Why Not WordPress?

After a couple of conversations I’ve had with people about Dbasr, I realize that I probably haven’t been too clear on why I decided to build an entirely new CMS, rather than building off of WordPress.

WordPress is a blogging engine. It’s designed to allow users to publish, manage and edit blog entries and static pages, which consist mostly of straight HTML text. It can be extended — as Peter Kirn pointed out to me in an email — using custom fields for posts and pages.

It would be possible, in theory, to simply extend WordPress using custom fields and some database hacking to do what Dbasr does. You could build in tagging for audio, video, etc.

But I think the result would be clumsy, cumbersome and more than a bit labyrinthine. You’d have to not only add a whole set of custom fields, you’d have to rewrite the admin UI, strip out a lot of the extraneous stuff, and build specific themes that would work with the new data sets. Essentially, I think, you’d be doing as much work to create a Dbasr-type CMS with WordPress that it’s simply easier to write Dbasr instead.

What would be the benefit of using WordPress as the base for Dbasr? Well, for one thing, at the moment, WordPress has several million more existing users than Dbasr does. (Dbasr has one real-world user — me.) For another, there are thousands of WordPress developers out there. The key is in numbers.

But I think the problems outweigh the benefits. Dbasr is designed from the ground up to do what it does. It’s not intended to be a replacement for WordPress — if what you want to have is a blog, WordPress is the tool for doing that. It’s an entirely different approach to content management for an entirely different set of needs. Blogging is part of it, but Dbasr’s blogging tools are far simpler and less feature-heavy than WordPress’s. But its media management tools are far more rich and capable. (That’s not a slight on WordPress. It doesn’t need to do heavy media lifting.)

One of Dbasr’s features will be the ability to import, export and cross-post to WordPress. If you’ve got a WordPress blog, you’ll be able to import your existing posts from it into your Dbasr site. You can export Dbasr posts to WordPress. And if you’re running both Dbasr and WordPress, you’ll be able to post to the WordPress site from Dbasr using WordPress’s post-by-API functionality. You’ll also be able to post to your Dbasr installation from any tool that supports the standard WordPress API for posting.

As I told Peter, I think all of this will make more sense when you start actually seeing the tools in action. Which hopefully will be soon — I’m hoping by the end of the week to have working screenshots.