I recently got a chance to do some professional development with the latest WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” release and it blew me out of the water. For a while now, I’ve been doing some work on the side in web design/development (I love to code, but I’m a designer at heart) and I use WordPress almost exclusively. I have to say, I’m very excited about the new features, menus in general, and their apparent redirection towards content management and less of a sole focus on blogging.
The menus are absolutely awesome. I’ve written and used extensions in the past to accomplish the same goal, but nothing beats out-of-the-box support with a Apple-esk UI only WordPress can provide. Multi-level support, drag/drop from content areas and built-in javascript for drop-downs all equal a vast improvement to an already great system. Best yet, the API function and the modifications to the theme to enable menus took me about 5 minutes to figure out.
For me, working with Drupal for an extended amount of time was painful. If a client wanted a complete CMS, it was hard to argue that a blog was their best solution. Often times, I’d green light Drupal just to avoid my least favorite word: Joomla (aims gun at head). Don’t get me wrong, these are fine products; it’s just that sometimes if you need to write in space, a pencil works better than a quill connected with a straw to an ink tank connected to a vacuum connected to a car battery. Is it really necessary to have a settings page with more options than there are hairs on my body?
Oh, and as someone who’s written extensions for all three of the PHP-base CMS players, you can not beat WordPress. I had my CATS JobSite page up and running in an hour — svn and release management included. Did I mention that Joomla has like 5 names for ‘plugin’? As if figuring out whether to call something a plugin, extension, addon, toolbar, module, etc. wasn’t hard enough, Joomla just grabbed the top 5… and I’m done with the complaining.
Back to point: if you need a blog, use WordPress. If you need a website your mom could add content to, use WordPress. Need more proof? I dare you to find a sexier video from an open source project.
