I'm going to be moving my website to a CMS in the coming months I'd I need some help on choosing an appropriate CMS. Many of the websites I've seen tend to say "use Drupal, hands down". However, my website truly doesn't have a need for commenting or community features. Its pages will need to be modified occasionally, but not extensively. My website will also consist of many programs, each with their own sub-pages and menus.
There are probably 25 people that will need access to the content on my website and will need the ability to update it.
I do like the idea of being able to tag and categorize the content, and the modular aspect of Drupal but is it really right for my website? If not, which CMS may fit my needs better?
It sounds like Drupal would be an excellent solution to your company's needs. I used to recommend WordPress for smaller, single-blog type sites, but now, even for those, I recommend Drupal because you can start small and scale up as your needs grow. It has a very dedicated community and there is a module for just about any need you may have.
I would agree with Drupal. The thing about Drupal is that you start out very small and add on as you need things. There is a ton of documentation, it is well coded, always being expanded on, good forum support, and free. It's the easiest to install, most problem free, and most maintainable CMS system I've seen so far.
You can turn Drupal commenting off with the press of a button, and if/when you decide to add onto your website, perhaps you want an ad rotator, more extensive user permissions, etc, etc, it is all already developed for you and ready to go.
I am not sure if Wordpress supports multiple users on a site.
The smallest you can go for a CMS is something like 10kCMS or the more popular TinyMCE
If it is something small I will go with WordPress as it is easily themed and extensible. There are a lot of community plugins and support. Their documentation is also fairly simple as they don't have a thousand of functions and stuff you need to remember and understand. With some creativity the basic functionality of WordPress is sufficient to solve almost all problems that might arise in small to mid-size website.
I also like Drupal, but you may consider Umbraco as well. http://umbraco.org/ I'd use Umbraco over Drupal if your team is stronger in .Net than PHP. (Really, I think that's a larger concern - what are your organization's strengths? Play to suit them. You are making a decision that will pave the way for many developers besides yourself, and business decisions of your company.) Both are extendable and open source so you can write your own modules/components to customize. It may be cleaner to import into Drupal tables than Umbraco, since it goes down to xslt files. (EDIT: This looks to be no longer the case in the new version - http://umbracohosting.com/umbraco-4---get-excited/one-cms-any-database) From a front end dev perspective, both offer great control of the final output.
From working on legacy stuff a lot, you may end up hiring interns to do the gruntwork. There's bound to be tons of inline tables and all sorts of un-reusable code in there, it may be easier to scrape the content manually and start w/clean markup for the content portions.
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I'm very new to coding (having only taken Web Development 101 at university aka 'OMG CSS u guise'), and I'm just beginning to realize that knowing HTML/CSS alone isn't good enough. I've decided that it would be best for me to learn the hell out of one CMS, because I'm not keen on learning a full programming language. Mainly I just want to be able to create websites that load instantly (think Sproutcore home page) that happen to use some kind of templating system to make things easier to administer over time.
I've looked into WordPress, and I know that it's a super popular platform for a reason, but it seems like most sites running WordPress don't load very quickly. I've read around a bit and it seems like the opinion of a lot of coders out there is that WP is a "heavy" platform. And, besides, I just recently viewed source on wordpress.org and found that they're not even running WordPress there! I mean come on!
I've also looked into ExpressionEngine, and I'm very impressed with the way things are done. It seems like after the learning curve it should be simple to use and highly extensible, but at $300 per commercial site license + the cost of add-ons, I'd like to be a bit more convinced of it's value. I know that AListApart, JasonSantaMaria.com, change.gov, iLounge, and many more high quality, high traffic sites run on ExpressionEngine, but I'm not totally convinced it's worth the price given that WP can surely do the job well enough in 90% of cases.
I would really appreciate your opinion.
Maybe I should just say F all this, and create my static pages with straight HTML/CSS, and then use a blogging platform like Tumblr or WordPress strictly for blog posts, as per Sproutcore?
Would love to hear your opinion.
For developing a commercial website that needs to run "in the real world", $300+/- is a very compelling price. This isn't to do with Expression Engine specifically, but any good commercial CMS. Nearly anything can do the job - including WordPress - it's just a matter of how easily and quickly it lets you do your job. Nothing is free - it's just a matter of whether you - or your users - pay for it in time, or in dollars (or Euros. Or Crowns... whatever). Amortize $300 over the life of the product - from the first big setup to every time you need to make a tweak - and think about how much effort EllisLab developers have spent themselves, and thus saved you. Then think about how little they're actually charging for that value.
Or, if WP happens to align perfectly with your needs, just use that.
But I strongly support commercial software products (partly because I work with them and make them) and IMO 4 times out of 5, the ROI is better than a free alternative.
EE is perhaps worth the price if it is the solution that meets all of your requirements. You need to use the right tool for the job. It will not do you well to learn just one CMS and then try to shape all your problems to fit that solution. I suggest you learn the features and downsides of several CMSs and apply whichever one is the best for the particular site you are working on. Or even use a combination. Limiting yourself to learning just one CMS as if it is the be-all-and-end-all of CMSs will only hurt you, and it might make your customers miserable when they're forced to use a product that wasn't even designed with their needs in mind.
You say that wordpress.org doesn't use WordPress, but I suggest you look more closely. The wordpress.org site is quite complex, therefore it might not make sense to use WP as the main CMS for that site. But did you look at the Blog (aka News) section? That's running on WP. Look at the Showcase section. That's WP too!
My guess is that they use WP where it's appropriate, and perhaps something else where WP isn't appropriate. Which brings me back to my original point: You need to use the right tool for the job.
Edit #1 - Oh, and as for your interest in making fast-loading sites: The CMS has some influence on that because some have more overhead than others, but the CMS is not the only thing that affects a site's performance. Sproutcore loads fast because it's a tiny page, it's got only one small image and a tiny stylesheet. So of course it's going to load fast! You can make a complex site load fast, too, if you use things like caching, small graphics, code/database optimizations, content delivery networks, throw more hardware at it, etc etc etc.
Edit #2 - If you're interested in creating static sites for performance, but you want to have some templating control, take a look at Jekyll. It's a script that combines your templates with plain text files that are formatted using Textile or Markdown, and spits out complete HTML pages. You might also be interested in Movable Type, which is a platform that can generate static HTML. Once again, the right tool for the job... there are so many choices out there.
I used ExpressionEngine professionally for about two years, compared to other "content management systems" out there I think it gets the job done well. In order to make Wordpress or Drupal do the same out of the box features ExpressionEngine has takes a bit of tweaking or php knowledge. ExpressionEngine was a great tool for me while I used it. The templating language and admin aren't too hard to get into with only html and css knowledge. Using third-party addons such as Structure and most from Pixel & Tonic will make your sites easy to develop and most of all easy for clients to manage.
Wordpress is a blogging platform, not a CMS. I find the admin too bare bones and confusing for clients to properly separate and manage their different kinds of structured content. It works great for blogging, but try to make a staff page or anything more structured and it falls apart.
If price is an issue I would recommend looking into Symphony CMS, which follows a similar concept to organization of content as ExpressionEngine. Though you have to learn XSLT, which can be a bigger learning curve than EE's own tag language. But, it's free.
I primarily work with projects now using Django, which is a python framework and will have a bigger learning curve than Wordpress, ExpressionEngine or Symphony. But it gets the job done for small and large projects alike. If you're looking to take the plunge so to speak, might as well go straight for the jugular.
Having dealt with both, between WordPress and ExpressionEngine, EE is not worth it. The community is nowhere near as supportive or vibrant, and there is nothing EE can do (after hours of painstaking configuration, mind you) that WordPress doesn't do better (in my opinion). Add to that the best plugin interface I've ever seen, and WordPress truly is limited only by the imagination and capabilities of the developer. And the technology, I suppose.
WordPress is not always the best tool for the job, but I'd say it is always a better tool than EE.
As most people have already said it depends on the site. But in my opinion for most sites ExpressionEngine is a better choice than WordPress. The $300 for the license gets you support from paid support staff plus the community is really awesome.
Paid software will always, in my opinion, be a cheaper solution than free software as you're getting better quality code, guaranteed support and a commitment from the developers. Try getting support for wordpress and it will run you $15,000 per year or more.
Additionally in order to do anything truly special with WP you need to know wordpress with EE you can build outstanding sites without any php knowledge and you're not forced to work within the confines of what is essentially blogging software. Admittedly it's gotten a little beyond blogging recently buy it nowhere near as flexible as EE.
Sean
To speed up WordPress, you can use caching and minification plugins, like WP Super Cache,
W3 Total Cache, and WP Minify — or even go with a specialized hosting provider like WP Engine.
Caching can speed up WordPress significantly. What it does in some cases, in fact, is actually create static files that are loaded on subsequent page requests.
As for minification, they say that 20% of loading time is server-side, and 80% is front-end code. (Of course, server-side delays are generally worse in than front-end delays, but still...) So when you're thinking of optimizing, front-end is often the first place to think about.
I have made many sites with WordPress and I'm finishing my first EE2 site.
My choice for future sites will mainly be based on the type of content the site needs. If the site needs pages and some sort of "posts" like a blog or simple news feed, WP is a good candidate. If there are other types of content EE2 might be the way to go as you create a new channel for each type of content (pages, posts, events, products, etc). Relating all these types of content to other content with the Playa Add-on has been pretty cool too.
In WP you can create a custom post type and customize the fields to create a suitable home for these other types of content, but by default it's meant for blogs. So I wouldn't say that WP can't be a CMS, I would say it's a blogging engine that can be a CMS with some work.
Two problems with EE instead WP. First, you can find many out-of-the-box solutions for WordPress from themes to plugins that can let a site with simple needs be created quickly. If I have a project that needs to go up quickly, find a premium theme that fits good enough, do some slight modifications and I'm done. The second thing is that for the average person WordPress will be easier to use in creating and maintaining content, especially if the content is posts and/or pages.
And use WP Super Cache to speed up WordPress!
For about a year and a half I used Codeigniter to build my sites. Then a client begged me to build theirs in Wordpress. I soon found the joy of using a CMS (if Wordpress can be called that). So for about the last 8 months I have been using Wordpress as much as possible to buld my sites - I made the content fit the design.
Well, I began to grow very tired of the limitations of Wordpress - I needed more control and flexibility over my sites. So, I have recently started using Drupal 7 (not 6.x - I really like the admin panel).
After working with Drupal now for a little under two months - I have begun to feel like I'm using Stone Age Tools to build Space Age equipment.
So my question is: does Drupal get any better? Do you really have to use Views to display your content? Asking for help on the forums is just a shake better than asking a wall. I feel like to do anything requires a module. Why? Is one better off sticking to a framework?
"After working with Drupal now for a little under two months - I have begun to feel like I'm using Stone Age Tools to build Space Age equipment."
Well, my intiial reaction is that this is what you're going to feel like you're doing when you're working with Drupal 7, which isn't out of alpha yet. A good number of the folks who maintain modules haven't started upgrading to 7 yet, and that means that you're missing out on one of the great features of Drupal, which is it's wide and deep space of premade modules.
Try 6.
Do you need to use views to display all content? No, not at all. You can go in, create a new module, and write the sql and presentation that you want. Or you can find a module that will display things for you. Or, depending, you might be able to get the effect you want just by adjusting the theme you're using.
(As a side note, using an admin theme really pretties up the Drupal experience. I'm fond of rootcandy, although Rubik is nice too. Problem with Rubik is that it's not on drupal.org.)
The strength of Drupal is that by using modules, you don't have to re-write code that someone else has written - you can instead take that code and modify it (with hooks) to do what you want. This means you don't have to write an authentication/autherization system again - it's there in core. You don't need to write up openid handlers - it's in core. You don't need to write code to integrate with twitter directly - there's a module that contains an api that helps out. You don't have to write an xmlrpc server from scratch - you can use the services module.
You don't need to write a website from scratch. Instead, you can start with Drupal, add most of the functionality you need, and then spend your time making it fit what your client wants.
Firstly, you can install the Admin module to pretty up Drupal 6 admin. You don't have to use 7. 7 is still in alpha, by the way. Garland sucks, but, Garland is just a theme- its not 'the' admin itself. The Drupal admin can take the form of any Drupal theme, which is useful in its own right, depending on the use-case.
In Drupal, you can create content types clicking through the interface in Drupal 6 or 7. As far as I can see in WP3, you have to script it. A few clicks vs scripting, the choice for me is not hard there. The first way is a lot more efficient, and a task you can hand off to a non coder to get done.
You don't HAVE to use Views to display content.
You -can- use Views to make the display of content easier, by telling Drupal to gather data and provide a Page, Block, or Feed to display . This lets you create specific sections of content for areas of the site. Otherwise, you would have to create a node, and hijack its template, run a direct sql query yourself AND write the pager functions just to show something easy like the latest 10 "Press Releases" content type. Then, if someone added a new field to that content type, you have to update all that SQL code and display code. Views makes your life easier in that respect. In minutes you can flesh out site sections and arrange content in a myriad of ways. In Wordpress, this method of arranging content without functionality of Views is/was a modern nightmare and a reason I do not want to use it at all unless its a blog and nothing more.
The Drupal Support Forum is tricky. Not all modules are as active as say, Views or Pathauto (being two of the most popular modules). However, SO is also at your disposal. I answer a lot of Drupal questions here. The trick to the Forum there is you have to ask it in the right spot. True, sometimes you may have to wait a few days to get an answer, then again no one -owes- you an answer for a free product. Thats the nature of open source.
Every developer has their favorite modules to use with Drupal, and more often than not, its the same 20 or so modules. It depends on what you are doing, what you are trying to implement. It's not that 'everything needs a module' its that Drupal is such a vanilla install because Drupal does not want to assume your purpose nor overwhelm with options. The UX is something they are trying to improve anyway, and popular modules are making their way into core.
Well, I began to grow very tired of
the limitations of Wordpress - I
needed more control and flexibility
over my sites. So... I have recently
started using Drupal 7
Why not go back to CI? Drupal certainly has it's strengths, but I don't think Drupal will give you any more "control and flexibility" than Wordpress.
If the standard modules/plugins, themes/templates, from WP, Drupal, or Joomla, fill your needs, then using a CMS can be a lot faster than building a site from scratch. But, if those CMSs do not fill your needs, you could find yourself "fighting the framework" and never really getting what you want.
You're just coming out from WordPress, which has great support and is relatively easy to extend to overcome what you call its limitations, if you know basic PHP, HTML, CSS & JavaScript. Every framework has its own potential/limitations.
As a user of WordPress my humble opinion is that you should have stayed with it.
As of you last question, It depends, to stick with one and only one framework has its advantages and disadvantages, the best of all is that you get to know it very well and eventually learn how to extended it. The bad part is that very often frameworks lose popularity and you are left to you own without an active user community and support.
Regards.
All of the popular CMS products (I'd maybe add Expression Engine to the mix) are great for 80% of what you want to accomplish and a huge pain to handle the other 20%.
That's just the nature of the beast.
On the plus side, it's OS so there's lots of people hacking away at it just like you which opens up the potential for someone else already having invented the wheel.
And with bulky enterprise CM solutions like SharePoint I find that you have to reverse the equation to 20/80 (ugh!).
If you're discouraged with Drupal and prefer to stick with WP, WordPress has many thousands of plugins, including ones that can overcome the limitations you're running into and make WP behave more like a normal CMS.
Just do a Google search for "top Wordpress CMS plugins." There's a lot of articles out there that can recommend ways to get WP to do exactly what you want.
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I am planning to build a training site which will accommodate multiple users. It will also have lots of custom pages with videos in them. Which CMS/CMF is better suited for this project? Please advise..
Wordpress is designed from the ground up to be a blog, but also to be modular. Drupal is designed to be a complete CMS out of the box, but there are also extensions for Drupal too. Both are CMS systems, but again, Wordpress is really designed to be a blogging platform. Also, Drupal is a little more complicated at first and has a higher learning curve.
However, you can do what you are trying to do with either one. In addition to out of the box functionality, you can customize both Drupal or Wordpress. People tend to specialize in one or the other, and the choice comes down to personal preference (people make a living off of being Drupal or Wordpress developers, that's what's great about open source!). Once you become proficient in PHP and the CMS platform of choice, you can build your own extensions/modules and have a very custom website, but I would minimize customization to only what you absolutely need. If you are creative in using the framework and freely available modules, you may not need to write any code.
Lastly, Drupal is getting a complete re-write with version 7, which people have been waiting a long time for! If you want to get into Drupal, you may want to look into the newest version.
Edit: Personally, I prefer Wordpress, I think the admin section looks great, gives you a lot of control, but without being overwhelming (however, my opinion doesn't really matter). I really think Wordpress has a lower learning curve. I'm also pretty sure, although you haven't given many details, but if you are planning on having simple pages with videos on them, and want access to those pages to be restricted only to authenticated users, I'm pretty sure you can do that without any custom PHP coding, just some HTML.
Here's a couple helpful links for Wordpress:
Restrict Page View to Authenticated Users
Setting your Posts or Entire Blog to Private
It can be confusing trying to decide which CMS to dive into; I hope that helps a little!
The answer is Drupal.
I've been running various websites, and few years ago I decided to use Drupal as my main CMS engine and I never looked back.
I used Joomla, phpNuke, Mambo and WordPress before and nothing is as flexible, as maintainable as Drupal.
My biggest website – www.mugen.pl has 14853 registered users so I can confirm Drupal is just perfect for big, heavily used web portals.
Drupal has few wonderful 'social-networking' modules I make an excellent use of to make sure my users are keen to stay on the website, sneak preview: (sorry, I've got only screenshots in Polish):
(source: mugen.pl)
Unfortunately for Drupal, sometimes it takes a while to understand this system. Some theming stuff is not that obvious at first, but the online community is huge and always helpful.
Additionally, Drupal has excellent support for SEO. It’s built-in “path” module allows to set custom URLs for every item on the page, and other available modules (i.e. Nodewords) allow to set custom meta data for every subpage.
When you decided to go with Drupal, you should have a look at the following modules:
Content Construction Kit - http://drupal.org/project/cck
Views - http://drupal.org/project/views
Custom breadcrumbs - http://drupal.org/project/custom_breadcrumbs
Last Node - http://drupal.org/project/last_node
Nodewords - http://drupal.org/project/nodewords
Fivestar - http://drupal.org/project/fivestar
Go with Drupal ;-)
With the new release of WordPress 3.0, I would have to say WP. Many useful updates just came around the bend (menu system et al) that make it even easier to create a "site" out of a WP installation instead of just a "blog".
Drupal is extremely powerful and accommodating to the time-allowed developer, but falls short on the ease-of-use-side of things (at least from my experiences.
In short, if you're looking to make a site that's easy to install, update, and maintain - especially for posting media, go with WordPress.
Hope that helps.
Read both JohnB's and Lance May's answers. The choice is quite tricky so the only way you can make a good decision is to do your own feature comparison/score matrix.
List all the features that you need and assign importance score to them - then objectively go through both systems (or ask again on so) to get their scores.
This will also help you if you have to justify your decision later.
In the end both are good, both have quirks and both will get the job done.
WordPress is just easy to understand, for both the developer and the content editors.
WordPress is best suited for sites with:
1) Typical CMS needs - Pages, Posts, Menus - I would also include embedded videos in this list
2) Low to Moderate Traffic Loads - I know there are sites like Smashing Magazine that user WordPress under high-load, but I am sure there is some custom code added to introduce a better caching architecture and multiple servers
3) Hand off to Client for Content Editing - In my opinion, the best feature of WP is the admin user interface. The sleek visual design, smart use of ajax controls, and the simple layout makes it possible to hand off content editing to "non-technical" people
When I start a WP site, I create a new theme with two files, index.php and styles.css. Then I build my own, custom theme, that is uniquely designed for my project. Examples of my work are http://perqworks.com, http://janemonheitonline.com and http://generalordersno9.com. As you can see, these are not blogs, but CMS sites. I agree, WP was a blog platform, but it has proven itself as a CMS-lite application.
I prefer WordPress because of its extensibility and easy install and modifications.
Version 2.0 has introduced a bunch of features (like custom post types) that makes using it as a CMS easy.
Wordpress is mostly use for blogging and Drupal is used for creating websites. YOu should consider using drupal for that ;)
You may be lured to WP immediately from how quick it is to get started. But in the long term, do yourself a favor and use Drupal. It's a proven CMS framework and less prone to security issues from contributed modules. I can count on two hands how many times a WP plugin has bit me in the ass, even highly rated ones. It has very granular security also, so you know exactly what your users can and cannot do.
I've used both and Drupal is just easier to extend and configure. I don't get why people think it has a huge learning curve.
I also think a big deal breaker is the end user experience - WordPress makes it just so damn easy to manage your website, all whilst looking (in my opinion) rather beautiful at the same time.
Every client I've handed a WP site to has been impressed with it's simplicity - as the iPad put it;
You already know how to use it!
I prefer Drupal over Wordpress . Drupal is made for flexibility . But you must know how to do it , ie all . You may need some time to read how to do with that module x and how to with module Y . But once you have learned you will be comfortable to do any site.
The main advantage of Drupal is CCK and Views . Wordpress 3 have come with CCK , but Drupal has it from version 5. Now we are moving to 7, and it still misses Views :) . Yes ofcourse wordpress is a wonderful tool for blogging with ease. But when talking other than blog, you may want to opt for Drupal . Once you have learned how to do with drupal , you will never say wordpress .
If some one is against Drupal then he may have not used or learned it to the extent :) . So my suggestion for you to checkout Drupal 6 for now , as Drupal 7 is still in alpha for the present time.
I would like to know how feasible is Joomla or Drupal towards a website development which has around 80 web pages? I'm a part time website designer who does a bit of server end development as well using PHP and Python/Django. However, i have never attempted developing a website of this scale. There is a lot of static content on this website and some user interactions using JS/JQuery. The only PHP used would be in contact forms. Rest would be only HTML/CSS/JS. As there is lot of text information to be coded into the web pages i would like to know how Joomla or Drupal would help me?
When you use Content Management Systems, you don't need to use code to make content, that is what the CMS is for. If your site is purely static content with a contact form, Drupal might not be the best choice unless.
You already know Drupal.
You want to learn how to make sites with Drupal.
Drupal is very powerful, it's extremely flexible and a great framework. But it comes with a cost, it's more difficult to learn. If you just want to make a site with 80 or more pages and a contact form, you will most likely be better of with Wordpress. It's more simple and userfriendly. It's not a great development framework like Drupal, but if you only need a contact form and content, you wont need a development framework anyways.
If you're not used to using a CMS, both of these options will be quite a culture shock. In my experience, Joomla is slightly easier to learn than Drupal, but each are a LOT more work than hand-coding a bunch of pages.
Who will be updating the content, if at all? This should be a major factor in choosing a CMS, especially for a small, relatively static site. If the answer is "you" or "one person who can be trained" then you might want to think about keeping it hand-coded (making use of SSI or similar, where appropriate).
Alternatively, if you want a lightweight CMS, take a look at something like kirby or perch, both of which are excellent CMSs for small sites, with relatively low learning curves.
Drupal is pretty powerfull when it comes to content management content management. 80 pages is really nothing. You can sort everything easily with built in Taxonomy-module(used for categorys, tagging, ...) and even create own displays with the Views module. Because of CCK, you can make as many different content types you want, with all kinds of input options(wysiwig text, select lists, checkboxes, files, ...). For the contact form you just use the built in one or use the Webform-module.
I dout you'll have to do any coding for this, but beware, drupal is quite big and you might take some time to understand how it works and how to install. Once done however, it's all very smooth :)
Haven't worked with Joomla yet, can't help you there, but you might wanna google "drupal vs joomla" or similiar, there's plenty of articles. From what I've read, Drupal can do more, but Joomla' easier to learn.
It totaly depends on what functionality you want to have. If you are interested in multimedia or more complex functionality then Joomla is a better option. Thus when it comes to build up a complex and robust website full of features and functionality, you should go with Drupal. Go through this blog to get clear information: http://hirejoomlaprogrammer.blogspot.in/2012/07/joomla-drupal-or-wordpress-which-cms-to.html
I know that most people will consider this post as irrelevant, and yes, I've read tens of posts saying that Wordpress is "just a blogging platform". However, facts speak for themselves - people do use Wordpress a lot. Moreover, large projects are being developed using Wordpress as the underlying platform. Who doesn't believe it could check the showcase. Even my team has developed a couple of magazine websites full of rich media and different content types.
The point is: what can we do to make the development, and management process even easier? I hope that this post will draw the attention of Pro wordpress users and a lot of plugins, extensions, and techniques will be posted here. Please, do not hesitate to share your experience, if you have done a project with WP that is way out of its "blogging only" capabilities.
Thanks.
You're right, Wordpress can be extended to do anything. After all it's just a database with functions that put stuff in and take stuff out. Speaking from experience, I found that the API is pretty robust and can accomplish anything you want to, however, it's probably better to spec something out and build it yourself using a more agile framework like RoR.
Sometimes less is more.
It is amazing how much one could achieve using simple concepts such as posts, pages, categories, tags, and custom fields. The thing that I do not like in many content management frameworks and more advanced CMSes is that they often hinder development by putting too much abstraction on top of simple concepts like these. With Wordpress I could prototype a site in less than a day, again due to simple templating options which, of course can be extended on demand.
No one says that code should be written here and there with no structure at all. The thing is that WP API allows enough options to add abstractions when and where needed.
I remain a clear proponent of the use of WP for bigger projects than originally intended. All that is necessary is a little twist of mentality.
Of course, WP is not without its drawbacks. Its strongest side, the plugin community could turn out to be its weakest one, unless measures are taken to educate newbie plugin developers about some good practices. I've worked with some great plugins that fail in users's eyes because of weak API and integration hardships. Nobody would care about functionality if they cannot integrate the plugin at all, right ?
Anyone sharing any of this?
Two pretty good plpugins for extending wordpress beyond blogging are flutter and pods that allow you to do more with custom fields, in pods case much more.