Wordpress for Web App?

[Dillinga]

Hi Guys,

I'm starting to look at CMS's and frameworks for a new site idea of mine which really is more of a web app for a specific purpose rather than a shop window / news / community type site.

I have looked at Drupal and Wordpress from the CMS side and CI from the framework site.

I really like Wordpress and I know I can write my own plugins (and use others to some extent) to fulfil my requirements but I can't help but feel I'm going about it all wrong and should go the framework route. I have minimal design skills so the range and quality of some of the Wordpress templates is appealing.

So the question is....is Wordpress a good choice for the non standard but not overly complex site?

Or go CI (or other) and pay for a decent front end design?

Thanks

 

[Sir SpankalotUK]

you really need to explain more about what the end goals are, personally I am developing a web app at work based off bootstrap (framework).

 

[visibleman]

As mentioned, if it's the frontend you're struggling with then there are plenty of frontend frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation where you can purchase theme's etc.
And obviously there are plenty of backend frameworks for what ever language you're using - PHPCake etc.

If you're needing something more custom than off the shelf, then personally i wouldn't think of building a web app based off a CMS like Wordpress. Primarily because it'll end up being rather 'bloaty', unless you plan to strip out unwanted functionality, and you'll no doubt have to resort to 'bodges' to get the CMS to do what you want.

 

[Dillinga]

Thanks guys I completely forgot about Bootstrap! That could be the answer for me. Also been looking at JQuery/KendoUI which have come a long way so perhaps that would help me put up a reasonable front end initially then theme it later on when the back-end is complete

Maybe the next question is which framework!!

 

[RoyMi6]

Just to throw a spanner in the works there's a good plugin for WordPress simple called "Custom Fields" that I used to create an entirely new Staff and Research types within wordpress.

The plugin lets you create relationships between the two and creates all the interface for you.

It's really quite powerful.

 

[Dillinga]

Just to throw a spanner in the works there's a good plugin for WordPress simple called "Custom Fields" that I used to create an entirely new Staff and Research types within wordpress.

The plugin lets you create relationships between the two and creates all the interface for you.

It's really quite powerful.

Will take a look thanks

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

Make your own front end design, it's just the same as a normal HTML site in that regard. I make web apps using WordPress as the CMS and then write all the front end myself. It's pretty awesome. Can be a challenge mashing plugins together sometimes and adding in the features I need that plugins don't provide but I have fun while I do it.

 

[Fallen god]

From my experience with WordPress and Drupal I would much rather use Drupal, for the following reasons.

• WordPress has a lot of the code in the theme, these just seems crazy too me
• Some of the WordPress core code is so bad
• Database calls are really slow on WordPress, won't be a big issue if its a smaller site, but one of the sites I moved recently to WordPress is 40k posts+ and a lot the quires to build a post takes well over 1second.
• Some pages have over 200 DB quiries too build
• Drupal 8 should include a lot of Symfony code, namely the routing system which is amazing
• Community plugins on Drupal tend to be of a much higher standard when compared to the WordPress counter parts.
• Drupal has a great permissions system built into it.

WordPress isn't bad. but I just found Drupal to be so much better.

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

From my experience with WordPress and Drupal I would much rather use Drupal, for the following reasons.

• WordPress has a lot of the code in the theme, these just seems crazy too me
• Some of the WordPress core code is so bad
• Database calls are really slow on WordPress, won't be a big issue if its a smaller site, but one of the sites I moved recently to WordPress is 40k posts+ and a lot the quires to build a post takes well over 1second.
• Some pages have over 200 DB quiries too build
• Drupal 8 should include a lot of Symfony code, namely the routing system which is amazing
• Community plugins on Drupal tend to be of a much higher standard when compared to the WordPress counter parts.
• Drupal has a great permissions system built into it.

WordPress isn't bad. but I just found Drupal to be so much better.

Drupal from what I've read ans from what I've see using it myself is a much better CMS but it is also MUCH harder to use properly. It is properly a CMS whereas WordPress is a blogging platform that is on its way to being a CMS. This is coming from a WordPress developer. There are a lot of things you can do to make sure WordPress runs quickly but, to be fair, you shouldn't have to do these things, it should jus the written well enough for it to run quickly no matter how much data there is.

 

[Fallen god]

Drupal from what I've read ans from what I've see using it myself is a much better CMS but it is also MUCH harder to use properly. It is properly a CMS whereas WordPress is a blogging platform that is on its way to being a CMS. This is coming from a WordPress developer. There are a lot of things you can do to make sure WordPress runs quickly but, to be fair, you shouldn't have to do these things, it should jus the written well enough for it to run quickly no matter how much data there is.

Yes I agree, Drupal is harder to pick up, WordPress was much easier to do some plugin work and so on, but some parts where crazy over complicated I found.

The quickness I found was a real issue for us, a lot of the core DB calls use things like select rows count which is much slower then doing a select and a count afterwards. Its not very slow but we have a lot of big sites across a few servers and if 1 query takes a bit too long it starts to build up quickly.

Most of the work I have done is with MVC frameworks but I have spent 6 months on Drupal and Wordpress. Drupal it is harder to use it as intended but once you understand how it works it seems very good.

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

Yes I agree, Drupal is harder to pick up, WordPress was much easier to do some plugin work and so on, but some parts where crazy over complicated I found.

The quickness I found was a real issue for us, a lot of the core DB calls use things like select rows count which is much slower then doing a select and a count afterwards. Its not very slow but we have a lot of big sites across a few servers and if 1 query takes a bit too long it starts to build up quickly.

Most of the work I have done is with MVC frameworks but I have spent 6 months on Drupal and Wordpress. Drupal it is harder to use it as intended but once you understand how it works it seems very good.

I agree with that. I've dipped a toe into Drupal once or twice but I haven't got the time to get to grips with it and I've used WordPress for sites with hundreds of pages and thousands of posts and not had any performance issues. Perhaps I'm doing something a little different to yourself??? Would like to get accomplished with more then just WordPress.

 

[PeterPanny]

Wordpress makes things simpler for the end user and drupal organizes ode better for the developer. Bootstrap should be the way to go for the OP.

 

[Fallen god]

I agree with that. I've dipped a toe into Drupal once or twice but I haven't got the time to get to grips with it and I've used WordPress for sites with hundreds of pages and thousands of posts and not had any performance issues. Perhaps I'm doing something a little different to yourself??? Would like to get accomplished with more then just WordPress.

Well, the company decided it was best to out source the project and we got back a a huge turd of a project. Some of the issues where just bad SQL querys, things where it had 3 subqueries none of which could be stored in memcache. I got around most of those it just some of the core DB cores like the loop are still a bit slower then I would like for huge traffic sites.

The issues isn't a big deal now since we have almost everything behind memcache it was more that I just didn't expect the performance to be so bad. All the other wordpress sites we had only had 50k views a month then we just added this beast with 1m+ unique users a month so it just hammered everything.

I had to also work on Drupal ones and it was very very confusing, you really need to know what your doing before you should start working on it, needless to say I had to redo most of the things I did in my first month lol. But overally it seems like a decent CMS system just a bit more complicated but its targeted more at developers I think.

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

Well, the company decided it was best to out source the project and we got back a a huge turd of a project. Some of the issues where just bad SQL querys, things where it had 3 subqueries none of which could be stored in memcache. I got around most of those it just some of the core DB cores like the loop are still a bit slower then I would like for huge traffic sites.

The issues isn't a big deal now since we have almost everything behind memcache it was more that I just didn't expect the performance to be so bad. All the other wordpress sites we had only had 50k views a month then we just added this beast with 1m+ unique users a month so it just hammered everything.

I had to also work on Drupal ones and it was very very confusing, you really need to know what your doing before you should start working on it, needless to say I had to redo most of the things I did in my first month lol. But overally it seems like a decent CMS system just a bit more complicated but its targeted more at developers I think.

Echo my feelings on Drupal. Maybe over the Christmas break, in a few years! lol.

WordPress can be tricky. It's got to be done right otherwise it breaks, being fragile may be a negative for WP but, you should be writing code properly so it shouldn't matter. It's a particular group of devs who don't do it well, the sort that are in a production/factory environment. Not bad coders in that they now their stuff but are truly shocking when it comes to writing it. It's like they just take snippets from a master file and whack em in here there and everywhere hoping it'll work. Nightmare!!!