puffbox

we ♥ WordPress

Puffbox didn’t explicitly start out as a specialist WordPress practice; but it’s kinda worked out like that. We’ve worked with it for years, initially as the tool which powered Simon’s personal blog, but increasingly in corporate environments - powering websites which don’t look or work like ‘blogs’. Here’s our ten-point guide as to why.

0. The ‘free of charge’ thing
Let’s get this one out of the way first. It’s open source, so there’s no cost to using or distributing it; and it runs on PHP and MySQL, both of which are similarly free to use. Of course, that reduces the cost of development. But more importantly, it has a number of significant side-effects.

1. Designed for simplicity
Bloggers wanted a tool which allowed them to write and publish their pages, quickly and efficiently. A rich Word-style authoring tool, a few categorisation options, and a big ‘GO’ button. And at the end of the day, for all the talk about complex workflow and content architecture, that’s really all most corporate users want too. On a day-to-day basis, you just won’t need to talk to the IT people. Often that’s enough to sell the solution in itself.

2. Up and running in moments
WordPress boasts of having a ‘famous five-minute install‘; and they aren’t lying. In fact, with some hosting providers, it’s a one-click process. Clients often ask about training; but when they see it in action, they don’t tend to ask the question again.

3. Multiple copies, no complex licensing
It’s free, and it all downloads in minutes. Want a development environment to play around in? An emergency publishing solution, as part of your crisis management plan? Want to take a copy home for private experimentation? Easy. Need to move or rebuild the site after a system crash? Assuming you’ve got the data backed up, it’ll take moments.

4. Posts and pages
The key feature which lifts WordPress from being ‘just a blogging tool’ is the concept of ‘pages’. These operate just like blog items, but they sit outside the rolling chronology of the ‘blog’ bit. They can be presented in hierarchies, and can have their own site-wide or individual designs. Typically we’ll build half a site as ‘pages’, the other more news-y half as blog-style ‘posts’.

5. Availability of plugins
If WordPress can’t do something out-of-the-box, chances are someone has thought of it already. There are countless free plugins just a download away, which - again, in moments - will add new functionality to your basic WordPress installation.

6. No lock-in
Decide you don’t like WordPress? You can export all your data in XML, and import it into your chosen alternative. Decide you don’t like us? Hey, it’s possible. Any competent developer should be able to come in, and work with the files we’ve coded on your behalf.

7. Authoring options
WordPress has a web-based interface which requires minimal training, if any. You can also use desktop software: there are numerous free blogging tools on the internet, and even Word can do it (although we’d rather you didn’t). There’s even the option of publishing via email, as easily as emailing your mum.

8. Design flexibility
WordPress uses a straightforward system of page templates, based around normal HTML, CSS, Javascript and all that… so the answer is almost certainly yes, it can look like however you want. The most basic design ‘theme’ consists of barely a couple of files; but you can also add special output templates for WordPress’s various page types, or even individual pages, if need be. The more complicated bits are handled by the PHP programming language, which is relatively easy to pick up if you’re that way inclined.

9. RSS feeds
Like any blogging tool, WordPress automatically generates an RSS feed of your latest ‘blog posts’ or ‘news items’. But it doesn’t stop there. Want a feed of items in a certain category only? - no problem. What about a feed of readers’ comments on a particular article? - easy. It all happens behind the scenes, and you won’t have to lift a finger. You’ll soon be wondering why everyone isn’t doing it.

10. Longevity
You’re probably wondering, how can the WordPress people give away this stuff for free? Well, let’s put it this way. They’ve had plenty of funding from big-name, big-money investors (including the New York Times). And there’s money in ‘free’: the company behind the open-source MySQL database, which sits underneath WordPress, was recently bought by Sun Microsystems for a mere $1billion. The industry’s economics have shifted; and if anything, we’d be more worried about the longevity of paid-for tools.