Fresh

Three years ago I began working on websites as a young account coordinator/project manager. I did not understand what CMS (that’s Content Management System for you kids at home) stood for or let alone what the difference was between open source and proprietary software. But, that didn’t matter because clients wanted a way to update their content that didn’t involve them taking classes at community college. Back in those days eROI had three CMS options to offer:

Marqui – A hosted proprietary system, which wasn’t terrible, but definitely was not worth the money and developing for it seemed to be a pain. I averaged 10 calls a month from two sites that had been live for years.

CMS/MS – An open source solution that served the purpose of a basic CMS with the best price around (FREE!). The only problem was that it was difficult to use from an Admin perspective, and was not as flexible for developers to be a truly powerful CMS.

Contribute – A trimmed down version of Dreamweaver by Adobe sold on Amazon and came in a real box. I won’t go into those forgotten nightmares too deeply, but let’s just say the software in the box had about as much value as an old AOL CD. The amount of time wasted trying to get this software to function as it was billed to could have been used to go to Mars by now.

Having had clients on all of these systems made me completely hate CMS systems. I spent so much time troubleshooting and tech supporting these systems that I grew jaded toward all CMS systems in general. The complaints were always the same: “This doesn’t do what I want it to do” (which was an issue of power) or “This is really hard to use and not user friendly” (an issue of usability). During this time, however, I was lucky enough to work on a few blogs for my client using an established open source blogging engine called WordPress. WordPress was still in its infancy but I was amazed at the Admin interface. Not only was it a dream to use for me, but my less tech savvy clients even found it simple. The best part of course was I hardly ever received calls on how to use it or how it was working as I had anticipated based on past experiences. Little did I know, several years later, that my blog crush would evolve into something much bigger.

Here at eROI, we considered using Wordpress as a full CMS in the summer of 2007. We realized that it satisfied the usability requirement but the developers felt that it was lacking power and flexibility to feel comfortable building a full site on it. We started dating WordPress slowly, getting familiar with it by building smaller brochure sites that didn’t have a lot of pages, content or functionality. (Keep in mind that at this point in time, the development community was rumoring about WordPress being able to handle full CMS responsibilities, whereas open source applications like Drupal and Joomla were being triumphed as truly having the power to handle bigger sites.)

Again, I was blessed and cursed with having clients whose sites were built using these CMS systems. I will agree that they blew the doors off the ones listed above (built sans-CMS), but to be honest I still found them clunky and hard to use.

While Drupal was hailed from developers as the next best thing, I found the Admin interface very confusing, and I could only imagine what my less tech savvy clients would say since even I found it convoluted. Would my Mom (best user case ever!) know what the hell a block was supposed to be?

The second contender, Joomla, had a “slick” Admin interface with colorful menus and cute little icons (and I actually found the system to be somewhat intuitive) but the distaste I saw from the developers who had to make functional changes with it or try and hack plugins made me realize that the universe didn’t need another not-so-powerful, hard-to-use CMS.

By the end of 2007 I had finished our first ecom integrated, decently sized WordPress site for a client who was not web savvy. With a few little bumps in the road the site was off and running with barely a peep from the client as the months passed. I remember seeing the gazes of developers at other agencies looking at the site because they couldn’t believe this site was completely built using WordPress. I knew in that moment this was something beyond a mere crush.

No one could really anticipate that WordPress would grow exponentially in 2008 due to a thriving community. The community began creating plugin after plugin, adding more features and functionality, propelling this simple blogging engine to something much greater than a CMS. In 2008, we at eROI began making full media campaign sites for global brands, 100+ page sites, and even a contesting engine from a hacked form plugin. We soon learned that by hacking or making or own custom plugins we could do anything for anybody.

Finally, we had a CMS with the power and usability required to make everyone happy. Technology was making things easier for everyone: the developer, the end-user, and of course the lowly project manager stuck in the middle. At the time of this writing we have built over 25 sites with the complete range of functionality using WordPress. As we move into 2010 our client needs and expectations have grown over the years, but thankfully so has the functionality of the little blogging engine I fell in love with.

I know there are plenty of Joomla and Drupal advocates out there, do you have any stories about why you choose these systems over Wordpress? Or for you Wordpress folks please feel free to let us know about when you too fell in love with it?