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Comment by rebootthesystem | Hacker News Reader

I must admit ignorance here. I've installed WP a couple of times but never went live with it or did anything past poking around.

Here's my hangup: I can't understand why one would start with a blogging platform, pound at it with various plugins and transform it into, say, a product/ecommerce website. It feels like starting with a shovel when you need a pick (or some other more applicable analogy).

That's the part I don't quite understand. Carrying all of that baggage to build something diametrically opposite what the original stated function of the software may have been.

On the funny end of the scale, I've seen five page static websites with a landing page, a few info pages and a form done with WP. Unbelievable. Are developers that lazy today that they throw WP at everything? Or is it easier at that level to charge X to do a WP site rather than charging the same for straight-up PHP/HTML/JS?

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I haven't used Wordpress much, but I am working on an Orchard site at my current job. It's a CMS kinda like Wordpress, but built on C#/ASP.NET. Our dev team is mostly working on a dozen or so custom-coded account management pages in a separate module, but most of the content is marketing material as pages built in the Orchard management screens, kind of like blog posts, but arranged like a conventional website.

The developers aren't terribly enthusiastic about working with those Orchard pages, since they're tough to collaborate on and version control. But the Marketing people seem to like it just fine, probably because conventional web site building tools, like writing HTML and CSS and managing folders of content with source control tools, is too complex and error-prone for them, and the site UI is worlds better than any other technique they might be willing to use. I'm guessing Wordpress works in a similar way.

Now that I think about it, I had always idly wondered whatever happened to those desktop GUI web page building tools, like Frontpage and Dreamweaver and such. They may still be around, but don't seem to have any mindshare. Maybe it's because the people who were using them put up Wordpress sites instead and are building their pages in the Wordpress UI.

The first problem is pigeon-holing it as a blogging platform that you have to bolt stuff onto. There's a lot more to WordPress than blogging these days. The origins are still there, sure, but fewer and fewer sites these days are using that as a starting place.

> On the funny end of the scale, I've seen five page static websites with a landing page, a few info pages and a form done with WP. Unbelievable. Are developers that lazy today that they throw WP at everything?

I see some version of this question all the time. The main problem is that you're thinking about it from a development perspective only. The major thing WordPress brings to the table is democratization of publishing from the user perspective. You see a five page site some dev built and wonder where the benefit is. The benefit is that the actual owner of the site, the "user" can easily control, modify, add-on-to, or remove that content. They can easily turn it into a 10-page site if they want to.

With some of these other less user-friendly systems (such as static site generators), control largely rests in the hands of developers, with WordPress, it rests with the content owners.

When the client says they want to be able to update site content themselves.... okay, here's your five page WordPress site with a single form.

Yeah, that's probably the scenario with the least friction.

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