WordPress is not just for blogs dammit | Hacker News Reader

WordPress is not just for blogs dammit

sennza.com.au

25 pointslachlanj21 comments

Wordpress -- and its close friends Joomla and Zen cart -- hold a huge share of responsibility for infected and compromised sites on the internet.

I understand the desire that people have to be able to maintain their own website without any specific knowledge and without paying anyone else to do it, and I understand a good consultant's willingness to make that possible for a client. However, any time I've recommended Wordpress -- which is rarely -- it's come with the HUGE caveat that it's very vulnerable to attack, and that cleaning it up may get expensive. This has been true at least until version 2.9.2.

Also worth noting is that WordPress is used on more websites than all the other well know CMS systems combined.

http://wappalyzer.com/stats/cat/CMS

Thanks ElbertF, that's a great site. There are some nice stats there.

This means that more and more people get attracted by easiness of WP installation (directly or through hosting panel). That's all. It doesn't mean that a lot of serious non-blog-sites run under WP.

Most people think it's just for blogging because Wordpress is mainly geared towards blogs (look at wordpress.org).

It's an amazing blogging platform and client-friendly CMS, but it's really not the best CMS for most other situations.

Also, I fail to see how an entire section on popularity proves its worth as a CMS.

In the past, making Wordpress do other things than blogging has been painful at best. Maybe this is changing in 3.0, I haven't tried it out, but just because Wordpress can be used as a CMS, that doesn't mean it should be used as a CMS. I think it is a "right tool for the job" scenario, where Wordpress is great for simple blogs, but not competitive when stacked against other CMS platforms.

In addition, I think more people are familiar with the concept of a blog than with a CMS, so you're much more likely to get a "wordpress? oh, like blogs?" response.

WordPress is evolving into a more complete CMS -- take a look at the Pods plugin: http://podscms.org/

The reason WordPress has NOT been taken seriously as a full-fledged CMS is that, for most of its life, WordPress has not allowed you to create complex content types. You were pretty much limited to "blog post" and "page" types.

Sure, you could create your own basic type that was essentially a copy of the "page" type with another name, but the only fields you could add to that type were WordPress's "custom fields" -- which acted more like unstructured metadata fields than true content type fields.

I understand that this has changed somewhat in WordPress 3.0. (I have not had the chance to try it out and verify.) But it's a bit late -- Drupal, Joomla, and Plone have gained much more traction as full-fledged CMSes in the intervening years.

A good example of where a product's market is limited by it's branding. I can look his points and see that they're a CMS's features, but in my head I'm thinking "WYSIWYG blog entry, adding pages to a blog, blog, blog, blog".

Yep. And there's really no point for WP to try to get away from blogs into CMS territory. There will be blogs for a long time to come, and WP should just shoot to own that.

WP does already own it though. With its momentum and swath of plugins, it will continue to own at least the self-hosted blog.

The reason it should branch out into being a fully-fledged CMS is exactly as the author describes: usability. It's so much easier for users than most other CMS's. Despite other deficiencies, that is huge.

When I was doing a freelance, I hated projects started by owhner in with Wordpress. Yeah, to create basic functionality - anyone a but computer savvy can do this, but later - you will hate to develop for wordpress.. I always asked, why people run stores, community sites, etc on wordpress??

I also head about "content types" in WP 3.x, but hey, it's not code, it's community who put code really matter. And WP community will need tons of time to get nice coding standards implemented in their heads! I am talking about "modules" right now mainly, 'cos this is what really matter.

WP for non-blog site? No way =) I even do not use it for blog sites, because I always hope that one time this blog will become something more then just blog =) And I will hate to be limited by what WP can provide. (and usually, you can't just upgrade =( )

Using WP as a CMS is like trying to use a Honda Civic to pull a boat through the mountains. Yeah, you can probably bolt on some parts to get the job done, but eventually it's going to end up a big smoking pile and you're going to have to buy the truck you should have used in the first place.

Right! But I still miss days when my turbo civic did nice burnouts.. I am getting older =)) And yeah - I broke 5 engines trying it to make it reliable daily driver turbo honda civic car. Didn't worked =) At least at low level budget.. Pretty close in comparison to WP serious site - until you redo it completely leaving only shell, you will not get right product. =)

Sure, Wordpress can be configured to do anything using plugins etc. but why you would choose that route when there are much more friendly, sensible and more secure platforms out there I don't know.

Site not loading... Cached version somewhere?

Ask and ye shall receive:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Thanks. Yes wouldn't you know it just after I posted the link we had server trouble, which never happens. What are the odds....

A good number of blogs that get linked to on HN are down minutes later. If you didn't know about caching before, I hope you learned about it. :)

Hmm, he must be using Wordpress

Right on. I use wordpress to create all the pages on my site http://goto11.net but I also added some new tables and PHP pages to create and manage my appcasts (http://connectedflow.com/appcasting) right in the wp-admin.

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