WordPress: Delightfully easy, surprisingly powerful.
March 10, 2014
WordPress: Delightfully easy, surprisingly powerful.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
3.8.1
Modules Used
- WordPress SEO by Yoast
- LeadIn
- Formidable Pro
- Genesis
Overall Satisfaction
WordPress is a core part of our business, and it's even in our name! FlowPress comes from "For the Love of WordPress". We develop enterprise-level WordPress sites for our clients, and we use WordPress as an application framework for our own products. WordPress addresses the core problem of facilitating the effortless writing, publishing, and management of content in various forms.
I personally made the move to WordPress seven years ago, after working with other early platforms like Greymatter, Movable Type, and TextPattern.
I personally made the move to WordPress seven years ago, after working with other early platforms like Greymatter, Movable Type, and TextPattern.
- Rapidly building + launching websites. You can have a WordPress environment set up in minutes with relatively little technical know-how. This lowers the barrier to entry and is a great stepping stone for people who want to build their own site "from scratch".
- Stability. WordPress is built and supported by a global community of developers. The number of businesses, organizations, and independent professionals that depend on WordPress can't be matched by smaller CMS platforms or proprietary software. All this dependency makes WordPress too important to abandon.
- Customization. Thousands upon thousands of plugins and themes make WordPress far more than just a blogging tool. E-commerce (WooCommerce, Shopp, Exchange), online education, corporate intranets (P2, O2, Multisite). You don't need to be a developer to build great things with WordPress.
- Relatively easy learning curve. Once you become familiar with the administrator interface, you can jump from one WordPress site to the next and not have to re-learn everything.
- Legacy code. It's both a blessing and a curse for WordPress. The team does a lot to make sure plugins and themes don't break over time, but that respect for reverse-compatibility comes at a cost.
- Would be nice to see more modularity to build custom environments catered to different use cases. Basically, "strip out" functionality that isn't needed (e.g. multiple users in a personal blog) and create custom installation profiles/templates, a la Drupal.
- More intuitive/user-friendly controls for custom user roles and capabilities. Handled well via 3rd party plugins like Members and Role Scoper, but it'd be nice to see it in core WordPress as well.
- Improved Efficiency: By standardizing our development to work with WordPress, we've become intimately familiar with the platform, so it's far easier for us to spin up new projects. We don't spend as much time comparing different frameworks.
- Customer Training: WordPress has a strong enough brand that even non-techs have used, or at least heard of, the platform. The familiarity and relative ease-of-use makes for happier clients. That makes our lives easier with less friction on training and support.
- Business Development: WordPress has built up its own industry, and that industry gets along beautifully. WordPress-based businesses work together to get stuff done, whether it be through lead referrals, peer support, or just general camaraderie.
- Drupal,Concrete5,MODX,Joomla
There are plenty of other open-source content management systems out there.
Why did we go with WordPress?
Why did we go with WordPress?
- Thousands of plugins for quickly building out functionality.
- More developers = more support.
- Deceptively easy to get started as a user or developer.
- Very powerful, considering how easy it is to learn.
- Dominant marketshare makes it an easy sell for clients.