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WordPress has left the building

kevinjohngallagher.com

201–210 of 223 posts

Re: WordPress has left the building

#201
post #99
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

The big difference is that in Drupal it's possible to get pretty far without ever writing a single line of code, even templates. For some use cases that's very powerful, especially an environment where you have trainable, reasonably technical people who aren't programmers.

The drawback to that is that all configuration goes into the database making deployment very, very difficult.

Oh, and it causes performance problems too.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#202

I have used Wordpress extensively for any dozens of websites. "The straw the that broke the camel’s back? My Account Manager: How can we claim that [WordPress] is the CMS for our clients, when you need the capability to edit ANY content on the website simply to mark a comment as spam?" 1) That generally makes sense. You need the ability to edit content in order to edit content (in this case, comments). 2) I have neve…

I have never had a client require a user account which can edit comments but not edit content. This is an extreme edge case.

Actually, that's a moderator.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#203
All content management systems suck. Why? Because no size fits all. At least that's the conclusion I draw after having worked with WP, EE, Drupal, Joomla, Typo3, DotNetNuke, Umbraco, OpenText, Plone, Orchard, OpenText etc..

At one point most projects will hit a wall where the demands outgrow the constraints of the framework. So, if you're lucky, your framework will end up being somewhat flexible. Stability and good testing practices are also important and often neglected.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wordpress isn't a CMS, SilverStripe is, and it has a full MVC framework that it's built on too - makes coding extensions MUCH nicer than both WP and Drupal (ughhh). For me it's rails for the complex stuff, SilverStripe for the simple sites. Keeps me and clients happy.

I suspect a lot of people become expert in a "CMS" like WordPress or Drupal, because it seems easier than learning to work with a proper framework like Rails, and then find themselves stuck inside the platform. Like project management systems, CMS is destined to be reinvented by everyone, every day of the week.

It's very hard to convince people of going with a proprietary, custom solution. Many people have been burnt here, and it's a tough sell to upper management.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TechCrunch, BoingBoing, and GigaOM are blogs though. That is specifically what WordPress is designed for. Sure, you can use WordPress as a pretty good CMS, but there are going to be cases that WordPress chooses not to handle. Some of those cases seem to be what this guy needs in his site, so he's not using WordPress. That's it.

It's hard to say that TechCrunch is just a blog now; it's complex site with millions of pages views that probably uses lots of the CMS features of WordPress.

While it's true that TechCrunch-the-brand isn't just a blog now (it's an event! it's awards! it's an investor! it's InternetDrama!), www.techcrunch.com-the-website really is just a blog. A big blog admittedly, but still a blog.

And unless I'm missing something, www.techcrunch.com isn't even a complex site: blog posts in the left-hand column followed by comments, a smattering of basic widgets in the right-hand column, and ... uh ... that's it?

Re: WordPress has left the building

#206

I'd like to respond to some things a number of people have commented on HN here... 1) Wordpress might seem like just a blogging engine, but this is not how the WP developers see it -- on the Wordpress .org About page, it's described as "[Wordpress] has evolved to be used as full content management system" (sic). So they expect people to use it as a CMS. 2) Plone, unless you have a lot of technical chops, is a nightma…

> So they expect people to use it as a CMS. And they appear to facilitate that. But, it tellingly IMO, doesn't say that WP was designed as a CMS or even that it was modified to become a CMS just that it has grown to be used as a CMS.

Things changed drastically with 3.0. Wordpress is now much better described as a CMS with built-in blogging defaults.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

really, like what?

Doc management, Workflow management, Digital asset management, User management, Access Management

Re: WordPress has left the building

#208
post #115
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suggested using EE before for a few clients. They turned down because of the license and hassle to renew it.

EE simplified their license with version 2, and there is no ongoing/renewal license fee: http://expressionengine.com/sales_faq/article/do_i_have_to_b...

This was for 2.0. Back then it was 1.6. No longer look at EE these days, just make use of FuelPHP.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#209
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Expression Engine yet and am curious to hear people's opinions about it.

I am developing a site in Expression Engine at the moment. First time with it and first time using php in a major project. (At the moment I identify myself as a Rails guy with no php experience) EE is pretty powerful in enabling you to get a site with multiple customized CRUD data up and running quick. Though the makers of EE need to do some serious work on documentation, as it took me about a week to fully understan…

I have experience with the old version of EE in which the docs were quite good, so I'm surprised to hear there are now problems with it.

In general the plugins / addons create much less problems than the Drupal equivalents. Also, from what I heard is that it's now easier to hack EE through its CodeIgniter base.

Prce is an issue, but really, what is 200USD if you're billing thousands for the whole project? Lack of a demo, no excuse for that if it really is the case.

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