WordPress CMS

WordPress CMS

WordPress took 2nd place in 2009 for the CMS of the year which is hosted annually by PackT Publishing, a world leader in computer technology text books. As usual, Joomla and Drupal were battling it out, but WordPress had surprised some people.

But, when you look at the plugins that can be used with WordPress, it has the ability to be used as a simple blogging platform to ecommerce to a community website.

Taking an analysis a step further according to Alexa, wordpress.com is one of the Top 20 most visited websites in the world for July, August and September 2010 while joomla.org ranks at 258 and drupal.org at 469.

Some interesting stats according to Alexa is that Drupal viewers tend to have a large selection of users with a grad school education, male, and between the ages of 25-34 and are browsing from home. Joomla’s audience is similar to Drupal’s with the exception of a higher percentage of users between the ages of 35-44 and that most of the users view from work. Finally, WordPress does not tend to have an excessive amount of male or female viewers (more equal than Joomla and Drupal), a more younger crowd as the 18-35 crowd is over populated and most viewers browse from school.

A top 20 website is a force and if younger viewers are gravitating towards this system of choice, the writing could be on the wall to which cms could dominate for years to come. Looking at recent years, it looks like WordPress could become a very mainstream tool just like Facebook and Google; since they now all share a spot in the Top 20 websites.

Having worked extensively with open source cms technology, this is not surprising WordPress is the easiest CMS to use. Even if WordPress is used quite often as a blog, it would be a logical step for any one having used this blog platform to want to stretch out and expand a website into a CMS with familiarity.

The downside of using any open source cms for a quick solution is that knowledge of html, css, php and mySQL is necessary at some point along the web design and development process or the website will have no functionality beyond image and text changes. In some ways, the explosion of popularity of open source cms can help a lot of PHP/mySQL developers stay with work because modifying a simple site can help make it more important to have a larger skill set than html of the web 1.0 era. By seeing a potential trend of having static html/css websites obsolete, a company could have a lot of difficulty making it without PHP/mySQL skills.

October 3, 2010 by kent