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SharePoint vs. WordPress for Public Blog – No apology needed?
Microsoft has never invested a lot in their blogs. It’s ok to say that SharePoint isn’t the best blogging platform. In fact I don’t shed a tear when I say it’s not the best wiki either. There are point solutions out there that are better than SharePoint and most SharePoint consultants will stand up and admit it. Maybe that’s even a good litmus test for your SharePoint consultant. Tell him you want to stand up a public blog and ask him what you should use.
I’ve had a great run with this blog on the SharePoint platform, but it’s driven me a little crazy over time. Rackspace has been great for giving me this complimentary blog for the last number of years. I still recommend Rackspace and fpweb as great alternatives to Office365 if you need more ability to customize your solution.
This is not the end of my blog, but on May 1st this blog will be moving to WordPress. I’ve found more than a dozen reasons why it will be a good thing for me and my blog. I’m already picking out a responsive design theme, and looking at the SEO capabilities, and social integration plugins and wow! There are some incredible things I can do. I’ll also be investing heavily in categories. I can already see some big investment of time ahead of me, but I think you will ultimately thank me for doing this when you’ll see that comments end up being usable and the descriptions are better when you share them in social media and so many many more things will just simply work better.
I did spend a few days thinking about Office 365 and the public blog. I even did a test migration and was pretty happy with it. I think it was the themes and plugins that won me over.
Big kudos to Bjorn Furuknap @furuknap for helping me in making this decision and in the communty who helped me support this big decision. This does not mean I’m not going to still be at sharepointjoel.com and it actually means I will be blogging more and you will have a better mobile experience, navigation experience and way more… tell me what you think on this new community platform called Nestivity. It’s in beta, and I think it’s got some promise.
Join the “What is the best blogging platform for SharePoint bloggers” discussion and leave a reply!!
I’d love to hear your thoughts on if you think I should still be using SharePoint or if you think I’m making a mistake with WordPress and if there’s something better still out there.
SPChitChat is our own Nestivity SharePoint Community instance. I plan to add more moderators as we get going. More on that later.
Help me count down the days…. This blog will be on WordPress on May 1.
I’ll provide some sneak previews and early beta for feedback as it gets closer.
15 Comments on “SharePoint vs. WordPress for Public Blog – No apology needed?”
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WordPress is the best way to go for public blogs. I researched the limitations and downside in a matter of security and features.
In fact I have a case running at MS that has to do with displaying blog posts or allow people to comment.
On the other hand you can build a blog based on the wiki template and use Disqus for commenting. I think you get a much better blog in the end.
For my point of view the blog template never was made to be public. This template is nice for internal blogs but not really useful for public blogs.
As you mentioned in your article, plugins, SEO and a lot of other stuff that matters
Good choose going with WP. I have used it for blogs and smaller sites for many years.
If you want full control of your blog, then build your theam from scratch. The free and purchased theams often don’t use all standard WP and you may feel that you can’t do the stuff you want with the blog.
Looking forward to see the result!
Good luck!
Oooo, this is the WP site, sorry little slow this morning 😉
Nice!
I tell customers all the time, that no one uses SharePoint for blogging (even when I was internal at Microsoft). Then someone always says, “Joel Oleson does, what about him?” and I reply, “He and Mike Gannotti are crazy, no one normal uses SharePoint for blogging.” 🙂
I did hold out for too long. I think I got a lot of respect in the community for using it, but I think I stretched it too long holding out and potentially sending the message that SharePoint is a good blogging platform.
Externally it’s a no brainer to use wordpress or any of the very simple and cheap blogging engines that have SEO plugins and social plugins. Makes it very easy to use. I almost used Office 365 newest version for my blog, but I was still going to have problems with comment engine. I’d also have to develop a responsive blog template… Too much work!
So happy to make the switch, too. Thanks for setting the example, along with others.
It was a good decision to move to WordPress. I had a SharePoint hosted blog but it was way too boring and time consuming to maintain with SEO and UI customization. With a tight schedule as Collaboration Systems Administrator, WP helped me move focus on content rather than design.
WordPress will be the best decision you make. I love SharePoint, you know, but needs more development to be an easy blogging platform like WordPress.
Hope to see you soon, my friend!
Yes, WordPress has gotten way too easy. In many ways SharePoint should look at what WordPress is doing as a platform for plugins, templates and responsive design. Great ecosystem. I know the rest of Microsoft has been tipping their hat to WordPress and I believe that the Office blog itself moved to WordPress.
WordPress is great! And I think it was Joel’s SharePoint vs WordPress blog discussion that prompted me to select WP.
The MS office blog recently started using Word press and ever since then i have not been able to login or change my password to register. Hope your implementation does not have similar problems
The MS Office blog likely has a very different strategy for the users who can comment. I have a pretty broad support for comments on this blog. Comments was one of my biggest issues with the SharePoint blog. Now I get a great experience with akismet plugin. Let me know if you experience something different. There are a lot of different options for comment systems and plugins.
Good move, Joel.
Thanks Jeff. I appreciate your ESN chat’s every week.
Both WordPress and SharePoint are suitable for blogging, but I prefer SharePoint because I like it and you know, but it takes more development to be a simple blogging platform like WordPress.
https://www.codecreators.ca/Sharepoint-Consulting/