
WordPress has left the building - urbanjunkie
http://kevinjohngallagher.com/2012/01/wordpress-has-left-the-building/
======
scotch_drinker
Wait so he's complaining that a free piece of software that is designed to
"create a beautiful website or blog" (from Wordpress.org) doesn't cut it as a
high powered CMS?

I think if we're honest, wordpress is a blogging platform and if you try to
deform it into your own little niche needs, you need to accept the inherent
risks.

~~~
mortenjorck
I think the author's problem, and the problem of nearly every frustrated
WordPress user, is that the alternatives aren't nearly as enjoyable to work
with as WordPress. It has a nice, understandable, and flexible API, and even
though its greatest strengths are really only in blogging, the friendliness of
the environment naturally invites stretching its use.

For these people, I would strongly recommend a look at ProcessWire. It's kind
of like a radically simplified Drupal that is at least as easy to use as
WordPress, if not more so, and has a similar attention to design and detail.
I've been using it for a few months now across two very different projects,
and I'm wishing I'd found it earlier.

~~~
ahmadss
An alternative that is not as well known is ExpressionEngine. FWIW, we've done
a slew of EE installs and a few WordPress intalls and clients that have made
the switch from EE to WP have loved it. The admin UI is attractive for end
users, and when it comes to theming, designers love the flexibility of the
layout variations and front-end developers can actually implement said designs
without hacking the EE theming system. This is definitely not the case with
WordPress.

Here is a great blog post about the transition from WP to EE written by one of
our designers - <http://www.viget.com/inspire/wordpress-to-expressionengine/>

and here is another unique EE site that shows the flexibility of its native
theming system -

www.teamviget.com

~~~
weaksauce
> ...that have made the switch from EE to WP have loved it.

Might want to revise that to "from WP to EE."

~~~
digitallimit0
Yeah, that confused my balls.

------
crikli
WordPress wasn't ever in the building. Or at least it wasn't in the building
the author wanted it to be.

Lots of folks have tried to force Wordpress to be more than a blog platform.
I've always seen these efforts in the same light as when guys dumps tons of
money and time squeezing horsepower of a Honda Civic: end of the day, it's
still a Civic that get its lunch eaten by a stock 'Vette.

Look, you just don't get power _and_ flexibility in the same package as
intuitive _and_ simple. The best you can do is cut one to boost another. Take
iOS. Intuitive as hell. Flexible as a piece of rebar.

Drupal's been mentioned in other comments. It's crazy powerful and very
flexible... it's the Corvette to the hopped up Civic that is Wordpress. It's
also hard to learn, the interface can be...challenging and the plumbing is
complex.

Edit: Downvote me if you must but at least communicate why...did you build a
11 second Civic or something? ;)

~~~
rokhayakebe
_as I've viewed when guys dumps tons of money and time squeezing horsepower of
a Honda Civic_

Exactly. It's still a fucking Honda, and for the time/money spent on it you
should have bought a Lexus. Similarly you can tweak wordpress all day long, in
the end it's a blogging software.

~~~
photomatt
FWIW, 92% of WordPress users we surveyed are using it as a CMS. People seem to
like to say "it's just blogging software" to put us in a box, but people are
using it for so much more, and most much happier than the OP.

~~~
crikli
How did you define CMS? I've learned (the hard way) that the acronym does not
have a uniform definition.

Wordpress is the PHP of web publishing platforms. The barrier to entry is low,
you can get decent results quickly, and it provides a great deal of power to
the unskilled user. There are lots of things that it's good for; I'd say, in
fact that in most cases it's all a company needs.

But it's really easy for it to become the only tool in the box, and pretty
soon someone is in over his head trying to brute force it into being the
solution to a problem that it was never designed to solve.

------
saltcod
After about 10 minutes with Plone, a few months with Joomla, about 2 years
with Drupal, and finally 3 years with WordPress, I think WordPress is still a
brilliant solution for lots of problems.

The closest competitor, Drupal, is an absolute nightmare. For designers,
developers and certainly for the end user. It still doesn't even ship with a
wysiwyg editor—hard to disagree that this is precisely what the end user
wants.

In Drupal, developing themes is a nightmare, theming Views output is an
absolute disaster, and upgrading modules/core will almost certainly result in
a whitescreen.

I don't see an alternative to WordPress at the moment. If you want to give you
clients a reasonable admin interface I don't see another way around it. And I
don't find that clients mind it changing 2-3 times a year—they all say it gets
better each time.

Though it certainly is blog-oriented, and you will have to twist and bend it
to act as a CMS, having to do this is a lot more fun than trying to wrangle a
Views template file.

~~~
garethsprice
Drupal is halfway between an application framework (like Ruby) and a CMS (like
Wordpress). For complex, content-driven sites there's nothing out there that
comes close to providing the functionality that it does.

It's definitely overkill for a simple Wordpress style use case, where you have
a user who wants to post to a blog. But it provides a lot of the functionality
that the OP listed as missing from Wordpress.

There are plenty of cases where you would not need a WYSIWYG editor on a
website - for example, when it's simply providing a web services API to
another application, when it's just a front-end aggregating content from
another source or when it's being used for mobile. All of which you can do
with Drupal.

It's certainly not perfect, but it's definitely got it's uses.

~~~
cobychapple
Ruby isn't an application framework. You're probably thinking of Rails.

------
noonespecial
I know this is a rant, but I get tired of companies with $750k worth of
"department heads" and "managers of x" all balanced on re-purposed _open
source_ software that was never meant to do what they're trying to do.

Listen: fire a pair of "department heads", hire a pair of very good coders
from the community surrounding the project you're trying to use and make the
changes you want. Bonus points for giving back those changes to the project
when you're done.

Bitching that the free software you tried to perch your business on isn't
meeting your needs is just bad form.

~~~
wmeredith
I agree. My agency has developed and hosts about 40 WordPress sites for
corporate, NPO and start up type businesses. They range from hundreds of pages
of complex e-commerce to actual blogs and micro-sites. We have serious PHP
devs in house and we write and maintain our own plugins that do everything
from talk to Facebook and Twitter to create Google maps and manage complex
event registration and payment forms. We also contribute to the core.

WordPress is the best choice for our clients, because it's easy for them to
use, FULL STOP.

Enhancing that great UX with our own sauce is hard work, but it pays of for
them in the day-to-day and for us in the long run. (Referrals and repeat
business.)

The OP may have left the building, but WordPress is sticking around for a long
time.

------
kevinjohn
Hello everyone,

I'm Kevinjohn Gallagher, the author of the post.

While I really appreciate all the comments, quite a few folks here have made
presumptions that are really wide of the mark.

I love WordPress. I use it for my personal site, and thats not going to
change. WordPress is very good at what it does, and Im in no way down on it
for that; its just that the needs of my small company __is now very different
that the options WordPress gives us. There's no real drama there.

What has driven this decision though, is that sites that could/should/have-
already been running nicely on WordPress have really been let down by a number
of changes in the 3 releases in the last year. We deal with a lot of smaller
government and charity websites - which don't pay well - and they simply can't
handle the AdminUI changing every 16 weeks. To us techies thats a long time,
to your average "Joe Public", thats quite a lot. Given that most of these
people have really strict usage requirements (colour blind, no use of mouse,
etc) the new WordPress 3.3 AdminUI is shockingly inaccessible.

So much of the change involved in the WordPress product is horribly unmanaged.
And thats ok, it's free software. For our small company, this doesn't work for
us anymore, so we move on. I wrote the post on my personal website, simply as
a marker, to give myself closure more than anything. I'm not really sure how
or why thats offended so many of you, but I'm more than happy to talk it
through over e-mail ;)

Thanks, Kevinjohn =========

 __We're a 5 person company, with 2-4 freelancers as needed. We're definitely
not some $750k a website agency as someone mentioned. Heck thats more than
double our turnover for the year!

~~~
jacques_chester
> So much of the change involved in the WordPress product is horribly
> unmanaged.

As the volunteer admin of a small blog network, I cannot agree more.

Having to upgrade whole versions just to get a security fix is terrible
practice, but I'm forced to do it.

~~~
joelhaus
Agreed, my highly customized installs are occasionally broken by the upgrades,
so I was really happy find this plugin:
<http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hotfix/>

However, it's often a band-aid that isn't big enough for the wound.

------
smacktoward
Generally speaking software tends to either start powerful and try to work its
way towards usability, or start usable and try to work its way towards power.
The latter approach almost always beats the former.

A simple but usable product attracts new users, those new users eventually
start demanding features, the features eventually get added, the new features
make the product attractive to more people, some of those people become new
users, they demand even more features, etc. It's a virtuous circle.

The powerful but complicated product, on the other hand, doesn't attract new
users, and its existing users learn to live with its idiosyncrasies, either
because they want to or because their boss orders them to. So there's never
enough real pressure on the developers to make it truly usable, which means it
doesn't attract new users, which means there's no pressure to make it more
usable, etc. It's a _vicious_ circle.

WordPress has been pursuing the start-simple-and-get-powerful model, and
they've made a lot more progress in that direction over the last couple of
years than the start-powerful-and-get-usable (Drupal, Plone, TYPO3, etc.) have
at making themselves more usable.

~~~
hippich
I do know nothing about Plone and TYPO3, but I had quite a lot of experience
with Wordpress and Drupal. Do not be tricked by default Drupal installation
UI. Drupal is very configurable by downloading right modules. (obviously you
need to have experience with Drupal to know that).

And I am not talking about code side...

~~~
smacktoward
> Do not be tricked by default Drupal installation UI

Defaults are extremely powerful things. For most users they are all of your
product they will ever experience.

If your default settings are off-putting, people will feel that your software
is off-putting. The defaults are the welcome mat. If the welcome mat is
studded with titanium spikes coated with blowfish toxin, you shouldn't be
surprised if people aren't eager to walk through the door.

~~~
hippich
You are talking about _users_, not developers developing _for_ users.

Op is _developer_.

------
danso
This piece is not particularly constructive. While it's not required for an
opinion piece to present the perfect alternative in order to rant against the
status quo...to say "Wordpress sucks" and say _nothing_ about the
alternatives...? What good does that do?

I can think of lots of alternatives for the OP but all of them have certain
costs/tradeoffs that are prohibitive in many scenarios. The OP goes into great
detail describe how WP doesn't meet his needs...I'm really fascinated to know
what alternative he's considered that does meet his clients need and that is
realistically doable?

~~~
Apple-Guy
Exactly.

The author does not understand that if a theme is designed properly, an admin
_can_ mark comment as spam without editing the post. In addition, just about
every single thing he thinks core Wordpress lacks can be added easily with a
plug-in.

~~~
kevinjohn
Sir, you have missed the point.

You need the CAPABILITY to be able to edit posts to be able to mark comments
as spam. Many of my clients want to be able to delegate SPAM marking, but not
have that person be able to edit any content on the website.

WordPress has hardcoded these two CAPABILITIES together for the last 13
releases.

~~~
capsule_toy
Personally, I would create my own fork with this capability and try to
convince Wordpress to incorporate my changes.

How certain are you that you're going to find software that won't have similar
problems? One of the reasons I like open source is that I have control and can
make changes when necessary.

edit - also, you basically have customers that are saying they have a pain
point, please solve it. I would tell them that Wordpress is designed for the
majority and there may be edge cases that don't cover their particular usage.
If they would like a customized solution, you can do it for them but it will
cost x amount of dollars.

------
barce
Goodbye Swiss army knife. Although you are great at opening wine bottles,
cutting pieces of paper, cutting string and making notches in pieces of wood,
you do not:

1\. Allow me to kill deer. 2\. If I had a dead deer, you do not allow me to
cleanly gut it. 3\. After gutting the deer, you also do not allow me to cook
the deer.

Goodbye Swiss Army knife. I'll miss you, but my clients who don't know how to
use the right tool for the right situation won't.

Mr. Gallagher clearly didn't know how to explain to his clients that there
isn't a one size fits all solution and that you need to use many tools to get
complex business tasks done.

------
nanodeath
I'd like to respond to some things a number of people have commented on HN
here...

1) Wordpress might seem like just a blogging engine, but this is not how the
WP developers see it -- on the Wordpress .org About page, it's described as
"[Wordpress] has evolved to be used as full content management system" (sic).
So they expect people to use it as a CMS. 2) Plone, unless you have a lot of
technical chops, is a nightmare to use and maintain. My SO had one set up for
her non-profit less than a year ago and they've had so many problems with
memory, weird WYSIWIG bugs/behavior (stripping all sorts of tags, including
nobr, for one), confusing configuration, costly and/or poor quality plugins,
frequent need to modify source, etc that they're looking to move off it ASAP.
So I wouldn't recommend it if you're setting up an instance for non-technical
folk.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _So they expect people to use it as a CMS._

And they appear to facilitate that. But, it tellingly IMO, doesn't say that WP
was designed as a CMS or even that it was modified to become a CMS just that
it has grown to be _used_ as a CMS.

~~~
maaku
Things changed drastically with 3.0. Wordpress is now much better described as
a CMS with built-in blogging defaults.

------
unavoidable
This guy seems to be arguing that Wordpress should turn into a Drupal-like
app, which it was never designed to do. Although I am also guilty of using WP
for CMS on some simple sites, this is mostly due to convenience of
installation and (mostly) ease of use for clients. I don't think most
developers who use WordPress seriously consider it a "professional" CMS
solution.

On the other hand, the alternatives kind of suck. This author doesn't even
recommend one, which is odd considering he purports to have recommended WP to
everyone for the last 4 years. Most other CMS solutions I've used over the
last years have either been vastly overkill and overly cumbersome, or still
severely lacking the features he describes as lacking in WP. It usually turned
out almost as easy to develop your own skeleton CMS depending on the site's
needs.

Also, why is the font on the site so large?

~~~
tstegart
The font size seems fine to me (Windows Vista, Firefox). The lack of an
apostrophe in the last word, however, is killing me.

~~~
unavoidable
For some reason the site is trying to fill my entire monitor even though I
have my window using only half the screen (Chrome, OSX). The font size I'm
seeing is 25px for the body text...

------
markoheijnen
I disagree with most of the content. WordPress is a great CMS and it can be
used for it. I do advanced projects and it fits fine. The list of his hard
truths isn't that hard. Some of them are just rare cases that most people even
irritate at.

The Admin UI doesn't get a redesign 2-3 times a year. There is a big
difference between redesign and adjusting. Most of the buttons are still on
the same place as in WordPress 2.8. They only got replaced or have different
colors. Maybe they should create admin themes so you have the ability to hold
down some versions.

I think he and his team should stop complaining about things where they never
tried to make it better. At least it doesn't stand in that post. I do think
that WordPress can and should do a better job and I am do help a little bit
with it. That was something they should do to.

The complaint about a Beta product is just lame. It's a beta version. What can
you expect. A lot of Beta version of other software do break things.

This is just my point of view. If you dive into WordPress Core files you can
find solution for problems you thought WordPress couldn't handle. Sometimes it
can be little bit ugly code tho.

------
FraaJad
Time and again, people want to use a hacked up blogging engine as a CMS and
lament that it is not working.

Use a CMS that's been around for more than decade which has all the features
you want in a proper CMS (single sign on, WYSIWGY, multi-lingual support, a
huge community of developers and service providers).

ie., Plone -- <http://plone.org>

~~~
smacktoward
The problem with CMSes that have "all the features you want" is that they have
_so many_ features that the average user who just needs to plonk some content
down on a page and periodically edit it can't wade through all the features to
figure out how to do that.

(I don't say this to pick on Plone -- I'm a big fan of the TYPO3[1] CMS, for
instance, which does lots of the things that he mentions very well, but the
downside to that power is that it's insanely hard for normal people to pick up
and use.)

[1] <http://typo3.org>

~~~
beza1e1
A few years ago i recommended website baker as a nice simple CMS, which is
also hackable if necessary. That was three years ago. Maybe the situation has
changed, but i would never recommend a complexity-monster like Typo3. Typo3 is
"enterprisy" in the negative sense.

<http://www.websitebaker2.org>

~~~
smacktoward
Don't be _too_ hard on TYPO3, it has its virtues. For instance, it has the
most elegant handling of multilingual content I've ever found in fifteen years
of working with CMSes. But for a small single-language site (i.e. 99% of the
sites people develop) it's definitely overkill.

~~~
intheory0
For as complex as it is, TYPO3 is pretty usable. I built a site on TYPO3
before I ever messed with WordPress some 6 years ago. Now that I think of it,
I'd probably opt for TYPO3 before Drupal.

------
michaelpinto
What he never says in the article — and what I'd love to know - is what
platform is he migrating his clients to? I also wonder if we've grown to
expect too much from WordPress: It really started life as a blogging tool -
the charm of it was that it wasn't a full fledged CMS.

------
krogsgard
WordPress core is not trying to be all things to all people. But can he tell
me a CMS that makes it simpler to build out the requirements for a vast
majority of the websites in the world?

If you are looking for a custom feature set on a project that you claim
WordPress doesn't meet your needs, then build a custom CMS for the job and
charge appropriately. WordPress allows organizations and individuals to have
massive power in their website for a fraction of the cost of a custom CMS. And
in comparison to a custom CMS, it gets a great deal of testing.

WordPress is always looking for new contributors, and if your solution isn't
something that works for core and the WordPress core philosophy, then you can
extend your idea via a plugin.

And in the author's list of things WordPress "has either no, or severely
limited" support for, he is way off the boat. There are a slew of highly
talented developers that either having working solutions for or are working on
almost all of those things, and more.

------
rglover
Good post. Curious, though, about what alternatives they're testing. Wish this
would have read less like a eulogy and more like suggestions for potential
fixes.

------
skeltoac
There could hardly be a broader and more vague software category than "CMS".
As an exercise, write down the top ten features you expect from a CMS. See how
these lists compare.

(Not disputing OP's critique of WordPress dev and testing.)

------
ricardobeat
Come on folks, Wordpress _is_ a CMS. It _manages content_ , and has more
features than half the other CMSs. At this point the blogging setup that comes
by default is just built on top of general abstractions.

I've used it for plenty of projects, and IMO there are two things holding it
back: the violent release cycle (frequent UI changes, out-of-date plugins,
mandatory major upgrades) and the shitty performance (a standard install gets
barely a single request/second on a common shared box, for a content-rich page
- file based caching doesn't help much).

On the other side it's the most flexible, easy to customize and pleasant to
use CMS out there. It's a shame, really.

------
intheory0
I've used Wordpress on a number of sites for small businesses & restaurants
lately. In every case it has fit the bill.

Other CMSs I've looked at are way overkill, and while I've toyed with the idea
of building my own custom CMS, the fact is I can get everything I need in a
5-minute WordPress installation and 30 minutes of plugin configuration. Theme
development is straight-forward and relatively well-documented.

The investment in rolling your own is a mite more than 35 minutes. Even the
act of walling off or hiding portions of Drupal is more involved than that.

------
boopboop
I have used Wordpress extensively for any dozens of websites.

"The straw the that broke the camel’s back? My Account Manager: How can we
claim that [WordPress] is the CMS for our clients, when you need the
capability to edit ANY content on the website simply to mark a comment as
spam?"

1) That generally makes sense. You need the ability to edit content in order
to edit content (in this case, comments).

2) I have never had a client require a user account which can edit comments
but not edit content. This is an extreme edge case.

Wordpress has exploded in popularity largely because of its ease of use. When
you start to build a system which incorporates every possible feature to
please every user, it will start to suck.

If you have a requirement that is not served with Wordpress (1) built it as a
plugin or (2) use another system like Drupal. It is that simple.

~~~
waitwhat
_I have never had a client require a user account which can edit comments but
not edit content. This is an extreme edge case._

Actually, that's a moderator.

------
markrickert
Cached version. He's using Wordpress and probably doesn't have a caching
plugin installed.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://kevinjohngallagher.com/2012/01/wordpress-
has-left-the-building/)

------
wyck
These are the growing pains a lot of WP developers face at some point.

The problem is that WordPress is really, really good at basic things. Things
which involve end users and ease of functionality, this covers quite a bit of
actual work.

The problem arises when you need to extend that functionality outside the box,
you're used to working with something great, you're taking it for granted that
it can do anything.

Well it can't, some very basic functions like say a forms API or media API
which you consider essential , does not even exist.

I think there has been a strain lately that the core team, especially with J.
Wells leadership, has concentrated WAY to much on UI and Design. Developers
are starting to look elsewhere for actual functionality that keeps up, the
problem is so far there is not much out there that is easy to use.

------
jinushaun
I think WP is great and the platform has tons of neat plugins. However, even
though people try to use WP as a general purpose CMS, it still has its roots
in blogging.

------
mildweed
Wordpress is still great for small businesses. The problems he was listing off
tend to be issues for large organizations.

~~~
pacomerh
This is exactly the correct response to this article. He is looking for
features this platform is not intended for. Developers have mutated this
system by building a ton of plugins that extend WP to match a full featured
CMS, and to be honest that's what most people look for, an easy solution to
extend a website and connectivity with the popular API's like twitter,
dropbox, flickr, crm's , etc. But you should be aware of its limitations.

------
kitsune_
All content management systems suck. Why? Because no size fits all. At least
that's the conclusion I draw after having worked with WP, EE, Drupal, Joomla,
Typo3, DotNetNuke, Umbraco, OpenText, Plone, Orchard, OpenText etc..

At one point most projects will hit a wall where the demands outgrow the
constraints of the framework. So, if you're lucky, your framework will end up
being somewhat flexible. Stability and good testing practices are also
important and often neglected.

------
dasrecht
"If you get an Answer you don't like, probably you asked the wrong question"

As someone stated in the comments. Wordpress isn't the solution to all. Mainly
it's a blogging system with the possibilities to add some static content. Of
course there are many plugins which enrich the wordpress expirience but a
blogging system stays a blogging system at heart.

If you speak words like

* Document Management * Workflow Management or * Digital Asset Management

It's most likely you misunderstood Wordpress and it's capabilities from begin.

I personally use Wordpress for many purposes private and for professional
work. But if the client's demands are to high i switch instantly to better
suiting solutions (which does not mean that wordpress is bad but probably not
suitable for all use-cases) which makes the client even happier.

About selling the right thing:

If you go to the customer and tell him "This one-shot solution will be
Wordpress and you can do everything with it !" You already oversold it and
probably you should speak with your business development guys ;)

One point i agree is the release schedule, which creates quite a lot of work
trying to stay up to date with every wordpress instance you have. But i never
saw the so called "perfect solution" not in OpenSource and not in "I pay
fricken lot money for licences"-Software.

just my two cents

------
ggwicz
All the things he listed that WordPress doesn't have are the reasons _why_ I
like it. With the exception of better caching/CDN integration, I like that
WordPress is simple, straightforward, and super hackable with plugins and
theme functions. A lot of people don't even know all the capabilities. Few
know about the WP Transients capabilities, for example. They're quite powerful
and useful.

~~~
pestaa
Transients API is exactly what I've been looking for, thank you. The WordPress
Codex is not really in a good shape I think.

~~~
ggwicz
Glad I could help out. The Codex is in great shape, I think they just have to
prioritize their time and they don't have huge human resources to focus on
everything. Focusing on the Thumbnails section, for instance, might serve more
people than the Transients API. But the Transients stuff is pretty neat and
there are other little hooks and functions that really do a lot :)

------
hm2k
What's the alternative?

~~~
stef25
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Expression Engine yet and am curious to
hear people's opinions about it.

~~~
wonderyak
A lot of us would love to be able to chime in on EE, I'm sure. Not having a
downloadable demo or some way of checking out without paying $200 makes it way
lower down the list when you're looking for alternatives.

I would love to check it out; but if I don't like it or it won't work for my
clients it's a total hassle.

~~~
timmaah
Not having a demo available is beyond ridiculous. I asked about it in their
forums and was told to email sales. I went ahead with the purchase anyway.

It would not take much for them to setup a personal sandbox demo just like
spree commerce does ( <http://spreecommerce.com/demo> )

It can't be that they don't want people to think the product is too
complicated before purchase, as their after purchase help docs are limited and
they have no personal follow up or checkin.

------
agentgt
I have worked in the Enterprise CMS field for most of my dev career. Its
pretty much impossible to be "All things to All people" which seems to be the
requirement for CMS these days.

There seems to be dozen of CMS users:

* Marketing (free form, reporting, link management)

* Document Management users (structured, access management)

* Store front aka E-Commerce (structured)

* Simple Company Site (blog/wiki)

What I routinely see is CMS' that try to solve all these problems. OR the CMS
is basically just a platform/library which really doesn't help the end user.

Part of this is what caused me to start <http://snaphop.com> which is a mobile
campaign management (cms for marketeers) instead of the general mobile content
management which has the same problems above except for mobile.

------
boopboop
> "Additionally this causes immense trouble for our clients and users who
> WordPress consider to be “edge cases”, that they no longer cater for. That
> covers disabled users, colour blind users, those not using a mouse.."

Most every other CMS would not be suitable for disabled users, colour blind
users, those not using a mouse.. (unfortunately).

> "those not using a desktop PC"

Wordpress had a pretty nice official mobile interface.

> "those using a microsoft browser, especially those using IE6 or IE7"

IE6 is not supported by most website. Facebook recently stopped supporting
IE7. IE8+ works fine.

> "(Bluntly, if you’re not using a Mac, look out)."

There is no basis for this comment.

I am not sure why we are giving this author this much attention.

------
jakejake
The beauty of WordPress to me is that you can install it for just about
anybody and they pick it up right away. Te plugin ecosystem is fantastic for
specialized functionality.

I don't really agree with the OP that all of the workflow functionality
belongs in the core. If he thinks this is something a lot of users want, why
doesn't he write a plugin? If he's right (and maybe he is..?) then it would be
a huge hit.

If more hooks are needed to allow plugin developers to implement these things
and make WordPress more competitive with enterprise CMS systems, I would
support that. But I would not support adding a bunch of complexity to the
core.

------
gchucky
Until now I haven't really been able to encapsulate my feelings towards
Wordpress, but this hits most of the big points. One can really only do so
much with custom post types and custom fields before the question has to be
asked if it would better to build a new CMS.

Rolling a custom CMS every time a client needs something isn't really a good,
flexible solution. There are other options out there, like CMSes built on top
of existing frameworks (e.g. Diem or Sympal, which are built on Symfony), but
I'm not really sure how viable those are. I am curious if anyone else has
other ideas...

------
danzigism
Man what a surprising bunch of uneducated crap I've been reading. Have any of
you heavy criticizers installed it, learned how to develop themes, and gain a
complete and full understanding of the WP core and the incredibly impressive
Codex with a bajillion helpful functions at your disposal?

I've developed customized WP sites for things like realtors, business
directories, news sites, restaurants, online stores, local governments, and
quite a few small/medium sized businesses.

The only way to use WP to it's full advantage is to first of all, take
advantage of custom post types and taxonomies. Organize your content. Also,
you need to customize the backend so you're only allowing you client to see
certain information. There are great plugins available such as Adminimize, and
the User Role Editor for properly assigning permissions to your user roles.

As far as security is concerned, this obviously depends on the administrator.
Simple things such as not using "admin" as the administrator, and NOT using
wp-admin as your path for the backend, proper file permissions on the WP
installation dir, etc, are all simple practices.

To say WP is just blogging software obviously means you haven't been paying
attention for the past 3 years.

------
alwillis
I guess someone should tell TechCrunch, BoingBoing, GigaOM and the rest of the
large sites on WordPress to stop using WordPress, because it's not a CMS, or
so we're being told.

What people don't seem to get that WordPress has been morphing from "just" a
blogging platform to a CMS ever since 3.0 shipped. It'll just be a matter of
time before most of the legacy stuff is gone and we'll have a CMS that can do
blogging instead of the other way around.

~~~
RandallBrown
TechCrunch, BoingBoing, and GigaOM are blogs though. That is specifically what
WordPress is designed for.

Sure, you can use WordPress as a pretty good CMS, but there are going to be
cases that WordPress chooses not to handle. Some of those cases seem to be
what this guy needs in his site, so he's not using WordPress. That's it.

~~~
alwillis
It's hard to say that TechCrunch is just a blog now; it's complex site with
millions of pages views that probably uses lots of the CMS features of
WordPress.

~~~
waitwhat
While it's true that TechCrunch-the-brand isn't just a blog now (it's an
event! it's awards! it's an investor! it's InternetDrama!),
www.techcrunch.com-the-website really is just a blog. A _big_ blog admittedly,
but still a blog.

And unless I'm missing something, www.techcrunch.com isn't even a complex
site: blog posts in the left-hand column followed by comments, a smattering of
basic widgets in the right-hand column, and ... uh ... that's it?

------
rafski
Plugins often cause more problems than they solve.

I had way too many situations where a plugin would break after a WordPress
update and the author wouldn't support it anymore.

Also, there are malicious plugins on WordPress.org with no direct way to
submit report or post a warning. Can you imagine a FaceBook widget that after
a while of use starts to promote some rogue site?

------
mladenkovacevic
I don't get what kind of business goes out recommending WordPress to a bunch
of clients as a CMS platform to begin with. I always thought WordPress was a
quick yet flexible blogging tool for a one-to-five-man team who doesn't want
to get into serious development but just needs to get some content out there.
In that regard WordPress does the job more than adequately. He cites
department heads and account managers giving him shit over how this or that
doesn't work. If they've all been getting a paycheck out of a free blogging
engine until now then it sure as hell seemed to have served their business
well. Throwing together a quick blog in WordPress is something you do for a
computer illiterate aunt who wants to write about her recipes.. probably not
something you'd want to build an entire business on.

~~~
alwillis
A business like TechCrunch, that was acquired by AOL last year?

~~~
mladenkovacevic
TechCrunch produces content and as such I'm sure they were well served by
WordPress.

The OP's company is in the business of selling WordPress-based solutions and
that to me seems like a shaky business at best. In another post the OP
clarified himself in saying that they are not a large business and mostly work
with non-profit and small organization without a large development budget so I
guess now his write-up makes more sense. But perhaps instead of ragging on
WordPress for not being something they were hoping it to be, they should be
thanking the authors of WordPress for for creating a tool and releasing it
free of charge allowing the OP's company to stay in business for this long.

------
posabsolute
Ranting much? wordpress is good at 2 things, blogs and simple websites, it
always been good at that (and will probably stay the easiest solution for
that)

His company requirements outgrew Wordpress, its how you can resume that big
article.. I also don't understand his 'windows' problems? I guess he is
talking about ie7 and less, and well in a beta you can expect problems with
legacy.

Your a real wp dev? well you know where to draw the line where wordpress
becomes a drag, and act consequently, that does not mean removing it entirely
from your stack, that just mean using something more custom when the situation
arise.

I'm sorry but 3/4 of the world web agencies can't create a better user
experience as far as the administration panel is concern.. It's the best bang
for buck for simple content and blog websites.

Maybe this guy just got the wrong people around him too..

------
hippich
Having quite a lot of experience with clients wanting to build next social
network, yelp, online store using word press, I wrote article "Why Wordpress
is Bad" - [http://www.yepcorp.com/blogs/pavel-karoukin/why-wordpress-
ba...](http://www.yepcorp.com/blogs/pavel-karoukin/why-wordpress-bad.html) a
while ago.

tl;dr; Wordpress is great for a blog. I think they put a lot of effort to make
UI perfect for single user blog. And it is easy to install. But what happens
next - people try to do something with wordpress it not supposed to do. And
that's where problems start comming.

------
datums
why have a tester work on a beta version? It's free software labelled Beta ,
it doesn't load on IE x , this happens. If it was released as stable, then
there's a reason. You wouldn't be deploying the beta version to your clients
anyway. But here is the point. You are running a for profit business, use a
tool that fits the needs of your clients and the skill set of your staff. Have
it built. WordPress doesn't have the features you need, things you want are
not on the roadmap, and it's buggy. Why didn't you switch away earlier ?

------
paul9290
What is a better CMS solution? I have client who is asking me to build a
WordPress CMS, but after reading this I'd like to hear what the better and
easier (to implement & use) alternatives are.

~~~
whatusername
Does your client have a large team of people who will be editing this CMS?
Things like workflow management are essential if you're running sites like:
<http://technet.microsoft.com> or <http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/>

Not so much the website/blog of a startup of 10 people. For that kind of use-
case -- Wordpress is awesome.

------
joshu
I still think we need to split up hosting, editing, etc:
<http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/12/blogging-tools.html>

------
tumpak
• If you are looking for an All-in-one Content Management System, I doubt
WordPress or any other competitors would satisfy you.

• WordPress comes with an attitude and a path. And as long as you are in this
same attitude and path, you are fine. Otherwise it's best to part ways...and
stop complaining...

• You should have spent more time building plugins to complement the WordPress
System. You waited for others to deliver to you... (which is a bad call for a
developer of your stature)

------
reustle
This is what happens when you try to use a blog as a CMS.

~~~
antidaily
It's a fine CMS... better than most.

------
mknx
I no longer accept and build projects using WordPress. These days, I stick
with FuelPHP. Good authentication and blog package to start with.

------
wildmXranat
I'm too tired to climb on my open source high chair to scream it out loud, so
I'll gently say: come again - what ? WordPress was, is and will remain a blog
platform and not a CMS. It is open source, so if you have the balls to charge
oodles of money for managing it, maybe you hire guys to fix the bugs yourself.

It looks like it wasn't the right tool to base the business on.

------
ereckers
He'll be back. Why? Because building and maintaining the alternative that he's
asking for and had failed to mention is hard. Looking at his blogging history
I see a shit ton of it revolves around WordPress, which I'm assuming roughly
matches up with the client work dedicated to WordPress. I'm looking forward to
the followup post.

------
reedlaw
I'm surprised there's no mention of the vulnerabilities in Wordpress or its
plugins. I've had nothing but virus infestations on nearly every Wordpress
install I've set up. I'm sure the problem lies more with the random plugins,
but Wordpress itself sure makes it easy to find and install plugins with no
kind of security audit.

~~~
Karunamon
Not sure how this is a problem with Wordpress. I'm sure a critical analysis
of, say, the Firefox and Chrome plugins sites would turn up some quantity of
malware as well.

The trick is to not download random plugins; stick to things with lots of
reviews and lots of downloads. Installing some security plugins will help
(WebsiteDefender, both the plugin and the service, is a good example), as will
putting your site behind a protective CDN like CloudFlare (and since they're
free, there's really no good reason not to do this..)

------
ullrich
Is this blog post about moving away from wordpress? I can't tell because if
so, the new blog seems to be down.

------
rvkennedy
In the OP: _they dont have a Tester. They just load it on their MacBooks and
presume it works for the other 95% of the world_

Really, wordpress.org users are the testers, wordpress.com users are the
customers. I'd love to hear what the OP now recommends though, that would
provide some good perspective.

~~~
dextorious
Really? You have to ask?

Tons of free software projects have ESTABLISHED testing procedures. Have some
of your developers/project members sit and check it is OK before shipping it.

Even more so, if you have a huge company and PAID developers on the project
(Automatic).

------
odddogmedia
I work at a firm that employs WordPress to build simple B2B and B2C websites.
We share many of the same opinions as this author, and even more shortcomings
come to mind:

1) Unable to change content types 2) Funneled into the "Blog" post type, which
is simply called "Posts", with no easy way to kill this off and create your
own 3) User group management

The list could go on forever.

However, if the shoe doesn't fit, why force it? Did the author ever consider
using (or building) a CMS that fit the needs of the project?

Also, it's an open source piece of software. Why not contribute some time
yourself and fix the problem related to moderate_comments
(<http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4802>)?

Other than that, this post is a bit infuriating as it lacks background as well
as a solution. Thanks for letting us know you'll no longer choose WordPress as
your (seemingly only) choice of CMS. And thanks for not providing one ounce of
helpful insight for how to improve the problem or what the alternatives are.

~~~
Jem
> 1) Unable to change content types 2) Funneled into the "Blog" post type,
> which is simply called "Posts", with no easy way to kill this off and create
> your own

[http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/register_post_...](http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/register_post_type)
?

~~~
odddogmedia
Try creating a custom post type and adding a handful of posts to it.

Now try moving those posts to a different post type.

Not so easy, now is it?

------
Johnyma22
We're currently working on Etherpad Lite into Wordpress which addresses some
of his issues.

------
redthrowaway
What's with the current trend of using 18pt font for body in blogs? It's
unreadable. Choose a more reasonable font and make the margins bigger.

------
amuraru
Then the author should migrate his own blog from WP.

~~~
calloc
Why? Just because he is no longer using it for business purposes doesn't mean
it isn't still perfect for what it was designed to do, blogging.

~~~
kels
I think he means if you are going to hate, hate on it all the way.

~~~
kevinjohn
"I love WordPress. With it, I have felt a genuine affinity for a product the
likes of which is matched only by my Commodore64."

Who's hating?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>" _It will be exceptionally strange for me to no longer recommend WordPress._
"

So presumably this is hyperbole and you'd still recommend it, only for a more
limited range of sites.

The big question, as others have said I think, is what do you now recommend?

------
bialecki
On the WSIYWYG editor note, what are the CMS platforms out there that are much
better (or just better)? I thought WP's was pretty good.

~~~
krogsgard
That's a good example of one of his points that's way off base.

For one, WP is always trying to improve the WYSIWYG experience, but if you're
not happy just look at all the alternatives available for free in the plugin
repository <http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/wysiwyg> \- some with
very high adoption and ratings.

You could even integrate with markdown if you wanted
<http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/markdown> \- what other CMS has
these kinds of options in the writing experience?

------
justindocanto
I try to write constructive replies to posts like this... but you sir, are an
idiot. I wish I could down vote this.

I've used 9/10 CMS's in the market right now, and although there are the
occasional mishaps, it's still the best CMS regardless. Some will say it's
only a blogging engine, but it has enough functionality, when used correctly,
to battle most CMS systems. Especially with it being free... you have
absolutely no room to complain.

------
nikcub
can someone please clarify what you mean by these points?

* document management (I assume more like an enterprise CMS)

* link management (outbound links on posts? detect 404s?)

* publishing options

* 'application'

------
earle
"WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog."
\--Wordpress.com

RTFM.

------
scottschulthess
Wordpress can't please everyone. Stop bitching and write your own.

------
donbronson
i find it ironic that the site complaining about wordpress is still powered by
wordpress

------
Tichy
What will they use instead?

------
jsavimbi
I find it hard to criticize the author for his obvious misunderstanding of the
purpose of a certain piece of software and its inability to be anything other
than what it is, as many people have tried and continue to try and convert
their particular flavor of blogging software into the mess that is CMS and god
forbid, an app.

It serves neither purpose well and someone who who claims to have been working
on the internets ever since their immaculate inception should know better than
to recommend [hosted] Wordpress to anyone other than the random dreamer who
still thinks that they need a website from which to pontificate. In good
conscience, I no longer even do that, as I find it to be a cruel exercise to
inflict on someone who's otherwise harmless.

------
CubicleNinjas
WordPress has all of the things listed if you use a plugin. You just have to
do a search.

If the inability to moderate a comment is your biggest argument against a
system, then I look forward to the follow-up post in six months when you truly
try to implement any of the other "major CMS'".

Many people here are mentioning that this isn't what WordPress was built for –
and this is true. But WP can be used amazingly well for any style of site. The
fact is it has a hockey stick curve of usage because it does make a wonderful
web backend.

My biggest curiosity is Drupal. After implementing it for major clients,
managing it for major clients, and working with many developers who swear by
it, I've never seen it work well for user or admin. It just seems so
terrifyingly inbred.

------
skeptical
Really? Did he really expect wordpress would ship those specific features out
of the box? Come on. That is not even a mater of feature richness, it's simply
keeping it bloat free to some extent.

I can agree with him on things like lack of a fancy wysiwyg, but workflows?
Multi side admin? Pay someone to implement that for you if you don't want to
do it yourself.

There are more important issues with wordpres that should be solved: built in
support for syntax highlight, a fancier javascript image gallery browser, etc.
A simpler more effective plugin system (current one is an unmitigated mess).
Others cool stuff have been added lately such as drag and drop uploads.

This guy is expecting to have someone coding a custom software for him just
because it's available with GPL license. Non-sense.

------
xxiao
i stopped reading immediately when i saw CMS. you're using the wrong tool,
that's it, don't cut your feet to fit in your favorite shoe. and save your
time(and ours) to write this, it's just the wrong tool for CMS, and it's not
wordpress's fault!

------
gregbair
Repeat after me:

Wordpress is not a CMS. It's a blogging engine.

------
javadyan
Why would you want to use a blogging engine as a CMS?

------
lux
I'm mainly tired of helping friends and clients fix Wordpress security
breaches. That's why I've been working on a clean php5.3+ alternative:
<http://www.elefantcms.com/>

~~~
rickmb
I usually try to be respectful of anybody making the effort of publishing open
source code, but I'm getting pretty tired of you spamming your CMS everywhere
I look.

Especially since it is made up of exactly the same kind of procedural
spaghetti that makes WordPress such a joy to work with... "clean php5.3+" my
ass.

~~~
lux
Just because I'm not using PSR-0 in my core (which has its issues, not the
least of which is unnecessary verbosity, esp. for core classes in a
framework), doesn't mean my code is spaghetti.

And I'm not spamming when I contribute an anecdote or other information to a
discussion, or when I post a request for feedback on r/php. Startups come to
HN to post their launches and updates all the time and it's not spam. Go look
at the front page right now and count the number of open source projects
making announcements. I've made exactly one story submission to HN about my
project, and I've mentioned it while contributing to a discussion a total of
four times in six months.

