WordPress
WordPress has dominated the blogging software market in a similar fashion as Google did the search marketing all those [10] years ago. WordPress has acheived this by providing a CMS and blogging platform combined into one simplistic package that most people can install in seconds. The help of ‘fantastico’ and the 1 click install has definitely increased the WordPress market penetration.
WordPress is extremely simply to install, easy to use, is customisable in seconds via the use of the theme support, meaning that individual preset-templates can be accessed for free at the click of a button and users can create their own templates. The early plug-in support has built an industry almost in itself, allowing for users to do anything and everything.
Open Source
WordPress is open source and coded in PHP so is compatible with a significant majority of shared hosts out there. Due to the open source nature of WordPress there is an established active community, meaning that ideas can be shared and support is readily available on a broad range of issues. There is not really anything on the market which even compares to WordPress on an Apache server.
The problem comes when you are running a Windows server because there is not really anything asp/aspx based which compares to WordPress. There are some alternatives to this however nothing with the same features that have been listed. A sub domain can be created however the risk of splitting domain authority means it will be unable unlikely to fully harness the power of fresh content.
Popular CMS
The alternatives to WordPress on the whole are thin on the ground:
- Drupal – may be too much bloat for the casual blogger.
- Joomla – as above.
- Movable Type – was actually a big player at one point, before a license change alienated bloggers (Perl, not PHP). The fact it is written in Perl and not PHP has also hindered it’s adoption
- Textpattern – Great but not got the level of plug-ins that WP has.
- Typo – built in Ruby on Rails, seems to be the choice of the hardcore Rails fans.
PHP Nuke seemed to be the most popular CMS before WordPress took centre stage and there are of course other CMSs out there such as Drupal and Joomla, however as previously stated, there is nothing on the market that really comes close to comparing.
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