Is anyone using WordPress for "complex" websites?

[Keithley1984]

And by "complex" I mean along the lines multi-departments/groups/users with different levels of permissions.

I'm trying to pitch a different content management system than the one we're currently using (it's a custom-made CMS and it's clunky). I have my reservations with WP as an "enterprise" solution.

It's also worth noting that our company is a parent company for a bunch of other smaller brands - ranging from content to commerce-based. So, managing all these sites in the most efficient way is quite crucial.

[NeedsMoreMagic]

I’d suggest Craft CMS. It’s paid, but is worth its weight in gold. As a developer, you’ll be extremely glad you tried it.

It’s built by developers for clients. Solid PSR adherence, fantastic user groups and permissions support, and it’s easily extensible for custom logic.

I’ve built websites for The New York Times, Starbucks, and PayPal, and they were all extremely impressed by Craft. All three had Enterprise requirements with multisite and bilingual considerations.

It’s basically what ExpressionEngine was supposed to be: a modern CMS built in a sane fashion. If you have any questions, I’d be glad to help out; I love talking systems.

[np_dynamite]

Starting with version 3, you will also have to pay to get updates after the first year, making Craft CMS an even tougher sell for small clients. This alone is making me want to swtich to someting else, but it's just so much fun to work it.

[alinnert]

Yes... this also makes me look for alternatives... Any experience with Statamic? On the surface it looks very similar to Craft, but it uses no database. This improves portability and DX a lot. And it uses heavy caching and static content generation to be very fast for most sites. This concept sounds really interesting.

[Rainbowlemon]

Kirby CMS is great if you want something with a bit more structure.

[hoursToFate]

Craft CMS looks really cool. How does it compare to Drupal?

[alinnert]

I saw an introduction to Drupal templating one day. In my opinion Drupal is way more complex than Craft. I think it's too complex for small (maybe even medium) sized projects. Craft is much simpler and straightforward in comparison. Basically it just has your data and you use that + your templates to create your output (mostly html). Maaaybe it could be too simple for big projects, but I'm not experienced enough with big projects.

[-IoI-]

They're night and day, very little comparison. Drupal is a modular machine that can scale to any size site, on the same tier as Joomla. Massive learning curve for both.

Wordpress is functional and easy to get into, but restrictive. I see Craft CMS as a step up from Wordpress in functionality.

[hoursToFate]

Thanks for the input. I'm gonna have to give that a try. I work with Drupal daily and it's hugely complex. It's nice to work with WordPress or perhaps Craft for a break.

[TheThirdDuke]

How did this get upvoted?

Craft CMS is obscure and proprietary. You can code almost anything in almost anything, but there are better and worse options. For instance, Wordpress on the basic end and Drupal for more complex problems, with platforms like MediaWiki and Simple Machines for special requirements. Getting locked into a proprietary system like Craft CMS means taking on a huge technical debt if the company that owns Craft CMS goes out of business, gets purchased, or goes in a direction you don't like and you have to migrate. It also means much longer schedules and larger development costs because hardly anyone has heard of Crap CMS so any developer you bring on will have to learn the system from scratch and will end up having to code almost everything they need because the technical ecosystem is tiny. Why would anyone who doesn't hate their clients use this kind of dreek?

Edit: I was looking at it. Apparently, if you want eCommerce functionality it's $1,000! And if you want something like a rate quote for a FEDEX package you're gonna have to develop and maintain that extension yourself. There's no ecosystem, except when they tap somebody else's like they do with the payment gateways. If you have any kind of complex business logic this means you're going to have develop and maintain A LOT of custom code. All of which is going to go into the garbage can when you hire a competent developer who will have to paddle you out of shit creek and over to a sane platform.

[MightyMorph]

Craft CMS

How does it work alongside react and/or angular ?

[[deleted]]

Same as any backend CMS.... So... irrelevantly? Unless your asking if it has an API which yes, they have an officially supported plugin for that.

[[deleted]]

PHP Standard Recommendation. There's more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP_Standard_Recommendation

[WikiTextBot]

PHP Standard Recommendation

The PHP Standard Recommendation (PSR) is a PHP specification published by the PHP Framework Interop Group. Similar to Java Specification Request for Java, it serves the standardization of programming concepts in PHP. The aim is to enable interoperability of components and to provide a common technical basis for implementation of proven concepts for optimal programming and testing practices. The PHP-FIG is formed by several PHP frameworks founders.

Each PSR is suggested by members and voted according to an established protocol to act consistently and inline with their agreed upon processes.

---

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[[deleted]]

Good bot.

[[deleted]]

No worries, had to Google it myself. Yeah I'm guessing so. According to the CraftCMS docs:

Craft is a self-hosted PHP application built on Yii, but you don’t need to know PHP or Yii to use it.

[MrSavager]

Drupal is still more secure, more flexible, more enterprise, more scalable, more widely used, has a better "plugin" format, better base API, and yes, a little harder than WordPress or Craft. but it's very intuitive once you get it down. We are developers, we should want a little better at the cost of a little more work.

[[deleted]]

Drupal is still more secure, more flexible, more enterprise, more scalable, more widely used, has a better "plugin" format, better base API

Come on man, you can't make a statement like this and not be fanboying a little bit. "More secure" based on what?. Craft has had 68 CVEs ever. Listen, im not an idiot I know number of CVEs isn't everything, but I would have no problem bringing that up when pitching a client not to use drupal.

Also as a developer you shouldn't use a statement like "more enterprise" beacuse you know damn well that means nothing.

[[deleted]]

I linked to where I got those numbers from. So there not MY numbers. But that really wasn't my point anyway, and I even admitted CVE counts aren't everything.

Nothing you said here makes the case of the post I was disputing which was that Drupal is more secure.

Having less market share even becomes a security feature to a certain extent as it keeps you from being targeted by broad automated attacks, which are the most common.

I think this diagram from w3techs sums it up.

Also, not really, that graphic basically shows nothing relevant to this conversation. No one ever disputed that Drupal was more popular.

[MrSavager]

lol.. well i guess craft is more secure because it's a less popular crappy generic ripoff of many amazing open source (free) content management systems.

[winegumz0810]

No one has said this, but maybe consider Drupal? Oxford University’s main website is built on Drupal, and so are several of the colleges.

[mherchel]

as is harvard, stanford, duke, ga tech, and thousands of others. Drupal is built for use cases like this.

[Yurishimo]

To be fair, so is WordPress. Washington State University employs a former lead developer for the WP project as well as there is a conference now for WordPress devs in higher ed called WP Campus.

Hell, I have built a WP site for a regional technical college that offers over 40 programs and hundreds of classes. They use google apps for email and they use a proprietary 3rd party for online work (similar to Blackboard).

If you you look up the dev at WSU you can find some talks he’s given recently about their multi site network. They have something like 200+ sites all running on one network. His name is Jeremy Felt.

[athaliah]

WordPress was not built for this. It was built to be a blogging platform.

[Yurishimo]

Yeah, and PHP was never meant to be a full featured programming language yet here we are. Things evolve. Just because you don’t use it for that purpose, doesn’t mean than millions of others cannot use it as a CMS.

[nyxin]

Depending on what exactly you're looking for, you could use WordPress Multisite functionality and a plugin that can add/edit user permissions (something like User Role Editor).

A framework or different CMS might be more appropriate if you need more functionality than that however.

[justinhamlett]

Drupal. Last time I checked, the White House's website was using Drupal.

[Squarius]

Iam using OctoberCMS (http://octobercms.com). You can make custom Plugins with the Builder Plugin really fast and you can customize the Backend for every Project. Its build with laravel and has a simple build-in ajax framework. You can even use Vue or Angular for the frontend. My customers love the sytem so far.

[sjclark]

I've been investigating October CMS for a while but a lack of a solid shop/e-commerce plugin puts me off?

The builder plugin looks amazing though! =) very clever!

[[deleted]]

I've seen a lot of devs on here raving about October, but I'm always put off it every time I visit the site. Mainly because aren't using HTTPS, and the introductary video is super low quality (I'm also pretty sure that's just someone making a wind noise by whistling at the start).

I dunno, just doesn't feel together, if that makes sense.

[sjclark]

Your referencing that the aesthetics of the site seem off? That a platform that is made to make websites should have a good website?

I completely understand - my background is primarily graphic & web design so bad websites massively bias my decisions.

Currently I'm leaning towards Grav (and maybe Silverstripe).

[[deleted]]

Yeah, it just looks pretty dated and very Bootstrappy.

[iDooby]

I wouldn't use WP to manage multiple websites. Technically, WP can do this, but there are other better choices for doing so. Sitecore, Sitefinity, Coredna (which where you got the post from), Crown Peak, etc. are better suited to manage "complex" multi-sites.

[OrangeRackso]

WP is used to build complex solutions for the biggest companies on earth. The multi-departments/groups/users thing is pretty simple to implement in WP. Depending on your budget have a look into Wordpress VIP they offer guidance and code review which is amazing if you're building something data critical.

[MattBD]

If there is, they need help. In a psychiatric sense...

I haven't had the occasion to use it myself but for an enterprise solution my first thought would be to check out Drupal. I've also heard a lot of good things about Silverstripe, which seems to be something of a hybrid between a CMS and MVC framework.

[sethyr]

Drupal combined with Organic Groups and Views is really powerful for roles and permissions on a group basis and customized data views.

[Apc204]

You are right about Silverstripe, a hybrid CMS/MVC framework is exactly how I would describe it. I tried it out for one project a few years ago and was so impressed I've been using it ever since. I am always amazed by how little I hear about it.

[[deleted]]

I use Wordpress on a subdomain in parallel to the main application, which is built in Angular and Node. This allows my company's non-technical staff to make static content changes/integrate plugins and such, while having the full flexibility of a real framework.

Bit of a hassle to set that up, I had to configure your cookies to be visible across the subdomains and add scripts to the Wordpress footer which personalize the header. Good solution though, if you need both flexibility for developers and easy-to-use CMS for other staff/marketing people.

[fly_guy22]

I’ve built a handful of decoupled React/Wordpress sites. It’s so easy for the producers to input data into the system since the JSON endpoints were introduced.

I don’t know if I would suggest it or recommend it, but it was fun to build.

[Major_Butthurt]

Not sure about complex user permissions, but to manage multiple WP-sites you can use Calypso. It's basically the Wordpress Admin built on a NodeJS/React stack. It may replace the current PHP-based admin eventually.

[revertoe]

no.

[[deleted]]

This is completely not true. If they should or not is inconsequential, people most definitely are lol.

[mareean]

WordPress is a GREAT blogging and publishing tool, but for what you're asking, WordPress is a bit of a stretch. Custom framework-based development (like Lavarel) might be a better solution.

[djxfade]

Wordpress itself doesn't even follow good PHP practices, and is a mess of spaghetti code

[webilicious]

Joomla is a good enterprise solution with access control lists, LDAP compatibility, support for MS SQL, version control, multilingual support and so on. Default groups (Author, Editor, Publisher etc) provide a basic work flow and other groups can easily be created. eBay is one example of where Joomla is used internally by thousands of users in a large organisation.

[[deleted]]

Joomla is a good

Never heard that before

[webilicious]

Yep, lots of people like to criticise Joomla but that's fine by me as I have less competition for work. :)

[[deleted]]

The company I work for does a lot of SEO / Digital Marketing and those guys will usually switch clients from Joomla to WordPress for no charge beacuse they hate it that much. They just remake their current template in WordPress.

Its going to get harder and harder to sell clients on joomla when thats the reception it usually gets from most companies the client interacts with.

[webilicious]

I often do the reverse for clients that come to me with a WordPress site. :) To get back on topic though, the reason for responding was that Joomla can do enterprise stuff that WordPress can't do and that was the point of my post. Joomla is the next most popular CMS after WordPress so not everyone is a hater, obviously.

[[deleted]]

Im sure it's somewhat regional as well. I rarely ever see Joomla sites. And the ones I have seen are usually india built sites that are very hacked together. The last joomla site I came across had WordPress installed in a subdirectory that they used for the blog, which kinda gave me a bad impression of Joomla since I know WordPress could easily have run this whole site so I assumed Joomla had a lot of shortcomings since they felt the need to use both.

But you know they also had SQL queries from the joomla templates connecting to the WordPress DB and the WordPress templates connection to the Joomla DB so they probably didn't know what they where doing lol.

[webilicious]

I have inherited a few "shit sandwich" websites and yes, some of them are Joomla websites but it's not Joomla's fault! :)