Why I don’t think WordPress makes a good CMS
Tags: WordPress
Date: 1st February, 2010
A quick Google for WordPress CMS reveals a lot of people seeing it as a real content management system (CMS). I beg to differ.
WordPress is a blogging platform. It was written to allow people to easily create and maintain a blog. With each release, new features are added and the excellent WordPress community combined with the ease of producing a plugin, means a hell of a lot of functionality exists for WordPress. But, and it’s a big butt, it was originally built as a bloggin platform, not as a CMS.
I’ve made considerable use of WordPress and experimented with it as a CMS, but it seems that every project I work on I find something else which causes me a pain. It’s not surprising: I’m using something intended as a blogging platform for a job it wasn’t designed to do.
Contrast this with a real CMS. I’ve used Expression Engine for numerous sites and it’s such a pleasure to work with. Like WordPress, there’s also a great community, but this time it’s working on something intended to be used as a CMS, so the resultant plugins are more relevant to what I’m doing. Everything just takes less time with Expression Engine.
But what about cost? For the price of an Expression Engine commercial licence, and the time it takes me to set-up a site using it, unless the site I’m building is something fairly straighforward, the labour involved in tweaking WordPress usually means I’m saving my clients money by using the former. That’s the bottom line.
