The Wordpress CMS?

When you hear someone say Wordpress, what's the first thing that comes to mind? A blogging tool? If so, you'd be right. Wordpress has forced its way into mainstream by offering an extremely easy to use, and powerful blogging engine. I've hear Wordpress being compared to a Mac. Easy to figure out and not a lot of hassle getting set up. But has Wordpress come so far along that it has started to creep into the CMS domain?

If you do a Google search for "Open Source Free CMS's" you're likely to come up with some of the heavy-hitters: Joomla, Drupal, ModX etc... These beasts set the standards to which other CMS's are trying to emulate. Free, open-source, scalable, tons of community support and fairly easy to use. So where does Wordpress fit in? If you've ever used Wordpress you'd know that you can be up and running with a simple site faster than a jackrabbit on a date! Where I believe these other CMS's fall a little short is the sheer speed and idiot-proof plug-ins that are available with Wordpress. Need a photo gallery? Just do a search for it within Wordpress, and you'll immediately have about 20 pre-made ones to choose from. Find one you like, try it out, and if you don't like it simply remove it. Nothing difficult about that! If you get stuck, there are so many tutorials, forums and communities there to help.

OK, so you've spent about an hour or two getting your site set up, and now you want to apply a design. This is going to be a long process... right? No. Just do another Google search for "Wordpress templates" and you'll have so many hits you could search templates for hours on end. Jut download the one you like, upload it, and apply it. Done. Man that was easy! Now it does take some finessing to set your site up to look more like a regular website, rather than a blog, but there are many guides out there to help you through this process.

So what does this mean for the big guys like Drupal, Joomla, ModX etc.. Nothing. Wordpress will most likely always be just a blogging engine. The big guys have nothing to worry about because they offer something Wordpress doesn't. The ability to create VERY customized sites. I definitely would not recommend using Wordpress for your corporate web solution, but if you have the need for a small site, and want something easy to use then go for it!

I think Wordpress has set the standard for ease of use, and I hope this will change how the big guys think too.