Re: How Does a WordPress Powered Blog Work?

[tomrogers123]

WordPress has lots of good content management stuff done for you right out of the box. This includes storing content robustly in a solid MySQL database structure. Not only does this mean your content being independent of structural markup as it should be, it also give you practical benefits like tracking changes to pages (so you can easily revert to an earlier version if needs be. It also has handy components which would take ages to hand code – like a robust login system – already done for you. Just generally, its community as very active and has some of the best documentation I’ve seen for an open source project.

As far as the major disadvantages are concerned, some might argue (me included) that it is a good blogging platform but is just playing at being a full CMS. I know I [might get shunned for that thinking](https://css-tricks.com/video-screencasts/41-wordpress-as-a-cms/) but I really stand by it. Some of the stuff in the theme system requires on logic that should not be part of the presentational layer (eg. a custom “query_posts” loop) and it’s only when you start comparing it to the more complex options that you begin to see where the differences are.

Overall, for a small blog, I’d say WordPress is the right choice. Given that data is stored in a proper way, you could still migrate to something in the future if you needed more flexibility with types of content etc. I know WordPress has custom post types but it is difficult to control the data types of custom fields.