What's the alternative?
Write spec, hire dev, build your own.
WordPress has left the building
21–30 of 223 posts
Re: WordPress has left the building
#22After about 10 minutes with Plone, a few months with Joomla, about 2 years with Drupal, and finally 3 years with WordPress, I think WordPress is still a brilliant solution for lots of problems.
The closest competitor, Drupal, is an absolute nightmare. For designers, developers and certainly for the end user. It still doesn't even ship with a wysiwyg editor—hard to disagree that this is precisely what the end user wants.
In Drupal, developing themes is a nightmare, theming Views output is an absolute disaster, and upgrading modules/core will almost certainly result in a whitescreen.
I don't see an alternative to WordPress at the moment. If you want to give you clients a reasonable admin interface I don't see another way around it. And I don't find that clients mind it changing 2-3 times a year—they all say it gets better each time.
Though it certainly is blog-oriented, and you will have to twist and bend it to act as a CMS, having to do this is a lot more fun than trying to wrangle a Views template file.
Re: WordPress has left the building
#23What's the alternative?
Plone -- http://plone.org/
WordPress can be installed on hosted Web server space under a user account with no admin access. Plone needs admin rights and runs a daemon. Note: I'm not suggesting that the author's organisation did use WP that way.
I agree with others above that the author could have mentioned alternatives.
Re: WordPress has left the building
#24What's the alternative?
Drupal.
(Although it has it share of cons too, it can do many of the items on the list. Some require coercing, but doable.)
edit, in progress:
- Document management- No, not Word, Excel files etc. but can do revisions/diffs on site content, and manage files to some degree.
- Workflow management- http://drupal.org/project/workflow
- Digital asset management- http://drupal.org/project/media
- Link management - http://drupal.org/project/pathauto and others... not sure what you need here.
- User management - Default may do what you need, can do more.
- ESI Caching / CDN ability. - (no esi in drupal 7) / http://drupal.org/project/cdn
- WYSIWYG editing- Many options but sometimes flaky.
- Single Sign-on- http://drupal.org/project/bakery
- Multi-side Admin - Not sure. Different user groups can have different access.
- Publishing options - Quite a few. what do you need?
- Access Management - http://drupal.org/project/acl and more.
- Application - ?
- Multi-lingual - http://drupal.org/project/i18n
- n-to-n content sharing- user to user sharing?
- Reporting - what kind?
Disclaimer: I've used it for a few projects; More experience than word-press or joomla.
Re: WordPress has left the building
#25This guy seems to be arguing that Wordpress should turn into a Drupal-like app, which it was never designed to do. Although I am also guilty of using WP for CMS on some simple sites, this is mostly due to convenience of installation and (mostly) ease of use for clients. I don't think most developers who use WordPress seriously consider it a "professional" CMS solution. On the other hand, the alternatives kind of suck…
The font size seems fine to me (Windows Vista, Firefox). The lack of an apostrophe in the last word, however, is killing me.
It's also pretty large for me too, font size 25px.
Another error I caught: softwre
I guess he needs spell check on top of WYSIWYG, too?
Re: WordPress has left the building
#26Wait so he's complaining that a free piece of software that is designed to "create a beautiful website or blog" (from Wordpress.org) doesn't cut it as a high powered CMS? I think if we're honest, wordpress is a blogging platform and if you try to deform it into your own little niche needs, you need to accept the inherent risks.
Exactly. I don't keep up with Wordpress too much, but my perception is that you should go with something like Drupal (or other proprietary options) if you want a platform fully capable of being a CMS. That said, any CMS will struggle with the challenges that he lists. It's not some sort of magical entity where you turn it on and it's perfect. I feel bad for his clients...
Except that Drupal is, interface-wise, even worse than Wordpress; and management of the damn thing is difficult even for the developers among us. It's hard to recommend it when you know clients/users will struggle with it.
Re: WordPress has left the building
#27I've used Wordpress on a number of sites for small businesses & restaurants lately. In every case it has fit the bill.
Other CMSs I've looked at are way overkill, and while I've toyed with the idea of building my own custom CMS, the fact is I can get everything I need in a 5-minute WordPress installation and 30 minutes of plugin configuration. Theme development is straight-forward and relatively well-documented.
The investment in rolling your own is a mite more than 35 minutes. Even the act of walling off or hiding portions of Drupal is more involved than that.
Re: WordPress has left the building
#28Then the author should migrate his own blog from WP.
Why? Just because he is no longer using it for business purposes doesn't mean it isn't still perfect for what it was designed to do, blogging.
Re: WordPress has left the building
#29Wait so he's complaining that a free piece of software that is designed to "create a beautiful website or blog" (from Wordpress.org) doesn't cut it as a high powered CMS? I think if we're honest, wordpress is a blogging platform and if you try to deform it into your own little niche needs, you need to accept the inherent risks.
I think the author's problem, and the problem of nearly every frustrated WordPress user, is that the alternatives aren't nearly as enjoyable to work with as WordPress. It has a nice, understandable, and flexible API, and even though its greatest strengths are really only in blogging, the friendliness of the environment naturally invites stretching its use.
For these people, I would strongly recommend a look at ProcessWire. It's kind of like a radically simplified Drupal that is at least as easy to use as WordPress, if not more so, and has a similar attention to design and detail. I've been using it for a few months now across two very different projects, and I'm wishing I'd found it earlier.
Re: WordPress has left the building
#30In the OP: they dont have a Tester. They just load it on their MacBooks and presume it works for the other 95% of the world
Really, wordpress.org users are the testers, wordpress.com users are the customers. I'd love to hear what the OP now recommends though, that would provide some good perspective.