From what I’ve seen, I would say that WordPress has become a CMS over the last few years. It probably wasn’t originally, and still is overpowered by its own (excellent) reputation as a Blogging environment.
But “the right tool for the job” question is very different than your CMS question. Software Selection is a topic that has interested me since I was first assigned by my boss to pick some reporting software just over 35 years ago.
Some of the important things to consider with software selection are:
- what do you want to do with the software now?
- ….in the future?
- is it possible with the software?
- if so, what skills are required? e.g. – programming php, writing SQL queries against a database, just selecting things from an admin panel
- how much time and effort is required with those skills to do what you want to do now, and in the future?
- how easy will it be to make changes?
- how easy will it be to debug?
- what will the user/visitor experience be like (pleasant?)?
- what impact will version upgrades have on what you have built with the software?
- are there security issues now, or likely in the future?
- will the software continue to be not just cared for, but improved as needs grow in the future?
- how popular is the software? that tends to tie in with both the previous and next points
- take the software for a test drive and see if you run into any bugs
- check the reputation of the software. These days, Googling will probably give you the answers. In the old days, we used to phone people who already use the software. Probably not a bad idea today.
- try to estimate a five year total cost of using the software, from development to hosting, and everything in between.
To compare several software “products”, you will also have to create a weighting system for all of these points, to indicate their importance. If one point is twice is important as another, then its score gets twice as many points as the other. All of which presupposes that you have translated each of these points into a one to ten scale, where one is awful and ten is perfect.
I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of things in the list above, and the list really needs to be customized for each Software Selection activity, based on the needs.
In honesty though, WordPress already is a CMS by definition, Content Management System…
Whether you want to call it one or not is really down to a personal interpretation of what “WordPress is for you” …
Just my 2 cents… 🙂
FWIW, it seems to me that a full CMS needs to allow the definition, storage and management of specified types of data: text, dates, numbers, images, etc, with rules about the acceptability of content and relationships among the different instances.
WP allows mainly storage of undifferentiated blobs of text, with little control over the content and relationships. (Although you can provide some of the facilities with various plugins.)
Check out the WordPress Showcase – http://wordpress.org/showcase/
Thank you all for your comments!
