Despite its close ties to Microsoft, APC PC monthly Australian Personal Computer has rebuilt its Web site with the open source WordPress (read the page source).
That’s a great win for WordPress – it shows how it has now become a mainstream publisher’s tool, and not just a blogger’s toy.
I’ll have to ask Dan how much they hacked to code base for their needs.
In totally unrelated news, congrats to Susan Moore who has taken up a new post as Gartner’s PR manager, bidding farewell to a lengthy term at PR agency Howorth Communications.
Rodney
Thanks for the post Rodney 🙂 Well picked; yes it’s WordPress. However, that is only an interim site while we work on a more comprehensive one. WordPress is an excellent CMS for getting a site up quickly, but it’s a bit limited in some ways — a single WordPress installation is a “single blog tool”, so despite the fact that we have staff blogs, they are really only filtered versions of the front page. Also, everything has to appear in the front rpage feed unless we post it as a static content page which is not ideal.
However, in terms of hacking the WordPress code, we didn’t have to do that at all. We obviously built the templates from scratch using WordPress hooks, but that was it.
In my opinion, WordPress’ greatest strengths are its ease of use and large number of easy to install and use plugins.
As for “close ties to Microsoft”? Sigh!
NineMSN is a joint venture between PBL and Microsoft, but we are only a ‘partner’ site, which means Microsoft has no input whatsoever into our content or technology platform (which should be self-evident by our choice of CMS and our broad coverage of Microsoft/OS X/Linux). NineMSN just sells the advertising space on the site.