WordPress is the CMS of choice for presidential campaign websites (six out of the 10 declared Republican candidates) and every single candidate is using an open source content management system (Drupal powers the rest).
Don’t just look at this as an inconvenient platform change. This is a chance to do something truly significant for your school, your media organization and, most importantly, yourself as a developing journalist.
The new Poynter is more social; it brings more blogs into the stable, encourages reaction and conversation via Disqus comments and places related info next to content with a double right column.
No piece of software is perfect, and I take comfort in that WordPress developers recognize weaknesses in the software, inform their community of users and quickly release updates that can be installed with one click.
A study of WordPress and other open-source software shows that they may not be as insecure as some would have you believe.
WordPress is a content management system. It’s also a CMS that works well for journalism large and small and whose use for journalism by both professionals and citizens will only continue to grow. Reality check: There are very few great content management systems being used as platforms for journalism. Plenty of newspapers—and broadcast television sites especially—use clumsy systems with feature sets still in the stone ages of the internet. Even worse, these systems are skinned by ugly stylesheets and confusing user interfaces. We wouldn’t want our newspaper pages to be ugly or hard to navigate, so why are so many news websites exactly that?
Joshua Lynch is a product manager of custom WordPress sites and social media consulting for law firms around the world. He enjoys building with WordPress, fiddling with Android, reading on his Kindle, riding his motorcycle or bicycle, and drinking grapefruit juice. He's marrying Clara Ganey Sept. 6, 2014. More…
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