pie’s and Irena’s too) is that you need to say that blogging tools aren’t WCM, they’re blogging tools which you can turn into WCM if you put in some effort.

By: Jed

Jed — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:39:03 +0000

I have chimed in on this at Pie’s site, but on your last paragraph you seem to differentiate a ‘blogging tool’ from a WCMS – why is that ?

A blog post or article is a form of a type of content item, one which is published in a particular way. If you were to write your blog posts in Notepad, upload the HTML to an Apache server with no other tools involved, I guess you could still call the your overall system a “blogging tool”. However in my limited experience of WordPress, I have seen it used for static pages on an intranet, not just for blogs. So I say it is WCMS because:

1. It is publishing content to the Web (internal intranet or the public web)
2. It is Managing Content items – I use WP on a web site to which I am a contributing author. Posts are managed by senior editorial staff. That ‘management’ includes editing the content, adding metadata, setting a publishing workflow etc

So to me WordPress has the W, the C and the M.

It might not be RedDot (Ooops sorry OpenText) or Stellant (ooops sorry Oracle UCM) but its still WCM

By: Philippe Parker

Philippe Parker — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:52:52 +0000

Thanks for your comments. Just to clarify:

My point isn’t that WordPress is a bad product. It’s a good product. This blog runs on WordPress and I’ve recommended and implemented it as a project collaboration tool, which may seem hypocritical, but that’s another post.

My point is that picking a content management system is about getting the right feature set. WordPress is lacking in a number of those features and that may make it difficult for your website implementation to succeed as a consequence.

You can of course get any system to do pretty much anything with enough modules and development, but why would you bother when you get those features from another product more or less out of the box?

I don’t know podcms so I’ll have to check it out. But I think when so many products offer features that help to inform web content management that WordPress can’t achieve without significant effort, calling it a WCM just because you can use it to manage some kinds of web content is pretty much stretching the issue.

I have to admit that I piggy-backed slightly on the twitter debate just to get some more attention, but the main thrust of the post was to say that different wcm products have different features that are worth thinking about before you pick one. I certainly wouldn’t exclude WordPress from any website management, but if I thought it was a good fit for a client, I’d be likely to tell them that they didn’t need a CMS, they needed a really great blogging tool.

By: Scott Kingsley Clark

Scott Kingsley Clark — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:31:18 +0000

To be clear, how much development have you done with WordPress, how far have you taken it with your projects? A lot of what you’re saying here seems to confuse me. As a developer using WP every day (almost all hours of the day), I’ve been exploring nearly every aspect and every limit WP has.

Perhaps the core functionality is more geared for simpler setups, but a number of things change this. A plugin for WP like Pods CMS (http://podscms.org/) is a real game changer. WordPress 3.0 has a number of enhancements including some cool Menu Management functionality, beefier core support for Custom Post Types (automatic UI integration of registered post types), and other cool things on the way.

I guess what I really want to see is a detailed case study to support why you’re against giving WP the credit it deserves? I’m sure we could go back and forth forever with you giving reasons and me countering them, but I only hope to give you further insight from an active developer in the WP community.

By: Adriaan Bloem

Adriaan Bloem — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:29:13 +0000

If WordPress isn’t a WCMS, then Drupal isn’t, either There’s a lot to say about this (I just completed a 10-page review on WP as a WCM tool) but you’ve covered quite a few things nicely here.

Just one note… WordPress isn’t that great at SEO. For instance, it’s pretty hard to get the category names out of the URL; and it’s difficult to get a useful, individual meta description on all pages. None of it’s impossible, but little things like that quickly make you long for a more sophisticated tool. The list of nags and limits in WP goes on, so be careful it really suits your scenario, otherwise you’ll end up building your own system on top.