WordPress is a great product1, and I’m really liking it a lot, using it pretty much for most small sites that I am working on. The current list includes:

1. This blog.
2. My church website (Bayside Baptist)
3. My hobby website.

I’ve been using WordPress because it has the following key features in its favour:

1. Simple to use.
2. A great community, providing plugins, themes, and hooks to lots of web 2.0 goodness. See wordpress.org.
3. A rich interface, and doesn’t try and limit content creators too much.
4. It has grown to be a nice lightweight CMS, not just a blogging platform, including support for pages (non-date based content) and posts (date based blog entries).
5. Nice simple friendly URL support. Easily settable through the admin interface (using apache mod_rewrite, giving guidelines for how to do it).
6. Simple HTML based back-end. My content isn’t locked away. If I decide I want to move it won’t be too hard (wordpress is actually the third different blog engine that I’ve used—I started with Movable Type, had a brief stint with typo 2 before ending up with wordpress).
7. AJ uses it and has developed an EditLive! plugin, which means I get to use the most familiar WYSIWYG that I know .
8. php based, making it easy to deploy anywhere in a language that is well known and easy for people to edit and write.

Overall wordpress is a great little product that makes for a good starting point for a website.

1 – Ironically I'm posting this while sitting in the middle of a CMPros conference. I've had this sitting as a draft for about 9 months, and the time to post has come. ↩

2 – while going through a heavy ruby on rails stage, and trying to use it everywhere.↩

Related posts:

1. Migrated From Typo to WordPress
2. A Painful Trip Through WordPress
3. First EditLive! post
4. On Caching (with WebWork)
5. Happiness when editing (or playing nicely with the clipboard)