WordPress 2.5 Released
I’ll be honest – I’ve been a Movable Type guy since, what, 2000? I’ve been blogging with it at home for that long, and we use it at Allegheny as well. It’s always worked and their version 4 software has been nice.
When I first had the idea for this site, I wanted to use it as a learning opportunity and decided to use WordPress as the blogging platform. Thanks to Dreamhost’s one-click install, I was up and running in moments.
Thus far, I’m very, very impressed with WordPress. It’s so easy to use and customize, and the thing I enjoy the most are the plug-ins. What was tough to do in MT is so easy in WP. There are plug-ins for just about everything and I’ve tried a bunch including one to handle RSS feeds and send them to Feedburner, one for making SEO stuff a no-brainer, and one to publish Google sitemaps automatically.
This weekend, WordPress released version 2.5 of their software. Again, it was a simple upgrade thanks to Dreamhost and so far, things have just worked. The interface has been refined and things have been made a bit more simpler. All around, a great update. I’m sure there is a ton of work that’s been done in the guts of the application, and I think over the next few days I’ll try to explore those more.
The more I use WP, the more I wonder if it could be used as a CMS for a school. It’s so much easier to use then content management systems I’ve looked at (and I’ve been looking lately). A platform like the WordPress MU seems to have a lot of CMS features built-in: mutliple authors, permissions, blogging and editing “pages.” Are any campuses out there using WordPress as a CMS? It’s certainly a cost-efficient solution.
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Mike,
First great to find your blog.
We’re using WordPress as CMS for a new monthly Research magazine, Duke Research http://research.duke.edu. Required some hacking but I haven’t seen a CMS that doesn’t.
I really like the latest WP update too. I have to get used to their new media manager though. I’ve heard using the “custom fields” area in posts is one of the more powerful features of WP that can really open it up as a full-on CMS.
Hi Mike,
While the cost of entry is low when using WordPress, the cost of personalization and maintenance is neither simple nor cheap for the average user.
The largest functionality gap between a blog and a CMS is the lack of hierarchical structure. Typically all pages within the blog exist at the same depth, and as a consequence of this linearity horrendously long lists of links are not uncommon.
A good CMS designed specifically with schools in mind will incorporate a professional design and allow simple creation of hierarchical menus allowing clear navigation. I’m not aware of an off-the-shelf solution (either blog or CMS) which is capable of that.
Andy (http://www.foxbright.com)
We’re using it for our work blog and another department is using it as well. Updating via svn makes it even easier to update, especially if we start getting more instances around campus.
WordPress is running around 75 administrative and departmental sites at my college. We’re deploying separate installs, yet referencing global style sheets and global header/footer includes to keep top level control over branding and navigation. Overall, “pages” are used more frequently than “posts” as it’s difficult to get people away from static content.
We’re getting pretty bold with custom fields too, a recent site we launched using wordpress is ualr.edu/magazine.
Overall using a free, open source cms with a HUGE developer community has it’s upside. Myriads of plugins, resources are a great help. …I can picture how isolated we’d be if that funding had come through for a big bulky enterprise cms. We’d be on an island, depending on limited tech support and a much smaller user community.