Forum Moderators: mack
I like wordpress's simplicity and I think its pretty good for seo and cms.
I have looked around though, and cannot find many Wordpress themes that incorporate comment posts secondary to static content in their design i.e. they look more like web sites than blogs
Search for SEM WordPress CMS as well. There is a module bundle that helps a bit too. I don't particularly like it myself, but you should check it out.
As far as building a site goes, it's pretty easy to edit the templates to make it look however you'd like. I'd suggest installing a theme that already has the layout you want and then customizing it to fit your vision.
The documentation appears a bit unstructured and search on something specific yields muddy results.
If I had it to do all over, I'd have taken a day to read through the documentation start to finish and ignored the support forums, which are heavily populated with unanswered newbie questions and possible resolutions by other new users. Anyway, I waded through a large number of them before finding a simple answer to a simple question (use get_posts to select by category and reverse order of posts). Again, I'd attribute this difficulty to a weak search feature, like doing pre-google searches, where you have to really mash and sift through your results.
The TinyMCE editor is a bit crude also. No spellcheck. Spell check plug-ins available however.
I'm setting this up for users who have limited tech knowledge. This isn't working out well for them. Yesterday one of the users entered and heavily formatted some text through the WYSIWYG editor. For some reason the formatting for that post "bled" onto the rest of the page so the remaining text all came out large and italic. Hmmm, errr,... arghh... I may need to rip the whole thing out and install something more resistant to O.E.
If I were doing this for myself it would have been fine. Fast install, and obviously a great, dedicated team of developers doing some really quality work, as well as a great community contributing plug-ins.
I also installed Movable Type as CMS last year. Tougher for me to install, but documentation/forum support was stellar. Some oddities with the publish feature, which were made me not choose it for the group I'm currently doing the Wordpress for.
Good luck with your project, in any case. Next project I'm going to try out Joomla. I won't use Wordpress again, unless it's a tech-comfortable customer.
