Introduction
Anyone who’s
familiar with social blogging would be familiar with
WordPress. Not necessarily because they’ve used it,
but because it is one of the more popular blogging tools available
today. Developed in 2001 to fill a need for “an elegant,
well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and
MySQL” (WordPress, n.d.) it has undergone several changes,
and has doubled its number of users between 2006 and 2007.
While it could be regarded as a simple blogging tool, it has evolved in
the last few years to be capable of much more. Providing a
wide range of applications, this open source publishing platform from
wordpress.org has recently started being implemented by information
architects as a content management system, and for the purpose of this
assignment this area will be concentrated on.
Morville and Rosenfeld (2007, p. 358) describe a content management
system as “software that manages workflow from content
authoring to editing to publishing”, a description which
definitely fits WordPress, and indeed, they have listed it as an
example. This reinforces the notion that WordPress is more
than just a blogging tool for the personal user.
The official WordPress website also does it’s best to promote
both the blogging and content management aspects of the software,
stating that “WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing
platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and
usability.” (WordPress, 2007) Further bolstering
this claim is the changing display in the bottom right of the homepage,
which lists a number of high-profile WordPress clients such as Yahoo or
the New York Times. As WordPress can be set up on an already
existing server and has an impressively versatile range of set up
options for multiple users at differing administration levels using
passwords, is completely customisable, has a range of themes, and any
changes to the content being made as they happen the manner in which
information architects can use it as a content management tool is quite
varied.
It is important to note that WordPress.com and WordPress.org contain
different aspects of WordPress. The dot com site is designed
for personal users starting and maintaining blogs, whereas the dot org
site is more content management focused. A significant
advantage of using WordPress for content management can be found at the
dot org site. Clicking on the “docs” tab
in the global navigation bar takes the user to the documentation for
WordPress (the WordPress Codex) – everything from getting
started to design and troubleshooting. WordPress believe in
supporting their customers, and their customers, through the forums,
obviously believe in supporting WordPress right back.
McCreesh (2006) was initially dubious about using WordPress as a
content management tool, but after a degree of experimentation
confirmed that “WordPress lets users do an awful lot of
things without requiring any knowledge of the underlying technology,
such as maintaining content, including images; creating categories for
the content; selecting the look-and-feel of the site from a large and
growing range of templates; managing multiple users with different
access rights; and adding and removing plugins for extra
functionality”. He concludes that with a greater
knowledge of web technologies, professional Information Technology
types can work all sorts of magic using WordPress.
Uses of WordPress in Information Architecture
A 2006 survey by the
Information Architecture Institute found
that of the 65.8% of respondents to the question on content management
systems 5.2% used WordPress – although whether for personal
or business reasons was not specified. (Information
Architecture Institute, 2006) This result, however, clearly
demonstrates that information architects do indeed use WordPress as a
content management tool.
An IT World review supports the survey results and confirms that
WordPress is a valid tool that can be implemented for information
architecture. IT World (2006) found that upgrades to
WordPress 2.0 such as clearly defined user roles, importing capability,
post previewing, themes, customisable URLs, WYSIWYG (What You See Is
What You Get) editing and improved caching made it “a
powerful tool for companies that want a web-based content management
system that supports web standards.”
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