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14 June 2010
Posted in
Tools & Services
Wordpress will soon be releasing the 3rd major version of the open-source CMS tool and I received a chance to take a nice long look at Wordpress 3.0 the other night at the Atlanta Graphic Design Meetup. I have been hearing so much buzz about these "custom post types" as well as all of the new functionality that is being added to 3.0 and I was happy to get a demonstration and see what all the noise was about.
Although Wordpress does claim the largest chunk of market awareness amongst open-source CMS platforms, I wonder, after seeing a live demo and tour of the new version, if Wordpress is really going to become a better tool or if it's is breaking Jason Friends rule of less is more by trying to be more like its competitors.
Wordpress has always been the darling of the design community because of the simplicity of editing content and the ability for a designer, with limited development skills, to build a site. However, it has been far from a full website CMS and development framework, like Joomla. Many of it's users have been compromising this ease of management for the ability to offer more complex site functions to their clients. Thus, they are selling smaller contracts and attempting to fit the job to the tool. I mean, you don't use a hammer to drive a screw. Do you?
Wordpress, to this point and despite what they WP fanatics will tell you, has been not much more that a really nice and robust blogging platform. You can create a page with a collection of one or more blog posts and add widgets and some low-level application functionality, such as a simple shopping cart. However, if you want to move beyond what is built-in or readily available for installation, you will need to hire a coder.
Posts in Wordpress have been nothing more that a common WYSIWYG editor that allows you to enter either plain old text or HTML. So, when needing a more complex layout or functionality, such as a business directory or menu list, many designers have been forced to either contract custom coders to build a database application into Wordpress or they have had to do awkward work-arounds with HTML. These get the job done, but limit the ease of maintenance.
With the advent of the custom post types, administrators are now able to define some custom fields that can be populated for a page. So, for example, if you are using a business directory, they can define “business name, phone, URL, address, etc” and then define the layout and other attributes of how it will be display. This is a big deal to Wordpress developers as they are now able to save time and money and can provide their clients with a more robust feature set.
To the rest of the CMS world (Joomla, Drupal, etc), these are known as CCK's or Content Construction Kits and have been around for a really long time. For Joomla, there are tools like ZOO, K2 and a new favorite called FlexiContent. These are all tools that allow you to setup custom content with any layout you like (our Desginer Directory was built with ZOO). When the client wants to administer the content, they are given only the fields they need and nothing more.
Sadly, Wordpress is terribly late to the game with this concept and it is a little embarrassing that they are so excited about something that has been part of its counterparts for years. But, we must trudge along and it is indeed a nice enhancement to an otherwise comparatively limited system.
So, in the demo the other evening, I was able to see that they can define categories, check, fields, check, and presumably layout (this is the point where our speaker, who is not a developer, got a little confused and cited that she had the help of a developer for that part).
Another “big deal” upgrade in 3.0 is cascading menus. Now, despite that this convention is being hailed into legacy as a usability no-no, WP users are still all giddy over being able to (almost) implement this. (I say almost because it is still in beta and quite buggy).
Looking back at Joomla, again, there are currently 113 different options for menu drop-downs and customization available to the Joomla administrator that can easily be downloaded, installed and configured. These present everything from sliding menus, to image-based menus to plain old SEO friendly menus. Thus, here is yet another instance where Wordpress is racing to catch up to Joomla and sorely late to the game.
To add to all of that, the speaker ended by saying that if you want to do anything more than what is available as a plugin or a custom post type, you have to hire a developer. In fact, she even said that she had received assistance from a developer to get the reasonably simple demo in place.
My contention, after 15 years of building web sites and applications, that you cannot increase the functionality of a system without increasing the complexity and the new version of Wordpress has again confirmed this. So, as Wordpress attempts to approach the functionality that Joomla has had for years, you can expect it to become more complex to integrate and maintain and more unstable.
We are not saying Wordpress does not have its place, just not as a fully matured CMS. In fact, we are huge proponents of using Wordpress to create a nicely templated and branded blog to complement your new Joomla site. Just check out our services section.
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