WordPress has just won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. In addition to popular vote, judges for this award included Bryan Ruby, who runs CMSReport.com, jQuery creator John Resig, Deane Barker of Blend Interactive, and Karen Koombs, Head of Web Services at the University of Houston Libraries.
To an extent, WordPress has been a victim of its own success in terms of its reputation as a CMS. Because it has worked so well for the blogging community, the perception has often been that WordPress is merely a blogging platform. In fact, it is a full-featured, highly scalable CMS capable of running complex websites — and running them in a way that is flexible, efficient, and intuitive.
This is a landmark for WordPress, as it is the first time it won this award, and it marks a shift in the public perception of WordPress, from blog software to full-featured CMS. No small contest, the Open Source CMS Awards received over 12,000 nominations and more than 23,000 votes across five categories.
In addition to winning in the Overall Best Open Source CMS category, WordPress was named first runner-up in the Best Open Source PHP CMS category. This is significant because WordPress was’nt even in the top 5 last year, and now its #2, ahead of Joomla! As is stated on the Award site, “WordPress made its way into the top five for the first time. The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.”
Every day thousands of new people are embracing WordPress to power not just their blogs but entire sites and communities without compromising on usability or scalability (as would be the case with a legacy CMS). WisdmLabs has been able to customize some fairly complex sites with WordPress and we’ve not yet run into any significant limitations as far as its ability to work as a traditional CMS. We’ve had good experiences working with the code and design side, and our clients have found the user interface to be intuitive and the learning curve to be painless.
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