I really like WordPress.

As a blogging platform, it’s amazing.  Having been in the CMS space at Interwoven for roughly 8 years I really appreciate it any time I see innovation in or around the CMS market.  WordPress is one of the most innovative and impressive applications I’ve used in quite some time- WordPress changed the game for blogging.   I’ve spent a lot of time with WordPress and although I’m not an expert- I’ve spent enough time with it to get a good feel for what it can (and can’t) do.

So- is WordPress a CMS?  Well, no.  Although Matt Mullenweg might disagree, WordPress is not a CMS- at least not an enterprise CMS.   I won’t get into the limitations in this post but suffice it to say that WordPress isn’t ready to tackle the content challenges faced by Interwoven customers.  But as a blogging platform, WordPress does many things well.  Here are four things I think CMS vendors can learn from WordPress:

1. Improve content authoring usability.  WordPress is really easy to use.  With minimal training, pretty much anyone can blog with WordPress.  The simplicity of WordPress can be mostly attributed to only having to support one simple content type- a blog.  Enterprise CMS vendors have to address a broader set of content types and some of those content types (like products) require a certain level of complexity.  Still, content authors often complain that Enterprise CMS applications are too difficult to use for many “real world” content authoring use cases.  We’re continuing to listen to our customers, working hard to make TeamSite easier to use in each release.  Improving usability is a top priority for Interwoven.
2. Ease of installation.  WordPress installations are easy- install MySQL and edit a few .PHP config files and  5 minutes later you’re done.  Enterprise CMS systems are much more difficult to install although I’ll note that Interwoven TeamSite is generally considered much easier to install than our competitors.   Although we may never get to a “5 minute installation” like WordPress, we continue to strive to improve our installation experience in each new release.
3. Upgrades.  I just upgraded a WordPress installation to 2.7 and it took me about 10 minutes.  In WordPress 2.7, there is a new auto-upgrade capability that will automate upgrades in the future.  Of course the “auto upgrade” concept doesn’t fly in enterprise IT departments however, the simplicity of a WordPress upgrade is something to admire.   Interwoven upgrades have historically been straightforward but there is a great opportunity for us to continue to simplify the upgrade process.
4. Out-of-the-box functionality.  One of the most compelling features in WordPress is plugins.  Plugins are extensions of WordPress to provide specific functionality that doesn’t exist in the base package.  These plugins allow WordPress developers to launch sophisticated blogs with minimal custom development.  Enterprise CMS vendors will often tout their “extensibility” via APIs however- customers prefer to leverage out-of-the-box functionality. We’ve recognized this and with TeamSite 6.7.2 we now ship with over 90 out-of-the-box components and sample applications to help kickstart implementations.   We’ll continue to release more components and applications in each release.

So although WordPress isn’t a true enterprise CMS- there are a number of things that CMS vendors can (and should) learn from it.

Oops, I forgot one more thing I really like about WordPress. The WordPress developers name their releases after jazz musicians. Our internal project names for upcoming releases aren’t nearly that cool!