WordPress

Opmerkingen: Wordpress allows me to run a successful business building websites quickly and cost effectively. The various plugins and extensions have allowed me to create services of my own which I provide online.

Pluspunten: Probably the best thing about wordpress is it's flexibility. You can build a beautiful site, blog, shop, or pretty much anything on the platform. The version you install is pretty plain but there are probably a good 100,000 free and paid for plugins that allow you to extend the functionality of the software. The version I use all the time is the self-install version which for anyone with a little technical knowledge and a willingness to learn will be a quick straightforward process to get up and running. Once installed you can quickly set up pages and blog posts combining photos and pretty much every type of media you like. If you like to code, you can get your hands dirty and change everything. If not you can stick with pre-made themes and tools. Another huge pro is the astounding amount of free information and tutorials available online so if you do have a problem, someone will have already had the same, fixed it and explain how you can do it too.

Minpunten: So wordpress is free but you will need somewhere to host a site which can be a cost issue depending on the volume of traffic you expect. If you are not willing to learn how to set up the system and work methodically then it's probably not for you. There are some technical skills to be learnt so if that's not your bag then it's probably better to keep away or you'll end up getting frustrated.

Opmerkingen: Initially I was searching for a way to create and save tech-related notes, then link to relevant others, and search the entire pile. That was years ago (and I found some other software more suitable to that task). WordPress creators listen to the community that develops with it and the end users. So it has continued to evolve and adapt to the way the community uses and wants to use it. Over the years WordPress has served my needs as a blog, front page for a static website, content management system and ecommerce platform.

Pluspunten: WordPress evolves, adapts and is lovingly wrapped around by a caring community of coders, developers, techies, and users alike. I began using WordPress before it was worthy of a full integer (it was like version 0.4!). I was impressed with it then even though I used it as a storage place for tech-related notes. I watched it evolve from a mostly blog engine to an enviable content management system. And adapt from being primarily in the purview of hobbyists to become a serious tool in the business realm. I remain impressed by (and grateful to) the community that creates for it, tweaks and supports it, and teaches others how to achieve the results they're seeking.

Minpunten: Oh the woes associated with upgrading! I've had a few because while the software will always warn you to backup and backup and know what you're doing, it can't foresee every possible thing that can go wrong. So it will sometimes break things. Or some ill-coded plugins will bork your site when you upgrade WordPress. My other least favorite thing about WordPress is the WordPress Plugin Repository. I don't think it is designed well enough to rule out bad actors (who create crappy pieces of software that causes problems for your WordPress site). Finally, although I applaud WordPress for finally figuring out a way to "edit in place," I don't think Gutenberg is the answer.

Opmerkingen: WordPress is terrific. It gives us a platform where we can combine plugins and themes that speed up or automatically accomplish many otherwise-tedious tasks, but gives us options through plugins or back-end editing to add whatever functionality or customization we need. It is an exceptionally powerful open-source platform. Our only complaint is that the wide variety of options sometimes means that even simple tasks require a tremendous amount of involvement and decision-making. But these are few and far between.

Pluspunten: WordPress offers unmatched depth of customization
WordPress also offers a wide variety of attractive prebuilt themes, templates and simple front-end builders
The documentation and support is freely available and extremely helpful
The plugin store includes helpful information about each plugin to assist users in making choices about modifying their website

Minpunten: With great customization comes density of options—some tasks are excessively complex to achieve
Some utility tasks are offloaded to plugins, which necessitates a never-ending search for the right plugin to accomplish a basic task

Opmerkingen: I was able to develop custom websites (landing pages, as well as sites with more in-depth content, managed by an editorial team) that our customers were then able to fill with their own content and that would let them perform basic management tasks on their own.

Pluspunten: Wordpress makes it very easy for editorial staff and / or your customers to create and manage their own content for their own websites, leaving only theme design & development and development of special business functionality up to you. The process of which is also helped by the vast amount of plugins available for the platform. It's easy and efficient to create custom themes & functionality for Wordpress based websites and support is never far away thanks to the massive adoption-base it has.

Minpunten: The fact that Wordpress, at its core, still wants to be about blogging hinders its development. If it was reworked with the integration of custom content types & landing pages in mind, development of websites that aren't blogs (which is probably the majority of websites Wordpress is powering at this time) would go much easier.
Its underlying technologies, which feel like they're stuck in the days of PHP4, are also not nearly up-to-par with modern software development frameworks and environments. If you want to change the way a store-bought theme displays some values, you have to manually edit the theme's files, which you have to do over and over again if you update the theme, because Wordpress' hooks for software developers just won't cut it for most customisations.
Wordpress also doesn't have any concept of MVC-like (or any other) patterns for managing code & assets and it also lacks native support for any kind of build-system like grunt, gulp, or webpack.
In short: Wordpress is held back by its blogging roots and its resilience to acknowledging more modern approaches to web development.

Opmerkingen: We use WordPress to power a surprising number of content sites, many with more than a thousand articles (the largest site has over 10k total pages). This is a huge blessing from where we were just a few years ago with an expensive, development-heavy, closed-source behemoth.
The one thing we really don't intend to use WordPress for is the e-commerce area. We went with a special-purpose platform for that because we didn't want to cobble-together a ton of WooCommerce plugins.

Pluspunten: We use WordPress for more than ten websites, the top three of which have more than a million visitors per month. So, with the right hosting platform, WordPress can be "enterprise". What I like the most is that we've been able to train more than 50 content producers to easily use the system. There is so much self-help training (just not from WordPress itself, all 3p) out there that you can pretty much teach yourself anything. We especially like the SEO courses that all have modules about WordPress--that's crucial because trying to do SEO yourself, without good tools and processes, is a huge time sink. WordPress has so many plugins that you can find anything almost anything you need.

Minpunten: The greatest strength, the extensibility through plugins, is also a huge weakness. The "batteries not included" model means that you will spend a lot of time selecting, managing and updating plugins. This is still easier than coding site features yourself, but the all-in-one approach of competitors like Wix or Squarespace is pretty attractive if you don't want to configure a bunch of disparate pieces of software.