What I do think – the point I was trying to make in the rest of that paragraph – is that a CMS, besides the academic definition discussion, needs to meet some business need. In the case of WCM specifically – that is probably to deliver the requirements of marketing – a compelling, engaging website.

Of course, I presume that the requirements for these designs were not just about ’stunning’ but also about functionality, both for the visitor and how the business user can maintain the site – otherwise they would have been static hand crafted in HTML or Flash. These sites look like they are probably driven by small web teams, meeting their requirements, similar to the point about Janus using Wordpress.

Thanks for stopping by Irina, really appreciate your comment.

Cheers!

Ian

I think I am with Matt and Tony – the conversation sometimes wanders too far into academic discussions around terminology and away from requirements.

Some folks really do have very simple WCM (or CMS) requirements and my post was really about what we the ‘tradition’ or ‘mainstream’ CMS folks can learn from WP.

Janus Boye has for example proudly tweeted that his organisations website is driven by Wordpress. Now Janus is not some innocent Mom and Pop store confused by our industry – the question probably should be – what turns a blog into a corporate website? Yep, requirements… I guess if Janus wanted a Danish version of his site with parallel translation processes he’d have chosen a different tool.

I think it was interesting that, as a CMS technology geek Jon Marks pitched in with this stunning set of well designed WP websites. A reminder I guess that it’s a compelling end product – the website – that drives most WCM implementations – the requirements of marketing.

Philippe there is a great conversation going on in the comments to your article, so I won’t add here, but I think we need to be cautious about taking too rigid a view on this.

Chris – BTW your website/blog just gets more awesome every time I stop by. Anyway I only referred to Wikipedia as I liked the rest of the quote from Robert Rose’s excellent post – but “right tool for the job” – absolutely.

Cheers,

Ian

It is people that drive process, and the software we choose to use should not impede that process (whatever form it might take in your organization).

A CMS–any CMS, and that includes WordPress–should be considered the end-point in a delivery strategy with the website being the result, e.g. a delivery mechanism vs. the entire process of…

Let’s not forget the value of Information Governance while we’re at it.

To be clear, I love WordPress–it’s a great example of a system that retained a clear focus as to who its market is, and more importantly, the task for which it was built in the first place. The fact that the community saw greater potential in the system and explored the possibilities of applying it elsewhere is a testament to its potential as a ubiquitous tool.

But it is just that: a tool. To glorify it as anything more than one possible means to an end is just asking for trouble; after all, isn’t it about the right tool for the job?

I think WordPress is being adopted as a content management system over many capital-letter CMSes because it focuses on an author first, and has the most robust third-party theme and plugin community. Every WordPress user is three steps (click add plugin, search, click install) from a solution to every shortcoming you describe.

Whether people decide to call us a CMS or not really doesn’t concern me, it’s a lot more interesting to work on new features and functionality our users are asking for. In the day since you posted this WP was downloaded over 60,000 times.

Are we talking capabilities to support global, multi-lingual, multi-brand web sites? Is there integration to e-commerce? Is there single source publishing needed for email newsletters, social media and other sites? Or are we talking a simple campaign microsite with some blogging and commenting?

Suddenly feature/function debates seem less relevant and it will become tremendously obvious if a given product is a fit.