ZMAng sent in a great article to go along with the series he has on blogHelper relating to WordPress as a CMS.

If you are an experienced user of WordPress (WP) and want to setup a non-blog website - perhaps a portfolio site, news/magazine site or even an e-commerce site - you might just want to skip the more robust content management systems (CMS) most people tend to suggest, like Drupal and XOOPS, and consider using WordPress for your CMS-oriented task instead.

Why? Because…

  • It Can Be Done, and (Quite) Easily Too
    If you were avoiding WP for your news or portfolio site because you thought WP could only be used as a blogging platform, think again. You would be surprised at the multitude of ways WP can be used as a CMS, and how easily you can customise it to do your bidding. The huge repository of currently available WP plugins already ensures that your job is half done.
  • You’re Familiar With It
    This is probably the No. 1 reason why anyone would want to use WP as a CMS. Familiarity not only breeds trust in the system, but also the ability and expertise to customise it to fit your every need. For those who love to tweak the stuff they use, you’ll be saving a lot of time in the long-run from not having to learn/master a whole new CMS. While you might save time initially from using a CMS more specific to your needs, what if you need to bring in a new function or two?
  • It Integrates With Your Blog Perfectly
    I’m going hit you (or is it get hit with?) with a big duh! here. There’s no need to worry about integrating your blog with whatever CMS you’re using for the rest of your site if you use WP for everything. Imagine having to integrate your e-commerce CMS with WP. Urghh…
  • It’s Very User-Friendly
    More robust and feature-filled CMSes tend to be weak(er) in user-friendliness and high on complexity (think Typo3). Teaching beginners to handle WP is a much, much easier task. Here, I’m referring more towards the front-end of things with regard to community sites with multiple contributors, where it’s likely that the people who publish the majority of articles are less experienced CMS users.
  • There are Tons of Great Themes/Templates for It
    I challenge you to find another CMS with a better stock of free themes/templates (in terms of both quality and quantity). In fact, I’m willing to risk my neck and say that many of the more feature-laden CMSes have a real lack of free and great themes. But just on Blogging Pro alone, you’ll find a huge selection of great WP themes you can customise to fit your CMS needs. And if you think all WP themes are completely blog-centric, here’s one to debunk that myth.

But nothing is ever perfect, including WordPress, so there are downsides to using WP as a CMS. More on that, and the technical details of using WP as a CMS at my joint. So, make sure you consider them first before finalising your decision. Heh, no free tech. support if something fails, ‘kay?

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