WordPress has become one of the most popular online publishing tools of our day. How does the iWiccle / Wiccle platform (later: Wiccle) compare as a solution for community and content management purposes? Today, we take look at some of the considerations you should go over in choosing the right software to run your website.
Before we look at the details, let's remember the big picture. WordPress was built with a focus on blogging, and has since been extended to accommodate more CMS functionality. The Wiccle platform was built as a multi-purpose, modular publishing engine to support just about anything we want it to. The free iWiccle ships with modules for Articles, Blogs, Discussion Groups, Photo Galleries, and Link Directories. The commercial Wiccle ships with a whole lot more.
When it comes to customizing your site structure, WordPress has little to match the power of the Wiccle Builder. While WordPress sports a two-column layout and a way to drag and drop widgets to the sidebar, with Wiccle Builder, you can directly modify the contents and appearance of any unit anywhere on your site, move and resize them freely to just about anywhere, create any amount of columns or none at all, and much more. You can also use the same drag-and-drop builder technology for creating custom menus, profile layouts, and much more.
Both Wiccle and WordPress use TinyMCE as a WYSIWYG text editor for writing the content for your pages. Wiccle tops that up with an integrated image manager that automagically generates a set of optimized (and customizable) image-sizes you can insert to your pages as a two-click operation. Wiccle further sports a two-tier search index (one for your custom pages, and one for content published through modules) and a number of added search engine optimizations.
WordPress wasn't designed to be a social networking tool, so it isn't really a viable community builder solution. It seems to have been designed to be a one-man show with some member support for becoming a co-author, leaving comments, and so on. With iWiccle / Wiccle, you don't create a single blog --- you create a community of blogs, or a blogging service. Or a news publishing service, or a photo community project, etc. --- while down-scalable, Wiccle empowers entire communities by default.
You can modify your WordPress with a handy click-and-install interface for themes and widgets --- a very cool Admin feature. This is in fact something we had planned to introduce as early as iWiccle 1.0, but which has been delayed in favor of allowing the Wiccle shared modification platform to develop into something we can guarantee seamless support for. Our general installations (the famous 3-minute iWiccle install 
) and upgrades will also migrate to a one-click packet manager available in the Admin CP.
As far as Admin control panels go in general, WordPress is nice and polished, but doesn't quite empower you on the level that Wiccle Admin does. Nor was it intended to, because we're talking apples and oranges here. WordPress is a nice big blog fruit, and Wiccle is a multi-purpose Tree 2.0 with modular fruit support.
- WordPress is a great solution if you want a very decent blogging platform, possibly with some nifty widgets and a bit more.
- iWiccle / Wiccle offer great solutions if you want to build custom websites, start feature-rich communities, and offer a wide range of functionality and means of publishing.
