WordPress has just won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. In addition to popular vote, judges for this award included Bryan Ruby, who runs CMSReport.com, jQuery creator John Resig, Deane Barker of Blend Interactive, and Karen Koombs, Head of Web Services at the University of Houston Libraries (more details on the judges).
To some extent, WordPress has been a victim of its own success in terms of its reputation as a CMS. Because it has worked so well for the blogging community, the perception has often been that WordPress is merely a blogging platform. In fact, it is a full-featured, highly scalable CMS capable of running complex websites — and running them in a way that is flexible, efficient, and intuitive.
Awards can vary in meaning depending on who is handing them out, but in this case the judges seem legitimate and well-qualified. Clearly, the panel was convinced not only that WordPress is a fully-featured CMS, but more importantly, that it is a very good fully-featured CMS. It’s nice to see the public perception catching up with the reality of what this platform does, and WordPress notes as much in a post on WordPress.org:
This is a landmark for us, as it is the first time we’ve won this award, and it marks a shift in the public perception of WordPress, from blog software to full-featured CMS. No small contest, the Open Source CMS Awards received over 12,000 nominations and more than 23,000 votes across five categories….
Every day thousands of new people are embracing WordPress to power not just their blogs but entire sites and communities without compromising on usability or scalability (as would be the case with a legacy CMS).
Web Communications has been able to customize some fairly complex sites with WordPress (UA News, Research Magazine) and we’ve not yet run into any significant limitations as far as its ability to work as a traditional CMS. We’ve had good experiences working with the code and design side, and our writers/content creators have found the user interface to be intuitive and the learning curve to be painless.
If you want to explore more about WordPress, here are a couple of good sites to know about:
- WordPress Codex: WordPress has a great community of users and some of the best documentation of any open-source project around.
- Digging into WordPress: A blog about how to build, customize, and run sites with WordPress by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr. Coyier states on the site that he subscribes to the theory that not only is WordPress capable of powering any website it is almost always the right choice.
hooray, well done, l love wordpress and joomla.