Wordpress: advantages and disadvantages?
This question is for those individuals/companies who use Wordpress to run their main site. I'm interested to know why do you find Wordpress to be your chosen one CMS.
Advantages:
Name the top 3 key elements in WP that you find most important for your site.
Disadvantages:
Name the top 3 key elements you miss in WP, but you have a feeling it would be important for your site.
Thanks.
Good Answers (4)
Branko A
Project Manager / Senior Developer at Inchoo (Surgeworks Europe)
Best Answers in: Web Development (1)
Advantages
- Simple template-ing
- Relatively simple plugin development
- Very powerful
Disadvantages
- Relatively bad (poor) documentation (no offline documentation) (they should look up to MS SDK documentation)
- They should work on better solutions for moving site "parts" (posts or pages) from one site to another (i dont think on moving entire site, let's say moving post from category x to some other site)
- Should be considering more MVC approach in the future
Magnus H
Head of Product Management at Livebookings, The Online Marketing Network For Restaurants
Best Answers in: Web Development (4), Equity Markets (1), Market Research and Definition (1)
Provided you use the self hosted version (installing and running yourself, not signing up for the hosted solution on wordpress.com) the advantages are simple:
* Can maintain "ordinary" web pages and blog posts in the same tool meaning that you have one part in the app where you manage the pages linked in your normal navigation and one part where you publish blog posts on "news" style list pages (or whatever you want to tweak the categorized, tagged, date stamped blog posts to).
* Easy to modify page templates allowing you to customize the presentation layers to your heart content (while still packaged with excellent ready made templates so you don't need to, can be up and running in no time with templates coming with product or with one of the many skin packages you can download and apply).
* Active community of people developing add ons and plugins, frequently you will find that if you want something special or feels some feature is missing... ...someone else have already thought about the same and done something about it.
Disadvantages... Hmm... Trickier. That is is free? Nah. That it is open source and coded in a language which is sort of the lingua franca for a horde of web developers? No, not that either...
Sorry. Can't think of any off the top of my head. ;)
Hm, for the advantages, that is the easy question, but for disadvantages, well... Hard one.
1. SEO friendly, no hard to use, server requirements, not looking for VPS servers or something like that, a tons of plugins, great community, you have one developer team who work on core files, code is written clean, templates using celan xHTML code.......
2. Maybe only one thing, upgrades to new version have maybe done to early regarding to plugins version, so you must wait to upgrade plugin on new version and then you can go and upgrade WP.
My conclusion, for the smaller project, best CMS.
(my crappy English :-) )
Links:
Clarification added August 29, 2008:
Tomislav just point me there is lack off multilanguage support. There is "gengo" project... But they need some more time to catch all.
Advantages:
1. It's free
2. It's pretty quick and easy to implement and extend
3. Lots of plugins and templates available so you dont need to be a PHP guru or designer to have a nice looking site with lots of features.
4. Easy to host with simple requirements
Disadvantages
1. As with any open source project (where anyone can download and have a poke around the code and find security holes) you need to keep your installation bang up to date. Once a security hole is found WP are pretty good at fixing it and making an update quickly but you need to be ready to apply those as soon as they come out. As WP is used so extensively it is a good target which means that you need to be diligent about this. If you employ someone to develop you a site using WP make sure there is money in the budget to get them to update it for you if this isnt something you can do for yourself.
2. It isn't a full CMS product - which is fine for a lot of sites - but if your site is moving a long way away from something based around a blog then you might find it starts to creak a bit!
3. Related to both of the above. It's just PHP so of course you can hack at it and make it do whatever you like. However if you do this you can find yourself in a situation where it is very time consuming to upgrade as you need to re-implement all your hacks. My advice is that if you can use a straightforward install with some plugins then WP is a good choice, if you need to make major changes for it to work on your site you are probably better looking at some of the CMS options out there.
I like Wordpress a lot for blog based sites, if that is what you are planning on developing it's a good choice. Just try to avoid pimping your install out too much and remember that you will need to keep it up to date.
More Answers (5)
Chuck G
Vice President, Planning at digital.forest
Best Answers in: Computers and Software (2), Computer Networking (2), Information Security (2), Web Development (2), Certification and Licenses (1), Professional Organizations (1), Telecommunications (1), Software Development (1), Wireless (1)
Magnus hit the 3 advantages I would have stated. To it I'll ad: very stable. Easy to update. Easy to manage.
I've used other CMS/blogging platforms and WP outshines them all.
The only disadvantages I can come up with (after reaching a bit) are: Many of the themes have a tendency to look the same or similar. PHP's track record for security is pretty bad. Mind you both of these nitpicks are not strictly related to WP. They are more about the people who design themes and an underlying technology that WP is built on.
I maintain five WP installations and absolutey agree with previous answers, plus one single big drawback: it makes tons of queries to the db, so it may be very heavy. The problem has been solved by LightPress.org (a lightning fast frontend to WP), but the project is not developed further since one year.
There are some caching plug-ins (I use WP Super Cache for pages/posts and PHP Speedy WP for js libraries and css scripts), but aren't already developed enough. IMHO, I also think that similar solutions need to be included in the main code...
The advantage is the large open source community (plugins, themes, etc). There is no licensing fee, but you have to do everything yourself. If you have in house PHP developers, it's really the only choice. As for the actual programming, it's tag soup, but theme building is easy if you want to build a typical blog.
Laura W
Small Business Website Specialist and Trainer
Best Answers in: Starting Up (4), Web Development (3), Business Development (2), Professional Networking (2), Small Business (2), Economics (1), Advertising (1), Events Marketing (1), Planning (1), Blogging (1), E-Commerce (1)
We use WordPress for blogs, and for blogs only. It is not a content management system, and was never meant to be one.
Advantages:
Fast to setup.
Easy to learn.
Well supported.
Disadvantages:
I cannot change the position of sidebar items unless I edit the code.
Most of the disadvantages come in when someone tries to warp it outside of being a blog, when they stack on a ton of plugins that try to make WordPress take the place of Joomla or Drupal. It doesn't. When people try to make it do that, it does it to a lower performance level, and has more sustainability problems.
Laura
Wordpress is a great blogging platform but falls short when it comes to the more specialized tasks associated with a full featured CMS or corporate web presence. I highly recommend Drupal as an alternative CMS with advanced functionality and a strong framework for extensibility and modularity. The advantages are too numerous to list here but if you're interested you are welcome to contact me and ill give you the quick rundown.
