I can’t believe that it’s only been 6 years (less I suppose) when WordPress first got started back in 2003.
I picked it up about 6 months after it’s initial release and at the time had no idea what it would eventually become. Like many, I just used it to blog. In fact, I still do. But it’s much more than that now, and it’s growth and success is legendary, and continues to steamroll forward with calculated abandonment. It’s now the largest and most-used self-hosted blogging platform the world has ever seen, and is growing daily.
It’s also used by pretty much everyone, from the individual publisher to the Fortune 500 and even in government (Air Force, Army, Navy, and the CIA!). Organizations like Yahoo, New York Times, CNN, Ford, Nike, Martha Stewart Living, are just a few names of those who are betting their business on WordPress.
WordPress, though, is even more than just a semantic publishing platform; it’s now been used as a CMS (Content Management System) and boasts the capability to do almost anything that you can dream of. In addition to the custom configurations and development, you can download millions of themes and plugins for increased functionality.
In fact, WordPress is such a large and successful platform that not having a plugin or tie-in with the system is seen as a loss for the business, especially anthing related to social media and social networking. One’s ability to connect with much larger social economies, systems, and cultures (like Facebook and Twitter) is a snap and is almost too easy, even for a beginner.
Where does come from? The simple answer is it’s users, and the amazing community that surrounds the technology. Advances in the code base, extensions, and experiments are all part of it’s healthy lifecycle, which continues to get better every single year (if not daily). WordPress is the epitome of social collaboration, collective ingenuity, and open source technology. It’s “culture” is peerless, and it’s fans are raving.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg, as WordPress is going to become even more “social” and integrated with platform like it’s Multi-User brother WordPress Mu. Talks of merging the two are already been discussed, and it’s not too hard to imagine the next jump into BuddyPress, with advanced media features and social connectivity.
Why is it one of the social platforms of our near (and long term) future? Because it’s transforming the way we do life and business. It’s transforming complicated, time-wasting, and expensive processes and activies and making them fast, affordable, and cheap. It’s enabling people to reach new, untapped markets, and even enable us to be multi-lingual with the push of a button. It’s giving us the ability to create better feedback loops, launch new products, with more effective integration and implementation into almost any scenario.
Quite simply, it’s just better for business, especially for the Church. It has already enabled us to do everything mentioned above and more. What’s nice is that culturally and historically we’ve been all about that since day one. WordPress, for us, is one of our weapons of choice.
My hope is that the Church will continue to become leaders in social technology, platform development, social computing, and practical use. I think we’re uniquely positioned to do just that and we can do it with WordPress.
lon says
yay wordpress! I'm just hoping more non-blog-like themes come out that are more suitable for church/cms stuff
Eric Granata says
I know I blew up your twitter earlier John, but I figured I'd post it here as well. I think WP could become the foundation for an open source ChMS AND church website CMS. I don't know how it would best be done, but I imagine a freely available solution could save a lot of churches a bunch of money.
It would also be cool for designers and developers to contribute church website designs and plug-ins that would add to the functionality. (think twitter, online campus, etc).
human3rror says
😉 i agree.
Marcus Hackler says
I think at this point ChMS is a little out of reach – Buddy Press may be the start but I think it will take quite a long time given the fact that The City (onthecity.org) is now making the rounds.
Daniel_Berman says
Any thoughts about creating a directory of WordPress "Church Themes" and Plugins?
Some immediate ideas,
– Brandon Cox's Ministry Theme at http://www.ministrytheme.com/
– Sermon Browser at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sermon-browse…
stephenbateman says
I've got one in the works, August 1st.
human3rror says
cool!
human3rror says
yes. 😉
Eric Granata says
My friends at iThemes.com have a themes that would work well for churches with a little customization.
human3rror says
definitely! those guys are cool.
Marcus Hackler says
I used on of the iThemes templates for our non-profit, nationalprayercenter.org as well as our youth ministry, gcboise.com. We built a custom theme for our church's WordPress backed site at capitalchristian.com – all of these sites are under a singe install of Wordpres mu.
Daniel Immke says
WordPress is awful!
human3rror says
thanks.
Jim says
wp rocks the house