It wasn’t all that long ago that I looked at WordPress as a service for those that had lots of spare time on their hands and whiled-away the hours transcribing their every thought into their blogs. I suspect that same opinion was held by ‘serious’ content management system (CMS) users and developers. When I re-launched the DCP news-site about 5 years ago, we used Joomla – which was (and still is) one of the better-supported CMSs around.

While Joomla, Drupal and others are still fine CMSs – which we develop around and support (to varying degrees) … WordPress has become my de-facto standard when developing new CMS sites. This is especially true when my client is more interested in running their business and less interested in managing their CMS. Recent advances in the WordPress foundation have made it easier for developers to extend and ‘hook’ into the core of the system … resulting in an explosion of new plugins that provide enhancements to the WordPress core feature-set. The add-on functionality that the “Pods” plugin provides in the way of customized database applications opens the door to sophisticated WordPress-based applications. (More on the upcoming Pods 2.0 here)

WordPress 3.1 was released this week and, while I’ve been running the release candidates from RC3 forward, I’m excited about the possibilities I see for this system.  We’re able to produce high-quality, easy-to-use, easier-to-maintain solutions for our clients in less time – resulting in better productivity and value for everyone.

If you’re interested in upgrading your present static website to a client-driven CMS-based site – let’s talk about your application.  We’re finding that there are few things we can’t do with this platform.