Wordpress 2.2 is a simple content management software used for blog sites. I separate it from other content management systems because it is essentially a subset of what a full CMS would normally offer, and as such cannot be compared to more capable CMS solutions. I used it to configure this site, so you should have a pretty good idea of what it is capable of already.Â
Overall, it has been a rewarding and shortlived experience, only delayed by my own idiocy forgetting to enable PHP on a new domain I setup (this one). The simplest solution is always hiding from you, after all.
Overall the level of support I found on the website was initially disconcerting, as I couldn’t find an answer to my problem. However I had my answer immediately, when someone provided a link to the wordpress requirements, which I had already checked myself. It wasnt until I was about to  email my own domain host that I suddenly remembered that you have to turn on PHP in Helm. Pass the dunce hat. I’ll go stand in the corner.
Apart from that you can expect the same level of support as you can all the well used and mature open source projects out there;  If you search the forum properly, there is usually an answer. The major difference with this product is that it is so simple there really arent many problems to overcome.
As with almost all CMS and blog packages, it’s pretty much platform independent. Based on PHP, which is a language which must be supported by your domain server, the server creates an HTML file from the code residing on it, and therefore serves up only HTML data to the viewing browser. It also uses the same method for configuration and installation, therefore as long as your server can provide PHP 4 or above, and a MySQL database, you are laughing.
The system uses what has now become fairly universal in the world of web design; design/content separation using CSS. You can apply the multitude of freely downloadable skins to present your content, change fonts, colours etc. It validates XHTML 1.0 and CSS with the standard skin, so the php is sound, however you can find imperfect skins which do not validate, so you need to be careful. With a little practice and research you can usually jiggle about with the skin code to make it validate, so you can be safe in the knowledge that your site is web responsible (techy minds can read more on W3c here. Non teccies shouldn’t worry too much. It’s a consortium to standardise web solutions, to prevent the kind of anarchy that became the browser wars, back in the days of netscape and IE 4). In all honesty I have found the importance of some of the finer points of validation a little over-zealous.
RSS 1 AND 2 feeds can be setup for your blog, as you would expect, and Atom feeds are also supported. Why do you care? Well.. you may have seen the Windows Vista sidebar, or the Google sidebar software. If you subscribe to an RSS feed on your sidebar,  when a new post arrives on the subscribed blog, they get a little link on their sidebar with the title of the post, and can read it without actually visiting your site, but one would hope the content will impulse a click here and there.
Moving onto the admin interface, I can’t really say enough good things about it. Easy to use, intuitive, and concise. Arranging the layout of the site is literally drag and drop, It allows all kinds of custom plugins which could potentially extend this blog software into something rather more than it was intended to be. Advanced skins can utilise configuration plugins, and you could even write your own if you’re prepared to get tech and rollup your sleeves.
Designing your own skins can be time consuming and a little confusing just as with any other software skin function, but it is not so bad, and there are plenty of tutorials one google away to help you. Personally I would download a theme with the correct layout and then just modify the graphics to your own taste. It would save a considerable amount of time.
In case you can’t tell I like Wordpress. Designers and teccies alike can utilise it to effectively setup their own site in one day, with no experience whatsoever. Reviews linked below will appear when I have the time, the commerical competition and the open source alternatives look equally good, however I would suggest they cannot improve on Wordpress enough to make me switch. I would certainly not pay for an equivalent commercial product when the free one is this good. Long live Open Source!
- Ease of use: 5
- Learning Curve: 5
- Flexibility: 4
- Finish: 5
Commercial competition:
Opensource Competition:
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