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Why Do We Use WordPress?

There are an abundance of content management systems out there, why do we use WordPress? This document attempts to briefly outline the reasoning behind using WordPress historically. Technology doesn't stand still so what was the best decision for us yesterday may someday not be the best for tomorrow.

Moving From a Proprietary System

Before 2015 our site was developed by a third party using a proprietary CMS. We were encountering significant limitations with the existing CMS and moving to a new CMS was a must if we were to continue to build out our web presence. So, in 2015, we essentially started with a blank slate and in 2015 WordPress was the frontrunner.

Other options included DotNetNuke (.NET) but this framework seemd heavy and clunky in comparison. There was also Drupal and Joomla but neither had nearly the market penetration of WordPress.

What Is Attractive About WordPress?

  1. It holds (by far) the largest market segment for CMS'es.
  2. It has a tremendous ecosystem with thousands of businesses that specialize in building and supporting WordPress solutions.
  3. It is free and open source. This prevents vendor lock-in, ensures we can remedy code issues if necessary, etc.
  4. It is extendable using a massive number of themes and plugins. These can be built in-house or by a third party and many are available free.
  5. It has a robust administrative side that allows for site customization.
  6. It provides an intuitive user interface for non-technical individuals to interact with when writing content and uploading images.
  7. Automattic is a large and successful company founded by Matt Mullenweg who also is a BDFL of sorts for WordPress, there is no reason to expect the project to fold anytime in the near future.

In the Future

There is a lot of excitement among developers about the capabilities of the JAMstack to provide us with faster, more secure sites. This excitement has spread among the WP community and there are a growing number of individuals and organizations who use WP as the back-end but then a JAMstack for the front-end.

WP seems to be moving increasingly towards JS and we expect this trend to continue with PHP continuing to decline in popularity.

It would take some work for us to move to a JAMstack site though this might be a worthwhile undertaking at some juncture, especially if we continue using WP for the back-end. The biggest challenge would be the loss of plugins that a static site necessitates. Some of this can be filled by JS based solutions but others simply don't exist as robustly or for the niche in which we exist.