WordPress For The Enterprise – Article 1

As many WordPress users know, WordPress has become an application with critical mass. That’s not to say it is perfect or has all the application features you may need. That’s where plugins come in.

So let’s say you use WordPress for your personal blog. Fine. You know how to set it up; you know how to find a free template; you know how to load a plugin and configure a plugin. As you know there are over 4,000 plugins to choose from. Let’s say you are even at a higher level, with years of programming experience, or system experience and have an IT job…

So, you recommend to your employer, hey let’s switch over our sites to WordPress! Sounds good, right? Well, first off, yes, it is a good decision. There are a dozen other rational decisions out there, some of which are better for enterprise-level solutions. However, the reasons why companies implement enterprise solutions are different from a single site you run with some limited pages and posting needs. There is scalability, security, user approvals, multi-lingual (localization), an ability to manage upgrades, an ability to implement features. The list goes on and on.

So why did I recommend to my employer that we implement WordPress across our diversified 5-8 corporate sites and essentially go against all the negatives. Most people when they hear WordPress, only think blog. There is one big reason. Not exactly what WordPress is today, but what is it going to be tomorrow, and how much support and critical mass it appears to be getting. More specifically, to new users or WordPress, it can do a lot more than Post Blog Articles. It can do everything from hosting pages, categorize those pages, to rapidly implement designs, and this is not covering the 4,000+ plugins out there.

Last time I checked, but over 2.8 million people were downloading every new stable version of WordPress. The number and type of plugins, as I will prove, in this series of articles, saved my butt many times over the past few months. And as each version of WordPress comes out, it gets closer and closer to ultimately what I exactly need.

What is interesting is we were able to either write or fill in the gaps where WordPress did not. We created our internal plugins on the open source base product by Automattic, and found the pieces that ultimately filled in the puzzle.

Let’s get to the nitty gritty of the positives. Along with this WordPress conversion all our home grown and purchased CMS’s were slowly removed. That means less code management, and less developer time and energy focused on fixing our code. That is the beauty of open source. Instead of fixing basic problems with an old Cold Fusion CMS we had, we now have the developer working on plugins that add new functionality we need to be fully enterprise.

The standardization of the backend UI. Now all our sites have the same backend and everybody knows what to expect. I have not had to give a WordPress UI class yet. This standardization of how the plugins fit and how the themes just pop in, has made it universal for the standards of the design work to be completed, and has set expectations for outside designers of what we require to implement their design. In many cases the designer has been separated from the coding effort and can work independently on their own wordpress version and when they are ready to implement, the design pops right in.

Then there is the manpower issue. Other than design work, there really has not been a need to hire an additional developer we were looking to hire back when we were supporting multiple CMS’s. We are running a lot of these sites with a part-time plugin developer, a content manager and SAs moving around the code.

There fundamentals of WordPress Enterprise are in place. It will cut your dev costs. It will standardize parts of your applications that make it actually possible to get an upgrade. It will make your world more predictable managing websites. It allows you to access thousands of free open source code to solve programming issues that developers would have to hired for.

If anything, you would think this will reduce programming. In fact we still need lots of programming, but for specialized, strategic dev purposes. What I mean is we used to spend a lot of time on the login, the membership system and other basic functions that WordPress manages for us. Now these are less of a concern and integration and plugins are really where it is at.

In my next article, I will discuss the specific system issues, the plugins we use, the plugins we are developing or have developed, theme management, code management and how we got through the more mundane implementaton issues.

Click Here to go to Article 2, Issues and Plugins
Click Here to go to Article 3, Problems During Implementation