Thread: Requirements of LinuxForu.com

This was the trickiest part during the development process of the website. While we were clear; about the fact that we would publish all the content from our previous issues under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, we had no other:concrete plans. Hailing from the social media background myself, I was adamant on keeping the website user friendly and building in a few Web 2.0 elements that would help us stay in touch with our readers, and also help them with their queries with the least possible delay. Thus started our journey of scouting for a suitable CMS to start the development on.

While considering the various CMSs available, we finally narrowed down on Drupal, WordPress and Joomla. Now the decisions weren't as much technical as strategic. Here's why:
1) I preferred another CMS that would give it more flexibility with theming and Web 2.0 implementation. This made us favour Drupal and WordPress over Joomla.
2)I am not a PHP developer but I can create magic with CSS :- ) This meant that developing a theme right from scratch was out of the question and we had to look out for customisation on existing ones. While scouring the Web for magazine themes, we realised that the free ones available for Drupal were too vanilla, and we were hellbent on developing the website with freely available resources. This gave WordPress a big thumbs up.
3)When it comes to search engine optimising a website, Joomla could never beat WordPress or Drupal. This is one aspect whereJoomla lags behind.
4)Just while we were tied between Drupal and WordPress, we had to take a call because WordPress will never be as scalable a CMS as Drupal is. On the other hand, I had never touched Drupal before.
There were decisions to be taken and a lot of cigarettes were stubbed out in our quest for that ideal CMS, when finally WordPress' easy-to-use editor, the ease of adding captions to images, and the level of flexibility available took the trophy away and we ended up downloading the then-latest WordPress 2.7.1 while also looking out for that ever-elusive, free and 'perfect' theme for LinuxForU.com.
A History
When you write about the evolution of any technology, it is tempting to quote Wikipedia and fish out what the community has to say about WordPress: WordPress is an innovative and revolutionary self-hosted personal blog publishing system that allows bloggers to develop and maintain their own blogs or websites. Its usability and sophistication stem from the fact that as an open source project, countless people worldwide have participated in the development and ongoing refinement of the platform for the community. The ease and nontechnical aspect ofWordPress opened the blogging world to everyone, including those with minimum computer experience.

WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, wellarchitectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL, and licensed under the GPL. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001.

It was in 2005 that WordPress released version 1.5, making theming possible, and this paved the way for its rise in popularity and fame. Bloggers and website owners could then personalise their sites with specific themes, layouts, colour schemes, etc, to suit their personal needs, and best of all, for free. Although having a blog/website organised with a free WordPress theme is great, it did have its disadvantages. The theme designs tend to be generic and not offer a wide selection of quality styles to choose from. Blogs allover the Internet looked the same without much originality; in addition, the free themes lacked a lot of advanced functionalities.

Hence, the WordPress premium theme industry took off. With the growing popularity ofWordPress as a blogging platform, there were more free and premium themes in the market, which again contributed to the rise in WP's popularity, thus creating a vicious circle. Moreover, this had also allowed bloggers and website designers to choose from a wide variety of great designs and be able to customise their sites using tools and plug-ins not available with most free themes. Some of the advantages of purchasing a WordPress premium theme include:
.a wide variety of excellent designs for originality
.being able to totally customise your site
.themes will be continually updated
.technical support availability
.more advance and technical functionalities
.could be used for large websites of corporations and online news magazines.