Tony Byrne at CMS Watch recently wrote a short piece on using WordPress as a CMS, which got me thinking about the my experience in the world of enterprise class CMS systems. I must admit, I have always been a bit of a snob when it comes to open source CMS systems. I guess I swallowed the Tridion pill so long ago that other platforms don’t often come into play.

So in an effort to broaden my knowledge in the area, I have recently set out to revamp the UrbanCherry website and its blog. The site is hosted with GoDaddy, and currently uses the BlogEngine.NET blogging application, and custom built ASP.NET application for the pages. Unfortunately we get a lot of spam comments in the blog, and maintaining the site is not a top priority, and at this point I don’t really want to invest to heavily in graphic design.

Tony’s piece prompted me to take a look at WordPress and I will be launching a new  site/blog this weekend based on the tool. At first glance I am pretty impressed, installation took 5 minutes (in part due to the hosting options at GoDaddy), and the number of customizable themes  out there is truly amazing. I have not used PHP since about 1999, but it was still pretty easy to get things running.

Now it is clearly not a CMS in the same caliber as SDL Tridion 2009, but I think there are a lot of things SDL could learn from such an offering. I for one will be investigating a concept of swappable themes for SDL Tridion websites at a current customer of mine in the coming months. With solutions like WordPress and Drupal Gardens popping up all the time, and the number of developers with skills in this area, perhaps they will give SDL a run for their money. I would certainly encourage SDL to release a free/light version of the product to get developers and marketers to swallow the Tridion pill like I did, adopt Tridion for their small sites and blogs, flood the market with Tridion advocates, and use that as a way to boost their penetration in the enterprise market.

So drop back next week, and update your RSS reader to the new WordPress based URL when you have a chance.