advantages/disadvantages for building in Wordpress

Question

I work at a more traditional ad agency and I am the sole web guy here. Recently a designer here redesigned our website based on the popular blog style seen about on the internets at the moment. Design is similar to this blog: http://effektiveblog.com/

I put forward that this would be a Wordpress job, due to the designed features (tag cloud, dated/categorized posts, ability to be updated, rss, etc)

However, the non-web people at my workplace are saying they don't want to "do Wordpress" and are planning on out-sourcing a custom CMS for this blog-look-a-like site!

As you can imagine, this is very frustrating and back-to-front.

However, as I haven't really delved fully into Wordpress enough I don't fully know what arguments to put forward in regards to advantages/disadvatnages in building it with Wordpress vs a custom CMS.

Any thoughts on what to suggest to non-web superiors? or links even pointing to similar discussions?
:)

Answer 1

I know it's not the sort of feedback you want here, but I'm really hesitant to use Wordpress for anything serious because of the security-vulnerability-of-the-week (complete with zero day viral exploit by Russian organized crime) and compat-buster-upgrade-of-the-month situations.

Answer 2

I've been in the WordPress world for a few years and my observations have been that most of the "WordPress vs. other CMS" arguments boil down to a couple things:

• Ultimately, you could use WordPress for nearly any CMS task, and you could use a general CMS to build blog content
• WordPress was designed primarily as a blogging platform, so that's where it really shines. Yes, it can be used for other CMS tasks, but it does blogging best and that's where you'll find the most support and robust features.
• More general CMS systems will offer features designed for a variety of content (not just blog posts or static pages), but they won't offer as many features (or as easy of an experience) for the blogging component as WordPress will.

Generally I tell folks that if the focus of the site is frequently updated content that is managed in a chronological fashion (like a blog), go with WordPress. If they're looking to integrate a bunch of disparate content and blogging isn't really important, they'll probably be better served by a more general CMS.

Answer 3

Wordpress is great for blogs and mid size simple websites. It's "static pages" approach is really useful, because you can create hirarchies that are fully editable from admin panel. It's plugin ecosystem is very good also - from SEO to automatic backups.

When I needed to convince some people that Wordpress would be a good idea to a CMS solution (not just a blog one), I created a prototype, and said that I just needed to edit a few php files (all copied from the default template), a few administration tasks and a few plugins and I was all set.

This prototype was really simple: no design, just structure. I made it in a saturday afternoon, and I made a challenge to everyone involved if they could create the same structure I created, with a full admin interface, in less time. No one could. And it's a tested plataform, yes, it's not "all MVC based", but it works and its administration is great to use.

I don't know if you have time to do it, but since is really fast to do it, I'd rather show them instead of just saying it.

One disadvantage of Wordpress is its performance. You may need to look at some cache plugins for your installation, like WpSuperCache. And be warned that if your website, in a long run, is going to have a lot of different requirements, Wordpress may not be the ideal solution.