Why WordPress?
Choosing a CMS for a site dedicated to providing tools, techniques, and philosophy for new media journalism ought to be a serious, thought-out process that reflects on its subject matter rather than either following the crowd or acting out of desperation, but what ought to be and what is isn’t the same thing.
That isn’t to say that there wasn’t a lot of thought that went into the question. I’ve created sites using Drupal, Joomla, phpWebsite, and WordPress as CMSes; on DreamWeaver, GoLive, HotDog, and Notepad as development platforms; created them using Blogger, WordPress.com, MySpace, and Facebook’s services; and gleaning knowledge from Webmonkey, W3Schools, several O’Reilly and Apress books, and the picked brains of several people, so I’m aware of the smorgasbord of choices that are out there. But like a lot of things in journalism, it came down to how I could make my deadline while including as much as I could in the project, and WordPress fit the bill.
Originally, this site was going to be on the Joomla CMS, because it occupies a pretty sweet spot between power and ease, but I ran into the (admittedly near) limits of my abilities and felt that switching to a CMS with a easier theming engine—and, let’s fact it, a far larger number of theme jockeys to steal learn from—was a good idea.
The reality is that any of the tools I mentioned above could have been used to create a site very similar to JFF, depending on the resources (especially time) available, the skills one can employ, the content mix expected, and the environment one works in. So WordPress worked well for a serious amateur web developer with no time to speak of (that’s me), Drupal would have made sense for someone working in the depths of Morris Digital Works on a project that might have been promoted to wider avaialbility, Blogger would have worked well for a web naif who was trying to make their first foray into site-making, etc. and so on.
Navigating among the myriad choices is definitely one topic that will come up here and elsewhere repeatedly, but the answer will likely remain the same: whatever works.
Something that should be emphasized is that, like life, few choices are irreversible even though changing direction is always work in itself. Like I said, this site started in Joomla. Moving it to WordPress was relatively painless in the grand scheme of things, thanks to the similarities between the CMSes’ infrastructures and that there have been others who have faced the same task.
The morals are: don’t just learn one platform, but many; don’t just learn the front end, but what’s going on under the hood; don’t just learn to create, learn to transform; and a good search (or 12) can cure most ills.
