I Am Loving WordPress More And More
Alright!
Okay, so it has been a couple of weeks with WordPress. WordPress is a blogging engine, the underlying "meat and potatoes" of this blog and many others. There is no charge for WordPress nor its required components (PHP and MySQL) and it is VERY configurable. You could easily use it as a foundation for a small business web site. If I were a bit better with graphic design and creativity I would create a business out of creating web sites for small businesses and use WordPress as the engine. I would choose WordPress over Joomla everytime. Joomla is a similar engine that is popular with small to mid-size companies...even larger sometimes. It is highly configurable as well. In a computer comparison, Joomla would be a PC and WordPress would be a Mac (although in reality they run on Linux). I am a little bias when it comes to Joomla. A company I previously worked for had their site built with Joomla as the core and there was always something wrong with it or getting hacked. Maybe WordPress has similar security issues, but I haven't personally heard of any yet.
Here is why I like WordPress:
Free Software
As I mentioned, WordPress is free as well as its requirements. This means that hosting will be much cheaper than something requiring ASP or .NET.
Tons of plug-ins
There is a huge growing list of plug-ins available to do just about anything you might want. Although this is kind of the reason I hate Linux servers...add-ons. If you wanted to get a Linux server up and running, you had to first install one of many versions of Linux. Then you had to install Apache (web server), then MySQL (database), then PHP (script language), phpMyAdmin, Squirrelmail, Perl/CGI, etc. OR you could install Windows Server and SQL then go out for some beers.
Easy to add plug-ins
My biggest complaint to plug-ins is their complexity to add. WordPress has done a great job of making it a few mouse clicks. It's not just WordPress that has easy to install plug-ins, but it's still a plus.
Clean database structure
Compare a Joomla back-end (database) to a WordPress and see what you find. You would find that Joomla is equivalent to Kim Kardashian in the comparison. Although neither compare to the last software application I worked on which consisted of 367 tables, 513 views, and 3200 stored procedures! Talk about junk in your trunk!
Image Storage - Done right in my book
You should store DATA in databases and FILES in your filesystem (disk). And don't try to argue that images/files are data...I'm familiar, and that's not my point.