4 ms·

What other CMS is as easy to teach to end users, is free, and works 99% of the time? What other CMS can turn itself into an eCommerce store, blog, business webs

What other CMS is as easy to teach to end users, is free, and works 99% of the time? What other CMS can turn itself into an eCommerce store, blog, business website, magazine, etc with a few small tweaks? I hear a lot of these comments from very well respected developers, but as a user and webmaster (not a developer) of WordPress I am very satisfied with it, and rarely see a WordPress site that runs slow, with the exceptions of poorly coded themes which will slow down ANY CMS. I manage a lot of websites, probably 200 or so of them are WordPress. Over the last 5 years I've seen about 5 hacks, 3 were due to outdated plugins and 2 were brute forced. Backups are incredibly easy (file structure and database) for an end user with plugins, and maintenance for an average WordPress takes about 20 minutes per month. I think this discussion is very positive in the fact that the core of WordPress is very outdated and has not really been touched in the last 5 years (or more?) or so. I'd love to see version 5 or 6 be a full re-write or even a partial rewrite of the main functions and core includes, perhaps even a more efficient language but that is not really my territory. The problem I see with all that is backwards compatibility. There are so many themes, plugins, and addons that depend on WordPress core hooks, I don't know how that could work seamlessly. I suppose that is what beta testing is for. As I've already said in this thread, WordPress is a huge success in the mainstream and is gaining in popularity every day. 75 million WP sites last I checked vs a fraction of that in Drupal and Joomla. Node is on the rise but is still a custom solution and not deployable unless you are a skilled developer with knowledge of the network stack. We live in an age where end users want to be able to control their website backend. They want to blog, make changes to static pages, add images from events and even add their own products. Have you ever tried to teach someone to do this in Joomla and Drupal? I have, with success but it is 100x more difficult than WordPress.

harryf 12y ago
Sorry to rain on this party but... Wordpress is failing on mobile. Most of the themes are poorly optimized for mobile. For example open http://wordpress.org/news http://wordpress.org/news on your phone - there's so much mobile fail happening here, from the hamburger menu and the poor use of space at the top to tiny fonts and navigation elements. Over at blog.wordpress.com there's other fail going on, like the performance of opening the menu top left. Both of these reflect the general state of Wordpress themes from my experience. Meanwhile, aside from some app-based editing tools, Wordpress has completely failed to bring blog content to apps. The #1 use case here is for app developers who won't content from their blog to be available somewhere in their app. And actually it's not just Wordpress failing here. There's such a gap in the market that mobile marketing platforms like AppBoy are filling the gap with product features e.g. http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/appboy-reveals-in-app-news-feeds-to-increase-click-through-rates/544791 http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/appboy-reveals-in-app-news...
- rytis 12y ago
  > Wordpress is failing on mobile. I don't know much about WP, so I'm really curious, is it WP that is failing on mobile, or is it the poorly designed themes?
  - harryf 12y ago
    To me it's really that Wordpress developers / community are not taking mobile seriously. Poorly mobile optimized themes are just a symptom of the problem. The consequence is a generation of Mobile developers are ignoring Wordpress, at least in their apps. Wordpress needs to have a drop-in SDK that allows content from an app developers blog to be displayed in a friendly way in-app, plus push notifications / badges etc. to inform users of new content. How do you tell users about new features in your app for example? Then there are some deeper questions to answer like blog comments - do they make sense on mobile at all? Most people aren't going to write more than a sentence on their phone. What about finding different ways to provide feedback? Yelp for example spend a long time soul-searching about whether to allow reviews from mobile - http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/08/oh-snap-yelp-app-now-post-reviews-straight-from-your-mobile-device.html http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/08/oh-snap-yelp-app-now-po... - I don't think they found the answer but they certainly saw the problem. But that's another story...
  - BorisMelnik 12y ago
    100% poorly designed themes, WordPress does just fine on mobile and all of my websites pass Google's mobile testing tool which, is enough for me (and they look great.) I do admit that there are probably way more bad themes out there than good, and that most WP 'developers' do not stick to the codex / standards and just want to make money on themes.

harryf 12y ago

Sorry to rain on this party but... Wordpress is failing on mobile. Most of the themes are poorly optimized for mobile. For example open http://wordpress.org/news http://wordpress.org/news on your phone - there's so much mobile fail happening here, from the hamburger menu and the poor use of space at the top to tiny fonts and navigation elements. Over at blog.wordpress.com there's other fail going on, like the performance of opening the menu top left. Both of these reflect the general state of Wordpress themes from my experience. Meanwhile, aside from some app-based editing tools, Wordpress has completely failed to bring blog content to apps. The #1 use case here is for app developers who won't content from their blog to be available somewhere in their app. And actually it's not just Wordpress failing here. There's such a gap in the market that mobile marketing platforms like AppBoy are filling the gap with product features e.g. http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/appboy-reveals-in-app-news-feeds-to-increase-click-through-rates/544791 http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/appboy-reveals-in-app-news...

rytis 12y ago
> Wordpress is failing on mobile. I don't know much about WP, so I'm really curious, is it WP that is failing on mobile, or is it the poorly designed themes?
- harryf 12y ago
  To me it's really that Wordpress developers / community are not taking mobile seriously. Poorly mobile optimized themes are just a symptom of the problem. The consequence is a generation of Mobile developers are ignoring Wordpress, at least in their apps. Wordpress needs to have a drop-in SDK that allows content from an app developers blog to be displayed in a friendly way in-app, plus push notifications / badges etc. to inform users of new content. How do you tell users about new features in your app for example? Then there are some deeper questions to answer like blog comments - do they make sense on mobile at all? Most people aren't going to write more than a sentence on their phone. What about finding different ways to provide feedback? Yelp for example spend a long time soul-searching about whether to allow reviews from mobile - http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/08/oh-snap-yelp-app-now-post-reviews-straight-from-your-mobile-device.html http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/08/oh-snap-yelp-app-now-po... - I don't think they found the answer but they certainly saw the problem. But that's another story...
- BorisMelnik 12y ago
  100% poorly designed themes, WordPress does just fine on mobile and all of my websites pass Google's mobile testing tool which, is enough for me (and they look great.) I do admit that there are probably way more bad themes out there than good, and that most WP 'developers' do not stick to the codex / standards and just want to make money on themes.