Sometimes WordPress Isn't the Right Choice
Wait, what? That’s sacrilegious for me to write a headline like that!
WordPress Tavern linked to a post by Kevinjohn Gallagher about his creative agency stopping the use of WordPress for clients. Gallagher points out these weaknesses in WordPress:
"WordPress has either no, or severely limited:
- Document management
- Workflow management
- Digital asset management
- Link management
- User management
- ESI Caching / CDN ability.
- WYSIWYG editing
- Single Sign-on
- Multi-side Admin
- Publishing options
- Access Management
- Application
- Multi-lingual
- n-to-n content sharing
- Reporting"
As one of the commenters points out – there is no perfect CMS. Each user’s needs differ vastly – especially enterprise clients. And as John James Jacoby says, Gallagher’s “they” are us. We can change the course of WordPress in a number of ways to make it more like the perfect content management system. You just can’t say that about proprietary systems.
Some of the proprietary systems do some of the things that Gallagher wants better, but none of them handles the user experience or ease of installation/updates better than WordPress. That’s something to remember. WordPress has nailed that pretty well, and can continue to build on it.
What do you think? Is WordPress as weak as Gallagher makes it sound?
Update: January 14, 2012: I’m sharing this comment send by Kevinjohn Gallagher. It’s good because it points out some poor wording on my part:
Hi David, just to clarify, (I know you didn’t say this, but I’ve had it e-mailed to me that I did based on your article) I never once said WordPress was weak.
I love WordPress, and use it on my personal sites (not all blogs), and my small agency has used it as our go-to CMS for years. My staff no longer wanted to use it, and I acquiesced.
“Some of the proprietary systems do some of the things that Gallagher wants better, but none of them handles the user experience or ease of installation/updates better than WordPress.”
This was absolutely true about 18-12 months ago. I can think of think of at least 2 CMS solutions that do that right now. Though they are not accessible to everyone, the old adage of how good WordPress looks goes out the window when a sizeable percentage of your clients are what WordPress consideres “edge cases”.
And I know you’ve not said it, but its been reported everywhere else so I’m adding it here, I have NEVER called for any of these features to be added to WordPress. I just said it didn’t have them.
Anyway, thanks for your time.
Kevinjohn