Why We Use WordPress
Used by 1.5 million bloggers, ranging from Nancy Pelosi to Ford Motors to Stephen Colbert, WordPress has proven itself as a world-class blogging platform. What is not obvious is WordPress’ capabilities as a content management system. We use WordPress, not as a blogging tool, but as a CMS platform because of its excellence in design and functionality.
Our decision to use the software was three fold:
- WordPress active developer community continues to release new features while fixing bugs
- The open source licensing allows Matter to modify code without violating intellectual property laws
- We are confident our clients can quickly become acquainted with the administrative screens
The community of developers and documenters is brilliant. The community pushes the software forward by releasing new features, improving existing functionality, and fixing bugs, while thoroughly documenting the API. By crowdsourcing the feature prioritization decisions, WordPress is developing software that matches on-the-ground demand. Documentation of the software is critical so that developers can modify the source code. Some open source projects have inadequate documentation, making the adoption of their software even harder. WordPress has addressed this challenge with an excellent resource, codex.wordpress.org. This codex organized technical details into approachable section, a new user can find information about a PHP method by simply keyword searching the method’s name.
Open source licensing, in conjunction with the Linux-Apache-MySql-PHP stack, is a free, mature, and robust platform for web applications. With these tools, Matter is able to experiment with WordPress without reconciling software licensing costs. This freedom welcomes innovation. If our website idea succeeds or fails, we have only invested time and thought-capitol, while not purchasing $10K worth of licensed software. On more consideration, WordPress GNU General Public License allows Matter to freely modify source code and deliver modified code to our clients. This ‘open’ licensing means Matter can focus on adding specialized features and functionality to solve our client’s challenges without divulging our client’s proprietary information back to WordPress.
A well crafted user interface makes-or-breaks a software package. Our clients range from professional entertainers to Fortune 500 companies; WordPress is a tool that our clients can approach. By focusing on the details on iconography, on-screen interactions, and page layout, the WordPress team has crafted software that millions of people have adopted.
Matter, and many others, has extended WordPress beyond its blogging roots. These three powerful qualities of WordPress, plus the brilliant architecture of the software, allows developers to mold the tool into new and interesting forms. Matter looks forward to contributing to the success of WordPress.
The Matter website also uses JQuery, Scriptaculous, and LightView, all Javascript libraries that deliver excellent functionality through forward thinking software philosophies. Matter uses several WordPress plug-ins including NextGen Gallery a superior gallery creator and manager. The Matter website is developed on a Mac in Eclipse, and development server is Ubuntu.