Wordpress at No10
I was interested to read Mike Rouse’s post about the new Number 10 site and how it’s running on Wordpress.
This blog runs on Wordpress (WP), and overall, I think WP is a very good blogging platform. For starters, it’s free, open source software, is a doddle to install, has some decent admin screens and has a pretty good plugin architecture which means that it’s spawned a lot of plugin development.
There are some downsides. For one, it’s not very efficient. You really need to install one of the 3rd party caching plugins if you’re going to have a lot of traffic coming to your site.
Wordpress also supports the facility to add pages to your blog, which might be an “about me” or maybe a page of photos. So you can have some elementary content management, even to the point where you can make a completely blog-free WP site.
But it’s really not suited to full CMS features. There’s a lack of security granularity, a lack of audit trail or undo feature on changes (so you can’t have a live version of a page and a draft version awaiting approval). You can’t add tables easily in the editor.
If you’re starting with Wordpress for a CMS/blog, you’re probably starting in the wrong place. Plone, Sharepoint or Drupal are all better suited. Companies like Oxfam and Novell use Plone.
Regarding the site, I’ve only briefly looked at it, but one thing I don’t like is the YouTube/Flickr links. Clicking on one video, I was shown a video with related videos of “Stupid Americans”, “Stalin Tribute Video” and “Yes Minister”. If you’re going to do this sort of thing for a high-profile site, do it properly and stream the videos yourself.
RSS
I can sum up the reaction to this story as:
1) The likes of you, me and Dizzy who don’t think it’s good enough for Downing Street’s website to be run in this way - we understand IT and the software they’re using. We can see the potential for future embarassment and the restrictions of the application at a fairly deep level.
2) The “new media” types and “web 2.0″ types who think it’s a fantastic move, probably don’t know anything about caching and can only publish something if it comes with a WYSIWYG editor. They are often clients for people like you and me and tend to over-simplify how these things work. If and when it goes tits up they won’t understand why or have the patience to grasp it either - they’ll also be the first to moan when the website needs more money throwing at it or re-doing entirely because of hitting a dead end in terms of what the application can offer.
3) The people that know nothing about how these things work and don’t care either.