I recently switched over to using wordpress for the ammoboxproject and so far i am very happy with the way things are running, the installation was very easy and straight forward and i had a custom theme that i made in photoshop quickly sliced up by the awesome petr and within a week we were in business.
The one thing that struck me was for one of the world leading blogging software was how quick to install and how light they have made to utilize plugins - very slick. My concerns however started to creep in when i was seeing a couple of updates in a number of dates - moveabletype seems to have a lot of regular updates but not in a number of days. that was a bit of a shock and i messed up my installation a few times with transmit by overwriting files instead of merging. always do a backup, no matter how urgent the vulnerability!
But it left me with this nagging question, was wordpress the best CMS for my needs? - my honest answer for installing wordpress was because i had heard very good things about the seo plugins and i really want to expose the knowledge and blogposts on ammobox to a broader audience outside of social media networks. people who were actually using gadgets and technology for the first time and to try and cut through the gloating bullshit you see on some of these bigger sites that try and argue the toss over which is fashionable this week (i'm talking TwiT with the pre over the iphone - talk about too much information) and actually give people knowledge that they need for these devices. Anyway, aside from that - i kept coming back to it, is wordpress the best CMS out there?
It's a lot of questions actually mashed together - there are plenty of free, open source software out there that you can install and use but often it is how the software actually intergrates into your day to day life. One of the major reasons i used tumblr for projectswebmedia is because i wanted to know that i would not have to worry about the hosting and i could post easily from a lightweight iphone interface. The rule of content management and hosting are changing on a daily basis and the increase in tools that fit into our daily grind will rapidly change as well. I'm not saying that there will be a one stop application but i think a lot of applications are going to have to change in interface based on the users ability to gradually learn and i think this is where customized custom interfaces will start to become the rage to maintain the media output you are putting out onto the internet. filtering is going to be a major factor with all this creation too.
I'm looking forward to melody coming out. a true open source cms system from some of the guys that worked at moveabletype - i'm hoping they will have taken some interface lessons from tumblr and some installation cues from wordpress. You can pretty much sway a community away from a product these days with flashy graphics, lightweight installs and regular updates to patch features and bugs - it really is an open world for providing the right tools for the job. I have a feeling that content management systems are slowing coming of age and we will look back in just six months and think how nuts we thought it was to jump through hoops to distribute something.
Overall i am pretty happy with wordpress, it has a stack of plugins that are super easy to install and the template system is really straight forward. I think the reason why 'i did not install the cms everyone else does' was because of my switch from the PC to a MAC - when something is popular it always becomes a target for attack, using a windows based machine taught me that! :)
