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If you don’t know what Wordpress is yet, just take a look around at the Tech Leader platform and see Wordpress in full swing. Tech Leader runs on the wordpress multi-user platform, one of the topics covered(by Ashley Shaw) at the Wordpress event I had the pleasure of planning for last night.

Wordpress Meetup 3 Close on 40 Wordpress freaks (mostly freaks) flowed into the event room at the Bandwidth Barn in Cape Town’s CBD to share their Wordpress enthusiasm, knowledge, joys and pains. It was an event I am very proud to be associated with. Like any other technology lover, you can only understand it when you use the platform, so I suggest you check it out if you haven’t yet. It kicks the butt of all the competitors. Why else would New York Times online be powered by Wordpress?

We managed to get sponsors for food, T-shirts, hosting, bandwidth and all that off very little marketing, just a bit of blogging word of mouth. Nowadays it gets the message out there faster than most other forms of communication.

I use Wordpress to power the majority of the websites I develop for myself, personal projects and client work, and with the platform developing at the rapid speed it’s been moving at, it’s set to take take over the CMS scene. It’s by far one of the most user friendly web publishing platforms out there, and comes with some powerful built in features.

The speakers at meetup 3, affectionately known as WPCPT3, took us through the many facets of the platform which is much mroe than just a blogging platform.

Adii did a great job of filling us in on the many varied uses for Wordpress, and Johan, our hosting sponsor, spoke about how to make your installation of Wordpress much more secure from hackers and spammers.

We had Rafiq doing his SEO thang, showing off Wordpress’ super SEO abilities, one of the main reasons many people choose it as a favoured publishing platform. Wordpress is an SEO obsessed web guru’s dream come true, with all the plugins to keep you hitting top google ranks. Of course you have to write, and write about what’s relevant, something Rafiq covered as well.

An interesting point by Joey da Silva of Form Function, was that Wordpress finds itself in the typical position of a CMS platform on the way up. Not bloated like the oldies, but user friendly and full of life, however slowly moving out of the reach of the absolute newbie, with some of the newer simple CMS solutions rearing their heads taking its place as the bare bones solution. It seems to be a cycle which repeats itself over and over. I suppose it’s the nature of the open source community which keeps this trend going.

The Wordpress event attracted some top industry peeps, Creative Directors and blog personalities and quite a few newbies who were just around to learn what the craze is all about.

For more about Wordpress, Wordpress meetups and other geeky stuff, check out www.wordpress.org.za designed by yours truly and coded by Paul of WorldWideCreative - another of our proud sponsors.

WordCamp is coming to Cape Town in August. Watch this space.




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10 Responses to “Yesterday’s Wordpress Cape Town meet was huge”

What are the advantages of WordPress as a CMS platform over something like Drupal?

(Report abuse)

Barry on May 30th, 2008 at 2:57 pm

@Barry - in my humble opinion, there are huge barriers to getting started with something like Drupal, whereas wordpress offers free wordpress sites through wordpress.com for newbiews to get familiar with the platform.

This is how I started using wordpress. Wordpress is super user friendly, drupal is not, takes time to figure out how to get something done.

Wordpress’ community has a completely different personality, people who are more open and easy to speak to whereas drupal guys tend to be alot more like introverted programmers. Keep to themselves. The 2 platforms solve different problems and of course drupal has some huge functional advantages over wordpress, though most of that functionality will never be used by the average to medium web publisher.

If you want to get a site up fast and get your message out there, brand it, make it your own, wordpress beats most others. Drupal can be used to build social networks with it’s many heavy features, but it’s a bloated system that has a steep learning curve.

Why do you think a large percentage, if not the majority of new websites being started today are wordpress based. Or for that matter why wordpress sites are starting to feature more than others in google searches for many topics.

It’s light, user friendly, social, quick, SEO friendly, and comes with a fantastically helpful user and developer community.

Hope that helps!

(Report abuse)

nomad-one on May 30th, 2008 at 3:09 pm

Nur great post… but just a correction: believe it or not we run all the Leaders, including Tech Leader, on separate SINGLE versions of Wordpress… it’s not wordpress MU, which we looked into but decided against…

(Report abuse)

matthew buckland on June 1st, 2008 at 8:42 pm

Great product puff. How much did you get paid to write this? or do you get commission on sales?

A discussion on the pros and cons of competitive products in this space would have been worth reading. But not this press release disguised as a blog.

(Report abuse)

Cynical Sue on June 3rd, 2008 at 10:02 am

@ Sue, thanks for your comment, I don’t get paid by wordpress of course, it is open source and therefore free, though i do use it to develop my own sites and the sites of my clients therefore adding value to their online investment by cutting out custom cms development.

The post was with reference to a wordpress industry gathering and the gathering focussed exclusively on wordpress. In future I will post about other platforms, though my primary knowledge lies with the wordpress platform.

In any case, you ar right, a comparative would be valuable and I’ll try to put one together for a future post.

(Report abuse)

Nur Ahmad Furlong on June 3rd, 2008 at 10:09 am

I’d be interested in a comparison between WordPress and Joomla which what we use to power our site. Joomla has massive support and plenty of add-on modules but does sometimes suffer from the bugginess of Open Source.

(Report abuse)

Rob Mousley on June 3rd, 2008 at 10:48 am

I’m looking at MU at the moment for one of my projects. It seems vastly superior to the single version and has some functional add-ons (more still in development), so it would be awesome to know why Matt and the gang opted not to go the MU route.

(Report abuse)

Henre Rossouw on June 3rd, 2008 at 4:55 pm

we opted for SU because the database architecture is simpler and more efficient, but more importantly because we needed thought leader to be tightly moderated centrally both on a post and comment level…

we have xp in deploying wordpress MU on amagama.com — but have to say, it’s been an unhappy experience for us.

(Report abuse)

Matthew Buckland on June 3rd, 2008 at 10:12 pm

Hi Matt, thanks for your feedback. I thought Amagama ran on MU, but didn’t know you guys were unhappy with it. Thanks for clearing that up.

(Report abuse)

Henré Rossouw on June 4th, 2008 at 9:03 am

Very good article, thank you!

(Report abuse)

bahce on September 27th, 2008 at 11:44 pm

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Nur Ahmad Furlong - nomad-one is a designer on & offline, newbie social entrepreneur, a self confessed Wordpress nut, blogger, brand strategist and a social media traveler. He has worked in the communications industry since 1998 and currently focuses on ethically sound products & services which have a positive impact on society and the environment. He believes in the �Do No Harm� principle, and that the Brand of the future is the one that manages to improve society in general while making a profit. Nur's company, Colab Communications is an ethically focused communications agency which aims to develop conversations for a positive society.
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