According to Matt Mullenweg who made a visit to the Forbes offices recently, it’s all about the author. That’s the phrase that was heard repeatedly as he conversed with the Forbes team. Lewis then talks about why they chose to go with WordPress when revamping the True/Slant website:
True/Slant was also about the author — just as Forbes has been for 93 years. At T/S, easy-to-use WordPress tools enabled our contributors to do what they loved to do: create content. They freely self-published 100 to 125 posts a day, sometimes more.
When you stop to take a look at the development of WordPress over the past few years, it’s hard to argue that most of the improvements have NOT been centered around the author. Just a few author specific features that have occurred recently are: Post Revisions, continually improving media management system, Quickpress, word count, quick edit, reply to comments from the back-end, and although not directly in the core of WordPress itself, the acquisition of After The Deadline. As Matt was quoted in the article, even their acquisitions deal with the author. It’s this dedication that has propelled WordPress to be the most popular publishing platform in use today. Yes, there are other factors that go into the popularity of WordPress but I’d say the ease of use along with the ease of publishing content is a large majority of its popularity.
Strictly from an authors point of view, what makes WordPress a better publishing system than Drupal, Joomla or a myriad of other systems?
[insert capital_P_dangit() filter rant here]
But on the whole, yes: I love WordPress because, among many other great aspects, it makes content creation and publication so easy.
lol glad you brought it up and not me. I almost did, but decided against it. I agree that that particular filter was NOT geared towards the author. In fact, I’m still running the plugin that blocks the filter from running.
I actually tried both Drupal and Joomla when I was first looking for a blog platform. I also tried a few other systems (phpNuke, e107, and some .NET ones as well before I understood the difference between Windows and Linux servers). When all was said and done, I went with WordPress because it was easier to install, easier to configure, and creating a new post was a much more intuitive process.
At the time, I had zero experience developing with PHP and JavaScript, so the idea of writing code to make a website work was a foreign concept to me. It wasn’t until I was 6 months in to using WordPress that I even discovered plug-ins (I didn’t need any until then), and the process for adding code to WordPress was much easier than importing, installing, configuring, and deploying modules was in any of the other systems I tried.
I eventually dumped the Drupal and Joomla sites I’d set up and moved them to WordPress as well. It’s just easier to get in, click “New Post,” speak my mind, and get on with my life.
Just try explaining what a node is…
WordPress has by far the best ui of the open source CMS/publishing platforms. Thank you core ui team!
Jeff, I agree with you that WordPress is from an authors point of view quite similar like other publishing systems (drupal, etc.), but I believe one thing that made them so popular is that they offered since 2005 free blogs on wordpress.com, which attracted a lot of people that were not so internet savy at that time. They enabled everyone access to an easy content creation and publication system that many continued to use on their own homepages (inclusively me).
Maybe their motto shouldn’t be “It’s all about the author”, but “It’s all about simplicity”.
My switch to WordPress came after years of flight time with Grey Matter and then Movable Type and then Blogger. I found I could do more and I had more control with stand-alone WordPress. So yes, about the author – that being me – it was designed to allow me more freedom. A lot more than I could get with Grey Matter or MT or Blogger or Live Journal or Vox as well. And I had a few sites running post Nuke too, and I liked the layout possibilities but when I discovered WP plugins it was all over. Being an HTML web developer for 10 years, I landed up switching my whole operation to WP because it’s so built around the author… I can build a site for a junior hockey team in a couple days and have a hockey mom doing blog posts to the homepage using a cell phone. Now that’s proof that it is all about the author.