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Over the last few weeks I have been accused of proselytizing for WordPress, and while I do speak of WordPress’ virtues to whoever will listen or whenever someone brings up a competing content management system, it is not proselytization because my arguments are based on facts:

I have reviewed and used a number of the similar offerings out there and they do not possess the demonstrable virtues of WordPress. I believe that the facts support the position that not only is WordPress the best Blogging software available, but it is also the best available free CMS.

WordPress says:

WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

And while that is true as far as it goes, that is far from the whole story.

I would say:

WordPress is what you use when you want to create a dynamic website that is standards compliant, easy to use, and relatively simple to customize. While WordPress may not be the right solution for a huge enterprise, it is more than capable of managing the vast majority of websites.

I work with some guys that have chosen Mambo as their defacto standard when setting up dynamic sites for their clients, and while Mambo is not terrible (well, not as terrible as say eZ publish for example) if you ever have to support users that are trying to navigate Mambo (or Joomla) you will quickly begin to understand that its back-end is not simple for non-techies. Moreover it spits out ugly tables in the source code, you can create a valid xhtml template for Mambo, but when the pages are rendered, they are going to have all those 90’s style nested tables in them.

In stark contrast, the WordPress back-end is simple, even for web newbies to grasp and it allows them to begin running their own websites with very little instruction. And of course, WP only produces the best source code for your site.

When creating themes for WordPress powered site, you can be sure that WP is not going to spit out anything inside of your theme that is going to interfere with your commitment to web standards. If you want to know why I think a standards compliant site is important read this but suffice to say that there is a right way to do things and a wrong way. Creating sites that validate is the right way to do things, and the creators of WordPress understand this is at the core of their thinking.

With version 2.0, WP has introduced features like User management, which makes it suitable as a CMS and not just a blogging platform. User management works by allowing you to create different user-levels. This in turn allows you to control access to different features. For example, one user can edit content in certain areas and not others, can edit but not create a post, etc.

Since WP’s roots are in blogging, you get all of the tools associated with blogging in addition to the standard CMS tools. Features such as comments, trackbacks, pings, etc. allow your site to take advantage of all the things that blogs have been doing for years. You can read why I think that blogs are more than weblogs here.

But you say you want a website, not a blog. No problem. Instead of creating posts, you create pages. WP allows you to create web pages just like a “standard website” but you get all of the advantages of having the underlying WP platform goodies. Nobody said that you have to use WordPress to publish a traditional blog with posts in reverse chronological order use it however you want, I just suggest that you use it.