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WordPress has left the building

kevinjohngallagher.com

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Re: WordPress has left the building

#81

Post by chc »

unavoidable wrote: post #26
ddw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have been presented with relatively straightforward CMS site concepts and come to the conclusion that they would be better done in Rails or Django than Drupal because a) it would be easier to present a usable interface, and b) those would actually be less likely turn out looking like a tower of paperclips and bubblegum.

This may just be my lack of experience in Drupal talking (I've got plenty of experience in PHP, just not Drupal), but I put a pretty decent amount of thought into the matter and even mocked up simple prototypes just to see if there was something I was missing.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#82

Post by bakhlawa »

mattmanser wrote: post #14
scotch_drinker wrote: post #6

Wait 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.

Some of the stuff he was listing also sounds like his clients want a CRM, something like Salesforce, Dynamics or Basecamp.

really, like what?

Re: WordPress has left the building

#83

Post by Karunamon »

reedlaw wrote: post #45

I'm surprised there's no mention of the vulnerabilities in Wordpress or its plugins. I've had nothing but virus infestations on nearly every Wordpress install I've set up. I'm sure the problem lies more with the random plugins, but Wordpress itself sure makes it easy to find and install plugins with no kind of security audit.

Not sure how this is a problem with Wordpress. I'm sure a critical analysis of, say, the Firefox and Chrome plugins sites would turn up some quantity of malware as well.

The trick is to not download random plugins; stick to things with lots of reviews and lots of downloads. Installing some security plugins will help (WebsiteDefender, both the plugin and the service, is a good example), as will putting your site behind a protective CDN like CloudFlare (and since they're free, there's really no good reason not to do this..)

Re: WordPress has left the building

#84

Post by barce »

Goodbye Swiss army knife. Although you are great at opening wine bottles, cutting pieces of paper, cutting string and making notches in pieces of wood, you do not:

1. Allow me to kill deer. 2. If I had a dead deer, you do not allow me to cleanly gut it. 3. After gutting the deer, you also do not allow me to cook the deer.

Goodbye Swiss Army knife. I'll miss you, but my clients who don't know how to use the right tool for the right situation won't.

Mr. Gallagher clearly didn't know how to explain to his clients that there isn't a one size fits all solution and that you need to use many tools to get complex business tasks done.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#85

Post by dasrecht »

"If you get an Answer you don't like, probably you asked the wrong question"

As someone stated in the comments. Wordpress isn't the solution to all. Mainly it's a blogging system with the possibilities to add some static content. Of course there are many plugins which enrich the wordpress expirience but a blogging system stays a blogging system at heart.

If you speak words like

* Document Management * Workflow Management or * Digital Asset Management

It's most likely you misunderstood Wordpress and it's capabilities from begin.

I personally use Wordpress for many purposes private and for professional work. But if the client's demands are to high i switch instantly to better suiting solutions (which does not mean that wordpress is bad but probably not suitable for all use-cases) which makes the client even happier.

About selling the right thing:

If you go to the customer and tell him "This one-shot solution will be Wordpress and you can do everything with it !" You already oversold it and probably you should speak with your business development guys ;)

One point i agree is the release schedule, which creates quite a lot of work trying to stay up to date with every wordpress instance you have. But i never saw the so called "perfect solution" not in OpenSource and not in "I pay fricken lot money for licences"-Software.

just my two cents

Re: WordPress has left the building

#86

Post by FraaJad »

smacktoward wrote: post #38
FraaJad wrote: post #20

Time and again, people want to use a hacked up blogging engine as a CMS and lament that it is not working. Use a CMS that's been around for more than decade which has all the features you want in a proper CMS (single sign on, WYSIWGY, multi-lingual support, a huge community of developers and service providers). ie., Plone -- http://plone.org

The problem with CMSes that have "all the features you want" is that they have so many features that the average user who just needs to plonk some content down on a page and periodically edit it can't wade through all the features to figure out how to do that. (I don't say this to pick on Plone -- I'm a big fan of the TYPO3[1] CMS, for instance, which does lots of the things that he mentions very well, but the downsi…

CMS is a grown-up software.

Selecting and using a CMS requires time, preparation and mostly importantly a budget. If you haven't considered the any of these, then you can't really afford a CMS.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#88

Post by chc »

kelnos wrote: post #78
chc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That portion of the post is the opposite of what I'd pick out to illustrate that it has a point. It's just dripping with misplaced rage and entitlement and doesn't even point out a bug in any shipping version of WordPress. It strongly emphasizes the word "BETA" and then goes on to literally curse them out for the fact that it had major bugs. Like, yeah, that's what that means. Do you go grabbing a cook's half-done ri…

"... the fact that it had major bugs. Like, yeah, that's what that means." No, that's not what beta means. I expect core functionality to work properly in a beta. I expect there to be intermittent issues, and I expect advanced/fringe features to maybe sometimes not work. I expect there to be workarounds for most (but not all) issues that crop up. But the freakin' main menu didn't work. How is that beta-quality? I'd h…

1. I know definitions are a little hazy, but your definition of a "beta" is not really the traditional meaning. In a beta, core functionality should mostly be there, but it's expected to be buggy. Beta is the point at which most bugs are expected to be worked out, because that's the point when the software is mostly feature-complete. That's why people who use the beta are called "beta testers." I mean, you're welcome to your definitions, but it seems unfair to curse out free software developers for not adopting your personal jargon. (Here's a handy reference for the anonymous downvoter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Bet... ) At any rate, it is certainly not meant to be an end-user release, so if that's the worst accusation you can find to throw at them before you start swearnig, you're really being unfair.

2. The article is a bit vague (which doesn't help its case), but if the bug is the one I'm thinking of, saying that "the main menu didn't work" is a bit of an exaggeration. I believe the actual issue was that the main menu didn't work in Explorer. Broken Explorer support is very common among beta software unless they're specifically targeting Explorer specially.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#89

Post by noonespecial »

I know this is a rant, but I get tired of companies with $750k worth of "department heads" and "managers of x" all balanced on re-purposed open source software that was never meant to do what they're trying to do.

Listen: fire a pair of "department heads", hire a pair of very good coders from the community surrounding the project you're trying to use and make the changes you want. Bonus points for giving back those changes to the project when you're done.

Bitching that the free software you tried to perch your business on isn't meeting your needs is just bad form.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#90

Post by FraaJad »

keithpeter wrote: post #23
FraaJad wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you want a CMS and know what a full fledged CMS does, you wouldn't even mention wordpress in the same sentence.

Ease of install and being able to run on a $3/mo hosting plan is not the game CMSes play.

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