Task 5: Determine if WordPress is the right technology

Now that you have gotten clear on what you are trying to accomplish, you can determine if WordPress is the best technology for your project. While WordPress is the most popular software used to host web sites and blogs, if your requirements are complex you may want to consider some alternative technologies. If the only tool you know is WordPress, you may not be able to choose wisely. As they say, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

WordPress falls into a category of software called content management systems. A content management system is a piece of software that allows people to write, edit, and publish content on the Internet in a collaborative way. There are many different content management systems with various features and complexity. WordPress is designed for ease of use and does not require that you have access to a high-level information technology department to keep it running.

Consider these statistics:

  1. WordPress keeps a running counter of the number of WordPress sites, and reports the total is over 65 million worldwide.
  2. As of May, 2013, holds a 52% market share among the top 100 blogs, dominating all other technologies.
  3. Google Trends data shows that user interest in WordPress far exceeds that for other content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla.

To complete this task…

There are two subtasks to determine if WordPress is the right content management system for your project:

5.1 Please read this background article comparing the features of WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. After you have read it, please discuss the article with at least two other members of your learning team. Are you clear on how the products differ? Explain your thinking on which content management systems would be best for your project. Ask your learning team colleagues to explain their thinking to you as well.

5.2 If your site goals include heavy requirements for interaction between registered users, ask yourself if you could meet those goals by using a Google+ Community, a Facebook page, or some other utility social media service. Why do you need a web site if your main goal is to get people talking directly with one another? Will your users be willing to keep track of a new username and password? Will they be willing to go to your web site to interact with others? Explain your thinking about interaction among your site users to at least two other members of your learning team, and ask them how this will work for their own project.

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