I pretty much develop all of my clients websites these days using wordpress as the backend content management system unless there are some really far out project requirements that I don’t see wordpress as a good fit for. Honestly I don’t hear many project requirements these days that won’t work inside of wordpress, especially given the number of plugins that are available.
In fact, did you know that you can now deploy a plugin that will more or less turn your wordpress installation into an auction website like eBay? I was just testing a plugin for a friend a few days ago that does exactly that, and it’s pretty robust too!
This past week I have been working on a project involving wordpress 3.0 and the studiopress genesis theme framework and I have been amazed at just how much more control the end user, or client, is going to have once this version is released. Granted, there is a slight learning curve for developers when it comes to learning everything that is new w/ 3.0, not to mention how genesis from studiopress operates, but once we all get it, lookout!
For instance, I was wrestling today with a header issue on a client project and ran across Nathan Rice’s Genesis Simple Hooks Plugin, compliments of Brent Passmore, this plugin alone extends wordpress further than it’s ever been pushed by allowing the end user, or client, to input content – both shortcodes and php code, into one of the many hooks located on a websites theme. All of this from inside the user-friendly dashboard of WordPress. Incredible. There is also the PODS CMS plugin for handling different content types and extending the wordpress custom fields option. Is there really anything you can’t push wordpress to do these days?
I know that I have a lot of developers that read my blog so I thought I would invite everyone in for a discussion on this topic, here are a few starting points:
- Do you currently use wordpress exclusively for projects?
- What are your thoughts on wordpress vs the other open source solutions?
- What content management solutions do you offer your clients?
- How much of a factor is wordpress’ name recognition becoming?
- What are some of your favorite wordpress plugins / themes?
- What are some of your likes / dislikes about wordpress?
Don't get me started…
I think for a certain class of sites (news stories, text pages) WordPress is a great tool. It is simple to setup and customize, even by a non-techie. The admin interface is very clean and easy to use. My biggest dislike is the lack of a templating system. The mix of PHP and HTML in the themes leads to spaghetti code and forces designers to be exposed to PHP functionality they don't need to mess with.
However I don't think WP, or any CMS for that matter, is the right tool for every job. When site requirements of grow larger I prefer to build sites using a web application framework instead of a CMS. I think frameworks like Rails, Django, CakePHP, CodeIgniter combine development speed of a CMS with the flexibility of writing the system from scratch. Also I like the easy of which a framework lets me version control and unit test my code.
Good points. I think there are going to be some advances in the area of templating that will come along w/ version 3. Studiopress Genesis is allowing us to do a whole lot now but that project is still in it's infant stages too.
I use WordPress for just about every website. On some rare occasions for a more robust system I use Drupal. However the lines in the sand between WordPress and Drupal are getting less.
It's even more rare for me to use something like Codeigniter or straight-up PHP. I deploy WordPress in a few minutes and easily build a plugin and theme to do whatever I want. No need to do all the tedious duplication and configuration. The WordPress plugin PodsCMS adds much more control over custom content.
More social centric sites I build in Drupal. Especially when custom content types are displayed and connected in a variety of different ways. Accomplishing these tasks in WordPress are getting easier, I have already been planning do my next project similar to the above entirely in WordPress.
Are you going to Wordcamp this weekend in Fayetteville? I had one of the organizers on the podcast this past week and he also mentioned pods. Awesome plugin.
Unfortunately no. We are doing Kara's Birthday tomorrow, that's where my money is going.