WordCamp Orange County: Enterprise Class WordPress

Jake Goldman on May 9, 2012

I’m looking forward to meeting the Orange Country WordPress community in a few weeks (June 2-3) at their upcoming WordCamp, where I’ll be speaking.

Having taken the “fine-tuning administration” series as far as I can go (Hijacking WordPress Admin, Editing the Visual Editor, and What Would Core Do?), I’m turning my attention to another topic that’s near and dear to me: WordPress as an enterprise caliber content management solution.

There’s no question that WordPress has won the hearts and minds of the publishing industry, with everyone from the New York Times to TechCrunch embracing the platform. And WordPress is used by many huge business organizations, non-profits, and government entities – but usually, for microsites, a blog, or another “piece” of their publishing solution. WordPress still faces resistance from many big institutions in many verticals when it comes to that “enterprise CMS” need – the content management system that’s at the core of the organization’s online presence.

At 10up, we’ve had some big successes helping large organizations adopt WordPress as their central CMS, but we’ve also seen huge prospective opportunities ultimately shy away because of lingering hesitations about WordPress’s suitability to the enterprise class title. Some of the concerns are legitimate worries about its functional suitability to issues that only concern huge, international entities. Other concerns are more organizational – can huge companies use a CMS owned and managed by an open source “community”? Is WordPress a CMS meant for the million dollar project?

This talk explores what it means to tackle that “enterprise tier” need. It’s a blend of real world experiential guidance (hosting considerations, maintenance solutions, plug-ins that fill gaps that enterprise cases often require), tough analysis of where we’re falling short, and philosophical discussion about how we better sell and position WordPress to meet this need. Here’s the full talk description:

Sure, we all get that WordPress is great blogging software, and makes a great website for Joe’s Corner Coffee Shop or Mike’s Hometown Consulting Services. And maybe you feel solid about your ability to build a WordPress site on a shared host or VPS. But what about the big guns? Is WordPress a $200,000 enterprise CMS for large businesses? Is it a million dollar CMS for a movie production? And if so, what does this mean for building, hosting, and managing such implementations? How do we even sell WordPress as such?

This debut talk is an honest exploration and dialog about what it means to sell, implement, and manage enterprise-class WordPress implementations. We’ll explore solutions, like WordPress.com VIP hosting, EditFlow workflow tools, and development techniques where reliability and scale is a must. We’ll also examine the places where WordPress struggles to compete with or falls short of its enterprise competition, and explore how we can solve some of these problems as a community.