Why WordPress is the most popular CMS…

By Joe Gardiner Wednesday, 3rd February 2010

Is WordPress the best blog/content management system available? We think so, and in 2009 the Open Source CMS Awards thought so too! Lets have a look at what makes WordPress so popular. According to Technorati's most 100 visited blogs and CMS wire's research, and Pingdom's recent review of the blogging market, WordPress blogs claim at least a 27% market share. If the wordpress.com hosted blogs are to be included, that figure could be as high as 36%. Considering there are at least 5 main competitors (Typepad, Blogsmith, Movable Type, Gawker, Drupal) it is reasonable to claim that WordPress is the most popular blog/CMS platform around. Granted, WordPress is a blog platform first, but it's CMS capabilities have come along in leaps and bounds over the years and the upcoming version 3.0 is likely to go even further.

From Community to Ecosystem

So how did WordPress get here? Being open source certainly helped a lot. Both WordPress and the next most popular platform, Movable Type, have certainly gained exposure through being open source. The open source model can be a fast way to build a community - that is users and developers communicating their experience with the product and release guides, plugins and themes. At some point though, the community reaches a critical mass where it becomes an ecosystem. This is the point where community members start to build their own commercial products around the platform. At this point a product can consider itself established. Wordpress has certainly made this transition, which has allowed it to edge in front of the competition. Just look at the huge number of plugins and themes available, both free and commercial.

Ease of Installation

With WordPress, installation is extremely easy! All that is needed is a MySQL database and FTP login. From there the process is a case of submitting a simple form. Some web hosts even offer an automated tool such as Fantastico, through cPanel or some similar product. The ease of installation is one of the many reasons WordPress is so popular, and if further support is needed there's some excellent documentation available at the WordPress Codex.

There's a plugin for that!

WordPress has a huge number of plugins available, and almost all of them are free. At the point of writing, wordpress.org lists 8,211 plugins available for download, so this is the best place to start looking.

As with installing WordPress itself, installing plugins and widgets couldn't be much simpler. Simply upload the plugin to the right place, and enable it via the control panel. Widgets can be dragged and dropped into place.

If you are a developer, WordPress makes it easy to write your own plugins too. Plugins are written in the PHP scripting language, and integrate easily using the WordPress Plugin API. Again, the WordPress Codex is an excellent resource for plugin authors, and gives a list of programming do's and don'ts!

Themes

For many, look and feel is probably one of the highest priorities when starting a blog, and it's here that WordPress really comes into it's own. There are even more themes available than plugins, and again, many of them are free.

Some of the better theme sites are: Theme Forest, Woo themes, and Theme Lab.

Themes can be used straight out of the box, or used as a starting point and customised it to suit your individual requirements. The template files are laid out clearly, easy to read and modular, so can easily mixed and matched. The "Wordpress loop" gives the power to further customise individual pages by changing headers footers, or main content pages depending on external factors such as category or title of the post.

Many businesses have capitalised on the ease of theming a WordPress blog, and have combined their styling with various plugins to create excellent, dynamic web sites, that are steps ahead of the classic blog style you may expect. Here are a few of my favourite examples:

Dashboard

The WordPress dashboard is extremely simple to use. Designs can be updated easily and as regularly as you want, without having to update any of your content itself. The dashboard enables multiple users to be added to the site, with roles ranging from Administrator to Editor and Reviewer. This enables blog operators to keep tight controls over what individual users are able to do on the blog.

The post and page creation options are excellent, and highly accessible with visual and html editing views, and single-click page previews. Newly added content can be saved as draft, or awaiting review, and once completed tagged and categorised for organisation within the site.

The dashboard also offers excellent media management, with gallery views for your media and built-in editing tools. All this gives power to the less technical user, who no longer has to wrestle with image editing software. Uploading media makes use of a built-in wizard, and offers preview options before importing into a post.

Comments are easily handled, and through the settings panel, a default response can be set. Rules for allowing comments are customisable to require approval or blocked all together. Integration with the Gravatar service improves the appearance of visitor comments further.

Conclusion

The popularity of any blog/CMS platform can be measured not only by the number of domains, but by the community and ecosystem surrounding it. This is where WordPress really stands out from the crowd.

Most developers will pick one platform and stick to it in the absense of a compelling reason to change, and the ever growing WordPress community is evidence of that. With more users and blogs, bugs can be found and resolved very quickly.

The size of community that WordPress enjoys is to be envied by any upcoming product and this is without a doubt the secret to WordPress's long term success. In short WordPress has a formula that works and is so far ahead that this is unlikely to change in the near future.

In 2010 the WordPress developers will be working towards a major milestone - the release of version 3.0. Although the feature list is not set in stone yet, the main improvements are said to be greater focus on WordPress as a CMS system and the integration of multi-site functionality currently provided by WordPress-MU. In short, WordPress is a force to contend with.

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