Why Wordpress?

Wordpress is one of the most popular blogging tools and Content Management Systems (CMSs) out there. It is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1 million" websites and as of August 2011 powers 22% of all new websites [Wikipedia].

So, what makes Wordpress a great CMS?

The answer is: its SIMPLICITY and EXTENDABILITY.


First of all Wordpress is much simpler than other CMSs like: Drupal or Joomla. The dashboard of Wordpress is very easy to use. It is also very easy to extend the Wordpress website and make a customized CMS as per the requirements.



The following are the features of Wordpress that make it such a great CMS:




1. Dashboard

Dashboard

The figure at the left hand side is the image of the dashboard of a Wordpress site.

It provides the site administrator with a great way for managing the posts/news being published in the site; organizing the media contents like pictures and videos; adjusting the appearance of the site like background color, font color; adding plugins like google map to the site and so on.

















2. Themes

We developed a news site using a free theme

Wordpress users can install as many themes as they like and switch between them as many times as they like. Themes allow the users to change the look of the website. There are thousands of free themes available. However, if you are not happy with any of them, you can develop your own theme very easily.

My first attempt at developing a theme in Wordpress

3. Plugins

A plugin which plots news articles on a google map

It is very easy to extend the functionalities of the basic Wordpress site with the help of plugins.

Wordpress itself provides over 17,000 plugins. And again, if you are not happy with any of them, you can develop a plugin suitable for your needs very easily.

The plugins are usually about posting the blog posts to the social networking sites; adding images, videos and maps to the site and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).






4. Widgets

Widgets like calendar, tag cloud and search engine can be dragged and dropped to any part of the web page you like. You do not need to write a single line of PHP or HTML or CSS code to do this.


5. Excellent Documentation

Finally, as a developer, I find the documentation of Wordpress API (Application Programming Interface) marvelous. Each function is described properly and demonstrated using a simple example.


So, Wordpress is an unbelievably simple yet very powerful CMS with unlimited extendability which can be used to develop websites without having to write any code. So, go ahead and try out this great CMS at Wordpress Site.