One of the changes here is making the shift to “WordPress 3″, which seems to be a pretty major sea change in the ability of WordPress to function not just as a rolling weblog, but closer to that full blown “Content Management System” for people that find tools like Drupal and Jooma too complex. (Let’s face it – Space Shuttle engineers look at Drupal and think ‘Wow – that’s really complicated.’)
I’m going to plug two other projects that I’ve found to be absolutely amazing in their ability to allow users to create active, social websites:
Concrete 5: A “CMS” in the vein of easy to update, static websites. I implemented a church website using Concrete 5 to replace (and expand upon) a “custom website” offering that wasn’t terribly extensible and required paid hosting. For organizations that need easy to update “static” websites (not blog-focused), Concrete 5 is really hard to beat for the features it offers with ease of use.
Buddypress: Social Networking comes to WordPress. About a year ago, my organization was looking at creating a “Social Network” for our target audience. The tools just a year ago were relatively difficult to implement or just not quite what you needed. Along comes Buddypress – a social network with most of the ‘basics’ out of the box, and a set of plugins that get any project close to being ‘there’ within a day. Custom development involves theming (look and feel) and custom development the “WordPress Way”. (The only stumbling block for many organizations might be the lack of a good ‘application framework’ for developing data driven apps – but that’s often easier done outside of the CMS anyway.)
