Ask HN: Anecdata transitioning to/from WordPress, especially for non-profits?
Does anyone else on HN, official home of the "Show HN: new CMS" every 2 weeks, care to share any of their war stories? My current opinion is that setting up any organization with anything other than managed WordPress is going to limit their options and cost them real money down the road once I'm no longer around to help out.
The first site I worked on was built using Microsoft technologies back before Microsoft supported WordPress on IIS. I picked the simplest ASP.NET CMS I could find (N2) but was still contacted every other year whenever a change was needed. They have since transitioned to WordPress, leaving several features behind (after I had incorporated those features from their original site into N2). My first failure was not communicating what N2 was even capable of, then I missed an email requesting help with fixing core functionality broken by their hosting provider's system updates (preventing large file uploads).
Now I am working on another website built with extensive customization of a random PHP CMS I've never heard of before (MODX) and my final recommendation is probably going to be to migrate to WordPress. They've run into issues with comment spam and are currently broken due to an interrupted transition to using reCAPTCHA; the original dev is no longer responsive.
PS. Please document any solution whether or not you ignore my advice and make sure the core users know about this documentation; it will save the next guy a lot of time after you move on!