Content Management Systems are a dime a dozen these days. Every PHP designer with any teeth probably has made one or another to prove they can make a kickass CMS! Usually though, these CMSes are horribly difficult to use, are closed box systems, and force people to get locked into their proprietary technology. The BIG reality is that there are only a handful or so that are actually usable for clients. My clients across the board need something that is web based, easy to use, and doesn’t require a Computer Science degree to manage.

I have tried my fair share of open source CMSes and have generally one complaint about all of them, they aren’t user friendly. This is usually tied to the fact that some PHP programmer designed the system and user interface with little to no help from graphic designers.

Enter WordPress.

I couldn’t find a better way to describe it than the main quote from their website.

“WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.”

I have been using WordPress for all of my sites for about 3 years now and will never look back. It has everything a guy couldn’t want and more! To save you and me time, I am just going to list out the pros and cons. I will let you decide.

Pros

• FREE! FREE! FREE!
• widely used and developed (Ford, Yahoo, eBay, CNN, New York Times)
• highly extensible (thousands of plugins available)
• easy templating & well documented (php based & the WordPress Codex)
• very user friendly (if you can use Microsoft Word you are good to go)
• did I mention FREE! (Open Source)
• you can get a completely free blog to get started (WordPress.com)

Cons

• still makes blogging the main UI focus
• no caching out of the box