Kairosnews brings up the point that WordPress is not a content management system and shouldn't be pushed to be one.
This post compares WP to a small box of legos when a CMS system is a large tub. With the small box, you'll be able to build a car, but won't be able to stretch the legos you're given to create the full blown website you'll need.
WordPress is a great tool for building blogs, but stretching it past its limitations is just asking for problems.
Sure, you can build just about anything in WP by adding a plugin or hacking the code, but what happens when your carefully stacked cards fall down?
Its much better to stick with building websites with content management tools, like Joomla, Drupal, Plone. They area made for building websites and have the structure and framework to support the complex tasks that a website requires.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Matthew Huebert // Sep 13, 2006 at 1:07 am
I agree 100%… I used Movable Type for a number of projects that went beyond blogging, including this one, and it worked well — but if I’d have needed to add more complexity I’d have been up a creek.
A few months ago I bit the (smaller-than-expected) bullet and learned how to use the ExpressionEngine CMS (www.pmachine.com), and have never looked back. I no longer feel like I’m trying to drive in the wrong direction on a one-way street… I was even able to use more complex relational features for a books & quotes section on my blog. Moreover, it was by far the easiest CMS I tried in the area of customizing the design of my sites. I like to design my websites from scratch (very picky about this) & then sprinkle in CMS code wherever necessary, which is exactly what EE lets me do.
I can’t remember where I first heard about ExpressionEngine, but for me, EE has the perfect mix of features vs usability. With a little hacking, this spring I was even able to develop a database-driven multilingual site that served Chinese or Mandarin pages depending on a URL segment, which was marvelous — it would have been an enormous headache (and likely impossible) to get the same result with a less powerful tool.
2 Kim // Sep 18, 2006 at 7:15 am
Thanks for the input on ExpressionEngine Matthew. Most of my clients have been expressing an interest in ‘doing it themselves’. Most blogging engines leave them cold because of their limited ability to WYSIWIG the content as they go.
They want the ability to write in a familiar environment – Word usually – and copy and paste the outcome. So far, that means Plone or Joomla. Yet, when I see the content the editors produce – filled with font tags, extra p tags and numerous other tags that make it look like how they want – but fill up the HTML with crud.
I’ll check out ExpressionEngine.
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