Wordpress: advantages and disadvantages?

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Wordpress @ 1st SEP 2008

Couple of days ago I posted a question to LinkedIn Q&A. It was for those individuals/companies who use Wordpress to run their main site. I was interested to know why do they find Wordpress to be their chosen one CMS. The users were supposed to name top 3 key elements in WP that they find most important for your site.  That was the easy part to most of them. Harder part was to name top 3 key elements they miss in WP, but have a feeling it would be important for their site.

There were some really interesting replies.

Advantages:

  • It’s free
  • Fast to setup
  • Easy to learn
  • Lots of plugins and templates available so you don’t need to be a PHP guru or designer to have a nice looking site with lots of features.
  • Easy to modify page templates allowing you to customize the presentation layers to your heart content
  • Large and active open source community community of people developing add-ons, plugins, themes frequently
  • Easy to host with simple requirements

Disadvantages:

  • Many of the themes have a tendency to look the same or similar.
  • PHP’s track record for security is pretty bad.
  • Database queries may be very heavy
  • 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!

http://www.linkedin.com/answers/technology/web-development/TCH_WDD/308438-15378406

Many of the people think that Wordpress is still just for blogging and if you want some decent CMS, you should consider Drupal. This quote summarizes those thoughts:

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.

What are your thoughts about this topic. Feel free to post the comment here or if you are a LinkedIn user, you can reply there.

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2 Responses to “Wordpress: advantages and disadvantages?”

Vladimir Said on September 18th, 2008 at 21:13

PHP’s track record for security is pretty bad

Security is not a part of the programming language itself, security is the part of the right development.

Database queries may be very heavy

This is not WordPress’s issue. If you run EXPLAIN against the query that a clean WordPress installation issues, you will find that they are pretty well optimized. Performance issues/heavy queries (and even security vulnerabilities) appear when you start to use the 3rd party plugins. If a man is a good programmer, this does not mean that it understands well how the database engine works. Most of the plugins are tested in mostly clean WP installations (couple of users, several posts etc) - and without special analysis it may not be clear that the approach the author used does not scale well.

Many of the themes have a tendency to look the same or similar

Again, do you really think that it is WordPress disadvantage? :-)
Many themes (esp. free ones) are the same inside except for copyrights/graphics

Tomislav Bilic Said on September 19th, 2008 at 16:10

Hi, yeah you are correct in all of your statements. I just pulled some user thought from a LinkedIn question I posted. I will also probably update this post and bring some conclusion on my own. Without it, this post makes not much sense. ;)

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