WordPress: advantages and disadvantages?

WordPress: advantages and disadvantages?

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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9 comments

  1. Yes wordpress have some issues with the security and spams. but if you update wordpress regularly when a update arrive. then most of the security problems will be solved.

  2. It seems like they are, to a degree, comparable regarding features, plugins, community building, etc. I agree that the database queries may be very heavy with WordPress.

    I disagree that all WordPress sites look the same. The world just needs more WordPress designers/developers.

  3. Hi !!!! ^_^
    I am Piter Kokoniz. oOnly want to tell, that your posts are really interesting
    And want to ask you: is this blog your hobby?
    Sorry for my bad english:)
    Thank you!
    Piter.

  4. Hello!
    Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
    PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language 😉
    See you!
    Your, Raiul Baztepo

  5. Though an old post but I found it interesting. I was not a fan of WP, tried to use it, twice, failed because I would not wrap my head around it and resent how it dictate how I should built a site. I am a Modx and Textpattern fan, the former is super great for CMS, with basic blog feature for the current version. Textpattern is depressing due to its slow development.

    Magento is great, my clients want WordPress blog 🙁 Now I am finding I am learning WordPress. Still a bit resenting it, but I guess I have come to my sense, especially seeing how nice the WP 2.7 is. So I am giving WordPress a chance, and convincing myself it shouldn’t be bad to have a new skillset under my belt after all.

    As for a real CMS. Really, try out the Modx, and the next version will be the Revolution. Hmmm, Magento + Modx (Revolution) + WordPress under one’s belt, one can be a super duper web developer 🙂

  6. 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. 😉

  7. 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

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