Over the last year or so, Matt Mullenweg, Automattic (his company), and a coterie of bloggers who develop the WordPress platform have been claiming WordPress is a content management system.
I gotta call bullshit on that.
What they’ve done is build a back end (if you use the right plugins) that can be used to create content.
What WordPress can’t do right now, so far as I can tell, is deliver the content. So far, I’ve seen only one plugin that lets you do layout, Carrington Build ($499). I’ve seen no plugins that let you display generic meta-data. Lots and lots that let you create generic meta-data. But every single one that I’ve seen requires that user modify code in a theme to display the information.
To illustrate: let’s say I want to build a book review web site in WordPress. Now let’s say I want to have an index of reviews where all reviews of a certain author are displayed, sorted by author using a standard name sort (surname, given name). Really not easily done without writing code.
I have any number of plugins that allow me to add that author information. None so far for displaying it. Not without writing code.
And I’m pretty sure that moving the created data from one plugin to another would be a complete pain in the ass, because there’s no standard format for storing that.
I so wish the Drupal user interface were comprehensible. (Maybe it is now, I haven’t looked at it in a year plus.)