Is WordPress the Best Choice For a Content Management System?
Many of us will have a need for a Content Management System (CMS) at some stage in our Internet marketing careers. There are plenty for us to choose from on the market such as Drupal, Joomla and many others, but a lot of these require specific technical knowledge to use and are not intuitive.
Setting up a content management system can be a difficult thing to do without either hiring a techie or struggling to learn some unfamiliar software that takes hours to learn.
This of course, may not be ideal.
So what are your other options?
Most Internet marketers are familiar with a program called WordPress. It’s a favorite with marketers at the moment because it is easy to use, requires no technical knowledge and is quick to configure. Many of us are already using it somewhere within our Internet empire.
But is WordPress any good as a content management system?
It is incredibly powerful and very good as a CMS program. The only issue with WordPress is the lack of structure navigation. Setting up good and clear navigation is an issue with versions before V3, but the latest release (version 3) has a much better navigation system built in out of the box.
With a version such as 2.9.2 (the last before version 3) you can still use it as an effective CMS solution nusing some of the plugins that have been released.
The Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (or YARPP as it is better known) is a great plugin for allowing you to create relevant navigation menus for each post. By giving related posts the same tags, you can very easily create menus of related posts on your site. It’s not the best solution, but it works and is very effective and easy to use.
Another useful plugin to help with your navigation is the Exclude Pages From Navigation plugin. This will give you the choice to hide pages from the navigation menus, which is very useful. It means you can create pages and not have them appear by default in navigation menus.
Let’s not forget that you can create custom page templates within WordPress and set up custom navigation menus within these templates for related pages. This is another powerful method of creating custom navigation menus but requires a little bit more work than using one of the plugins.
WordPress is a very powerful piece of software and unless you are after specific CMS related functions only provides by software like Drupal or Joomla, WordPress is more than adequate for most of your needs to manage content.
Anything that is lacking in its CMS functionality is more than made up by it’s ease of use and simplicity of installation. If you are after a simple to use CMS system then WordPress may be ideal for your needs.