To wordpress or not to wordpress?

[peppericious]

Hi all.

 

I know the answer to this question depends on a wide variety of factors, but....

 

It's just that I've developed quite a few sites for friends and acquaintances using php and MySql. Each time, I've more or less started from scratch, developing a custom back end where blog posts, news updates, etc, etc can be made. (I've done the html/css front end for these sites, too.)

 

As I've developed sites, I've built a little repository of php/mysql functions that I reuse and this has speeded up my workflow quite considerably.

 

I'm wondering, though, if I'm needlessly reinventing the wheel.

 

My questions: are you guys 'n gals using WP as the primary starting points for your web dev projects?... Most of the time? Sometimes? All the time?

Are there compelling reasons why you do - or do not - use WP as opposed to 'starting from scratch'?

 

I know, I know, my question is probably hopelessly broad... Anyway, I just wanted some of your views.

 

TIA

[trq]

Your dead right about this question being hard to answer based on the fact that there are a lot of different factors involved.

 

From someone that has been developing (mostly backend stuff) for a long time both as a freelancing and as an employee, I'm going to put it this way.

 

If I wanted to get a freelance business (and portfolio) off the ground quickly, Wordpress would definitely be the first application I turned to. It is extremely easy to get things done, and it works very well. Having siad that however, from a developers perspective, I would hate to have to work with it every day. It is (IMO) poorly written and suffers numerous floors in it's approach. My biggest gripe? Globals. They are fucking everywhere. As such, you need to take a great deal of care when writing code for WP.

 

Given the time, I would much prefer to build a CMS on top of a decent framework myself. Of course, this isn't something to take lightly however. I would expect such a CMS to probably eat up the best part of a year in development. For someone trying to start a business, this kind of time investment often doesn't seem viable.

 

So yeah, I guess in summary I would say this. If I wanted to get the ball rolling on my business quickly, I'd go worth Wordpress, If I was planning on being in business for a long time, I would likely spend the time up front to develop a system that I myself was happy with.

[peppericious]

Your dead right about this question being hard to answer based on the fact that there are a lot of different factors involved.

 

From someone that has been developing (mostly backend stuff) for a long time both as a freelancing and as an employee, I'm going to put it this way.

 

If I wanted to get a freelance business (and portfolio) off the ground quickly, Wordpress would definitely be the first application I turned to. It is extremely easy to get things done, and it works very well. Having siad that however, from a developers perspective, I would hate to have to work with it every day. It is (IMO) poorly written and suffers numerous floors in it's approach. My biggest gripe? Globals. They are fucking everywhere. As such, you need to take a great deal of care when writing code for WP.

 

Given the time, I would much prefer to build a CMS on top of a decent framework myself. Of course, this isn't something to take lightly however. I would expect such a CMS to probably eat up the best part of a year in development. For someone trying to start a business, this kind of time investment often doesn't seem viable.

 

So yeah, I guess in summary I would say this. If I wanted to get the ball rolling on my business quickly, I'd go worth Wordpress, If I was planning on being in business for a long time, I would likely spend the time up front to develop a system that I myself was happy with.

 

I appreciate your thoughts on this.

 

The small amount of dabbling I've done in WP has certainly revealed great potential. It's just that for each of the dozen or so projects I've done already, WP would simply have been overkill.

 

The nice aspect about my own workflow so far is that I understand everything that's going on in the code I've written... because I've written it!

 

However, the bandaging and manipulating of WP code (lots of which I don't understand) makes me uncomfortable. To cater for those people who say 'I want a site... built on wordpress...', however, I guess I'm going to have to bite the bullet, dig in, and figure out how to customise it.

[JonnoTheDev]

As mentioned already by Thorpe, WP is a bag of balls to develop on. It's code is a mish-mash as it has progressed from v1 to the current release with no proper overhaul. However, from a user perspective, it works well. IMO, unless one of your clients requires a lot of the functionality that WP offers, I would not use it as a base platform. Stick to your own code. As you have said, you are building a nice library up and the more things you create using it in different projects, the less time it will take to do future projects as you can re-use bits. Honestly, if a client asks for a modification to a site running on WP, it could take you the same amount of time to figure out how to make the change from reading through all sorts of resources that it does to build in from scratch in your own app.

 

There is another option however. You could use WP as a platform for new clients who want lots of features and it doing quickly. At the same time, replicate these features in your own code. When these clients start asking for major mods, you can sell them an upgrade and port them over to your own platform. Where I work we went down a similar route with e-commerce sites. I was building our own app from the ground up but at the same time we were using off the shelf e-commerce platforms for new clients and just creating templates for them. When these clients wanted new bits adding, if it was too much to modify the code, we ported them over to our own platform.

[peppericious]

As mentioned already by Thorpe, WP is a bag of balls to develop on. It's code is a mish-mash as it has progressed from v1 to the current release with no proper overhaul. However, from a user perspective, it works well. IMO, unless one of your clients requires a lot of the functionality that WP offers, I would not use it as a base platform. Stick to your own code. As you have said, you are building a nice library up and the more things you create using it in different projects, the less time it will take to do future projects as you can re-use bits. Honestly, if a client asks for a modification to a site running on WP, it could take you the same amount of time to figure out how to make the change from reading through all sorts of resources that it does to build in from scratch in your own app.

 

There is another option however. You could use WP as a platform for new clients who want lots of features and it doing quickly. At the same time, replicate these features in your own code. When these clients start asking for major mods, you can sell them an upgrade and port them over to your own platform. Where I work we went down a similar route with e-commerce sites. I was building our own app from the ground up but at the same time we were using off the shelf e-commerce platforms for new clients and just creating templates for them. When these clients wanted new bits adding, if it was too much to modify the code, we ported them over to our own platform.

 

This is very helpful and encouraging advice. The wp-as-platform-for-new-clients option running in parallel with my own workflow is the way I'll proceed from now.

 

In fact, it has been my experience until now that, almost invariably, people don't know what they want in a new site. It seems that the first job in any web development project is organising the thoughts of the person who says "I was thinking about having a new website built..." When/if that person mentions WP, it's because they've heard someone else say it's the 'way to go', even if they have no idea whether that is, or isn't the case...