Randy Thornton over at MetaMedia is of the opinion that WordPress is not ready to lay claim to being a full fledged CMS just yet. He gives some well-thought out and valid reasons why this is so.

In a nutshell: Plugins. The things that make WordPress able to function as a CMS do not lie within its core, but rather are the result of a very active development community rallying to give WP users and developers what they need to force WP to act as a CMS. And he’s right. Take away a handful of beloved plugins (e.g., cForms, WP Contact Form, various SEO plugins, several Event Calendars, and other plugins that seek to expand WP beyond blogging) and what you have is simply a good blogging application. And face it, with the frenetic upgrade pace lately, a lot of plugin developers lag behind in plugin development and compatibility. Who can blame them?

Randy said it best:

One day, WP will catch up: it always does. But it does so because its community has been there ahead of it.

To be continued…

If you have a WordPress blog, an old fashioned mailto: link should be a thing of the past. Besides making your site that much more vulnerable to spam bots, it just screams 1998! So if you haven’t done so yet, ditch that mailto: link and try out one of the many easy to use and feature-rich contact form plugins available for WordPress.

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WordPress 2.2 (Getz) is now available. It touts new widget compatibility and has squashed over 200 bugs (that’s scary).

Pixelita Designs specializes in designing WordPress-driven personal and small business/professional web sites. We also perform site maintenance, WordPress installs and upgrades. Mention our Design and Industry blog and get your WordPress upgraded for $20 instead of our usual $30!

Last week, I talked about what a great application WordPress is for the solo professional or small business owner. It’s easier than ever before to create a professional web site with just WordPress and a few handy tools. (Of course if you really want a site that knocks their socks off, it would be money well spent to hire a web designer to create a professional design and pull all the pieces together for you!)

Whether you roll up your sleeves and do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you, you should think about employing at least these five plugins to help drive traffic to your site, to add functionality to your site or to otherwise enhance it so that the visitor’s experience is the best. If visitors to your site don’t like what they see, or if the information they seek is not easily attainable (read: no more than two mouse clicks away), they won’t stay. And what’s worse, they won’t return.

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