Well, well, well… Look who's our guest today. Nobody else than the most famous blogging platform, Mr. WordPress itself. It comes to us with a very solid reputation and an impressive installed base. But are these enough to justify the « best blogging solution ever » tag? That's exactly what we're going to see in our review.

What is WordPress?

Like its cousin DotClear, WordPress is not exactly a real CMS. However, it also deserves the right to be featured in our series of article, since it possesses 95% of the features a typical webmaster would use in a CMS — that is, the most common ones: content publishing, assets management, templates, plug-ins, workflow, users and security settings — just to name the most obvious.

WordPress comes in two flavors. For most of the people, there's the all-in-one, ready-to-use solution from wordpress.com that offers both the platform and the hosting. Just type in your username and your email address, select a password, and bam!, you've got a blog served by one of the best available engines out there. Great! You are given plenty of disk space, about 60 lovely themes, all for free. For free, really? Well, huh, not really. Let's say you ate all your disk space and you'd like to expand it. Then you notice the "Upgrade" option in the admin module. Oh, surprise… You have to pay. Not a lot, but you have to pay. If you choose not to, you can't use your own themes, you can't mess with the CSS, and you can't install any of those sexy plug-ins. Not so great, after all. That's typically where you consider the non-hosted solution.

The other flavor is the one you're more used to: a complete package to download, unzip and upload or FTP to your PHP/MySQL-enabled web server. This one can be found on the wordpress.org website and comes as a ~1MB .zip or .tar.gz archive.

What's in WordPress?

Surprisingly, WordPress' doesn't have a full-featured installer. There's what their website calls the « famous 5-minutes installation », but compared to what you find in Joomla!, Drupal or Plone, it's quite poor. Basically, you need to do half the job by hand: create the MySQL database, rename the sample configuration file, open it in your favorite text editor and fill in the database details as well as a "secret key" (probably for encryption purposes), and then (only) point your web browser to the install script. When you think about the dead-simple 4-steps process adopted by the other solutions, this is clearly a fail.

Once the bad surprise of the weak installation process has passed, you can (finally) access your admin module. And there, no more critics. Oh My God, it's so gorgeous, so web 2.0. WordPress' GUI has been heavily refreshed recently, and it's all for the benefit of the users.

To tell the truth, WordPress' admin interface is wonderful; it's amazingly simple to add and (for the most part) manage posts, articles, pages, stories, links, and other content. The editor is brain-dead simple to use, though you'll get the most out of it if you know some HTML for links and formatting. WordPress includes the ability to restrict comments to registered users, and there are some additional anti-comment-spam measures as well. The whole admin interface just feels "smooth" and it's quite difficult to find something that you can't figure out just by looking at it. Cherry on the cake: since it's all web-based, there's even a bookmarklet to let you quickly turn any site you're viewing into a new post on your blog. Wow.

WordPress comes with TinyMCE 3.0 for visual editing and it works quite well. The interface is easy to use and you have the option of tabbing between visual and HTML mode. There is a media bar to add images, music, flash or videos. The article editor lets you also create new categories and subcategories on-the-fly, without having to jump back to the categories manager, and an auto-suggest for Tags adds a drop-down of your currently used tags when you fill out the tags option.

The theme engine is simple and straightforward. A WordPress theme is composed of three elements: templates, stylesheets and widgets. A template corresponds more or less to a page of your website (eg. 404 page, archives, search form, …). The stylesheet describes the visual appearance of the blocks defined in the templates, and the widgets are little modules that you place on your pages for extra functionalities (eg. search bar, tag cloud, list of categories, RSS feed, …). You can edit the templates and the stylesheets from within the admin interface (PHP skills required!), and the widget manager lets you add/remove widgets from your pages and re-arrange them using drag-n-drop.

WordPress also comes with a great plug-ins manager. Sadly, there's no automated installation (à la DotClear, where you just need to type the URL of the plug-in); here, you'll have to manually download the package and unpack it in the appropriate folder of your WordPress setup, then go back to the plug-ins manager to activate it. However, once you're done, you'll be able to edit the plug-in directly from the plug-ins editor. At the time we write these lines, WordPress offers more than 2,000 plug-ins for just about any purpose you can imagine.

User management is basic: you can add or remove users, and then assign a predefined role to each of them (admin, editor, reviewer, …). You can't unfortunately customize user groups, however some plug-ins will allow you to roughly mimic this missing feature. Note that WordPress does not distinct admin users from web users, and also that you can let your users register themselves on your site.

The remaining features are the usual ones for this kind of product: categories, links, tags and media management; import content from another platform (with quite a long list of supported clients, like Blogger, DotClear, Movable Type, TextPattern, …); comments moderation; general site settings (writing, privacy, …); W3C-standards compliant rendering engine; enthusiastic and proactive community.

Although WordPress supports only one blog by installation, you can have multiple concurrent copies on the same server, sharing the same database, simply by using a distinct table prefix in the configuration file. There's another version of WordPress, Wordpress Multi-User (Wordpress MU), which is actually a fork created to allow simultaneous blogs to exist within one installation. Wordpress MU makes it possible for anyone with a website to host their own blogging community, control, and moderate all the blogs from a single dashboard.

Main Features:

• Powerful template system
• Integrated link management
• Search engine-friendly permalink structure
• Support for plug-ins
• Nested categories and multiple categories for articles
• Trackback and Pingback
• Typographic filters for proper formatting and styling of text
• Static pages
• Multiple authors
• Can store a list of users who visit your blog
• Can block site visitors by IP address
• Tag support
• WYSIWYG editor (powered by TinyMCE)
• Easy-to-use admin interface
• Full standards compliance
• Password Protected Posts
• Easy Importing from other platforms
• Integrated Spam protection
• Widgets

Strengths

• Cool AJAX-powered interface
• Powerful and flexible content editor
• Impressive installed base
• Community
• Huge list of plug-ins

Weaknesses

• Awkward installation
• Confusion between wordpress.com (hosted) and wordpress.org (non-hosted)
• Perfectible SEO
• More suited to blogs than general websites
• Requires frequent patching to maintain high security standards

Conclusion

It's very true that WordPress is one of the most popular platform available and it gained its popularity for a reason - it's great! It may not offer the whole bunch of functions you'd expect from a full-featured CMS, and there are certainly some aspects that are not perfect such as the installation method and the SEO, but they can surely be improved by a plug-in developed by their huge user base. So many people using it may not be wrong.

Links

» Download WordPress
» Get a WordPress-hosted blog
» WordPress homepage
» Documentation
» Community
» Themes and Plug-ins