Is wordpress a good platform for webapp development?

Question

I am planning a webapp to control bank paying orders. In a quick review, the user goes online and creates a payment order. This order goes to other people that pays it and register the payment on the system. The system keeps track of all the payments, keeping the account balance up-to-date. The system needs a login system, bank integration, and to support at some point thousands of clients.

We can find articles on the web about the benefits of using wordpress platform to build webapps. However, I could not find discussion with counterarguments to user wordpress. As the platform the most important choice in webapp project, I would to know more about the pitfalls and harms for choosing wordpress.

The question is: What are the benefits and harms for choosing wordpress as a development platform for a webapp that need to be integrated with other system (backend systems) and to handle thousands of users (does it scale up?)?

Answer 1

In my opinion: No. Wordpress is fine as a very feature-rich Web log, but doesn't have a clean code base, is quite bloated, has a large memory footprint, and has an extremely very slow user interface in the back-end.

If you use WP as a back-end to a web app, you will be automatically vulnerable by whatever security holes become public. From what I have worked in the code, it's not really opimization friendly, either.

Also, Wordpress is by nature built and optimized for the output of blog content. All this functionality doesn't really interest you for your web application.

I would definitely go with a PHP Framework that is leaner and easier to customize to your needs. I won't recommend any here because there is already a plethora of questions on SO discussing the pros and cons of every framewrok in existence. Related:

• Search for "PHP Framework"
• What PHP framework would you choose for a new application and why?
• PHP Framework Decision - Analysis paralysis!

Answer 2

Wordpress sure is very extensible, but if you're not using its main feature (i.e. publishing content) then I think there is no point in basing a web app on it. You might find other CMS more useful.

What I personally dislike about wordpress is that its structure almost forces you to mix PHP code with markup, and its inconsistent function naming and behavior.

Answer 3

No, Wordpress is a blogging framework. Trying to use it for a payment handling system is like putting lipstick on a pig.

Answer 4

Wordpress isn't a platform or framework - it's an application. Granted, it's a large application suitable for extension with plugins, which makes it look like a kind-of platform, but in truth it isn't. Hence, building upon Wordpress as a platform is needlessly constraining. It is a web-log application, and you will have to live within these constraints - your application will look like one large blog plugin. I doubt this is what you want.

Use a proper web-framework, like Rails (Ruby), Django (Python) or something PHP-based, if that's where your allegiance lies.

Applications that may be more suitable for extension are CMSes like Drupal (PHP-based). These are more general than web-logs, though still I wouldn't base a completely custom application on them.

Answer 5

There are plenty to choose from, Wordpress seems far too document oriented for your application.