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WordPress has left the building

kevinjohngallagher.com

131–140 of 223 posts

Re: WordPress has left the building

#131

Wordpress is still great for small businesses. The problems he was listing off tend to be issues for large organizations.

This is exactly the correct response to this article. He is looking for features this platform is not intended for. Developers have mutated this system by building a ton of plugins that extend WP to match a full featured CMS, and to be honest that's what most people look for, an easy solution to extend a website and connectivity with the popular API's like twitter, dropbox, flickr, crm's , etc. But you should be aware of its limitations.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#132
I don't get what kind of business goes out recommending WordPress to a bunch of clients as a CMS platform to begin with. I always thought WordPress was a quick yet flexible blogging tool for a one-to-five-man team who doesn't want to get into serious development but just needs to get some content out there. In that regard WordPress does the job more than adequately. He cites department heads and account managers giving him shit over how this or that doesn't work. If they've all been getting a paycheck out of a free blogging engine until now then it sure as hell seemed to have served their business well. Throwing together a quick blog in WordPress is something you do for a computer illiterate aunt who wants to write about her recipes.. probably not something you'd want to build an entire business on.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#133
post #76
post #4

What's the alternative?

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 understand how all the parts fit together (Our designer is having major issues wrapping her head around it). As with most any other CMS, when you hit the limit of EE, it is a hassle to add that one small item you need.

There is an active 3rd party plugin community. With quite a few being paid plugins.

The overall license charge and additional plugins are just a drop for any major project. It is exciting to know there are a few 3rd party folks making some good money on small EE plugins. I may just write a few of my own.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#134

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.

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 Proces…

I recently went through the process of selecting a CMS for a client. ProcessWire, was the ONLY one I looked at and thought, "ok, now this makes sense." In the end, I couldn't use it because it doesn't yet support repeatable content sections in the admin. Sadly, had to go with Wordpress.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#135
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.

A lot of us would love to be able to chime in on EE, I'm sure. Not having a downloadable demo or some way of checking out without paying $200 makes it way lower down the list when you're looking for alternatives. I would love to check it out; but if I don't like it or it won't work for my clients it's a total hassle.

Not having a demo available is beyond ridiculous. I asked about it in their forums and was told to email sales. I went ahead with the purchase anyway.

It would not take much for them to setup a personal sandbox demo just like spree commerce does ( http://spreecommerce.com/demo )

It can't be that they don't want people to think the product is too complicated before purchase, as their after purchase help docs are limited and they have no personal follow up or checkin.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first I've heard of it, but a quick glance at its website suggests that ProcessWire may be very promising. Do you have any additional thoughts on it, having worked with it before?

What took a little while to click with me, and really hit it home for me once it did, is how simple ProcessWire's approach to content and data actually is. Its primary admin UI looks like it's for editing a straightforward site hierarchy, and it certainly can be, but the key is that its "pages" don't have to be web pages. A combination of some simple PHP and some quick setup in the admin lets you build all sorts of t…

Just my 2 cents about XML. Don't use it as a feed for data. It's better to use JSON. Specially for mobile applications.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#138
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 never had a client require a user account which can edit comments but not edit content. This is an extreme edge case.

Wordpress has exploded in popularity largely because of its ease of use. When you start to build a system which incorporates every possible feature to please every user, it will start to suck.

If you have a requirement that is not served with Wordpress (1) built it as a plugin or (2) use another system like Drupal. It is that simple.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Proces…

An alternative that is not as well known is ExpressionEngine. FWIW, we've done a slew of EE installs and a few WordPress intalls and clients that have made the switch from EE to WP have loved it. The admin UI is attractive for end users, and when it comes to theming, designers love the flexibility of the layout variations and front-end developers can actually implement said designs without hacking the EE theming syst…

> ...that have made the switch from EE to WP have loved it.

Might want to revise that to "from WP to EE."

Re: WordPress has left the building

#140
post #22

After 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 wan…

Drupal is halfway between an application framework (like Ruby) and a CMS (like Wordpress). For complex, content-driven sites there's nothing out there that comes close to providing the functionality that it does. It's definitely overkill for a simple Wordpress style use case, where you have a user who wants to post to a blog. But it provides a lot of the functionality that the OP listed as missing from Wordpress. The…

Ruby isn't an application framework. You're probably thinking of Rails.
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