wordpress as a cms

[Missy]

Hi All-  I was wondering how many of you are using wordpress as a cms for all or part of your website, and how is it working out for you?  we are looking at some of the options and think WP might be the way to go.

Thanks.

[Jay Collier]

That's helpful, Darren. Are you able to share your "college needs"? I'm really interested in finding out what CMS-features we might not be able to accomplish with WordPress in the future. So far, no problems ;)

[Eric Juden]

Jay, I'm interested in how you handle the content workflow. That seems one of the things that Wordpress lacks. When an author makes changes, are they published immediately or do they have to be approved by someone else? We would need that workflow in ours to move it away from being just a blog server and into a cms for the entire university.

Eric

[Mike Murray]

Hey Eric,
In WP, depending on the users role, their changes would have to be approved by an administrator. I would say that is something that WP lacks compared to other CMS's, but our CMS is so crappy and unintuitive... that I really can't say that.

[Eric Juden]

Thanks Mike, I guess I haven't looked into the different user roles that much. On our blog server, they all just get brought in as administrators over their own blogs. I suppose if it was a campus-wide implementation you wouldn't have them as administrators.

Makes sense...

Thanks,

Eric

[Mike Henderson]

A quick search on WordPress looks like there are a few options for advanced workflows.

I believe you could simply do this with user roles also. With either the functions.php file or a plugin like Role Manager.

[Jay Collier]

I've found the built-in permissions (subscriber, contributor, author, editor, and administrator) -- along with random evaluation of content after publishing -- to cover the bases.

For a more granular permissions matrix, Justin Tadlock's Members plugin is nifty.

http://justintadlock.com/archives/2009/09/17/members-wordpress-plugin

For checking changes, Audit Trail is very helpful.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/audit-trail/

If you really, absolutely needed a detailed workflow solution (and wanted it integrated into WP), check out EditFlow, which is intended to support complex student news organizations.

http://www.copress.org/wiki/Edit_Flow_Project

[Zack Barnett]

We use Wordpress and Drupal in our shop at the University of Oregon. We built sites for the president and provost in Wordpress, president.uoregon.edu, and provost.uoregon.edu. We do build much bigger sites in Drupal -- but for many of the sites my shop does Wordpress is a quick and easy solution.

[Chris Wiegman]

We're using WP MU to provide faculty, course, student group, and other sites other than our main web presence. So far we are very happy with it. Not only does it allow us to quickly build out many smaller sites, but it does so while providing a level of control over the content. We know what goes up will meet the goals of our users while not providing an open door for spammers, bad code, etc.

[Jay Collier]

Sounds great. Can you provide URLs to your work?

[Chris Wiegman]

Sure.

http://blogs.aviation.siuc.edu

[Rick Sweeney]

Wordpress 3.0 Beta is out. Looks like a possible May release...

http://wordpress.org/development/2010/04/wordpress-3-0-beta-1/

Rick