2012-10-13

Is WordPress good for building sites? A SEO Group discussion on LinkedIn


This is an excerpt from discussion on the Search Engine Land’s LinkedIn group:
http://lnkd.in/gigffm - copied almost as-is (fixed a couple of typos)
►LP: I found this article to be a good read:
http://biztwozero.com/Home/6181
► My reply
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@LP: I am with you on this (PHP, etc.), and I already expressed my opinion about the quality of PHP code in WordPress and potential security risks - in other discussions (look for my recent posts).

However, do not take that specific article as a 100% truth. While correct in general, many specific details are not.

Why don't you just try for yourself? Installing WP takes literally 5 minutes, as long as you have Apache/MySQL/PHP at your disposal. MySQL can be anywhere, of course, and you can specify the remote host. Apache and PHP can be at your PC, so you can easily play with the themes, plugins and the core code - as a PHP programmer and not as a WP user. You will see everything.
The question is, however, what is your goal and what do you compare WP with? If you are building a "non-mission-critical" website, who cares that WP will throw PHP notices on every line of its lousy code? Disable all errors and sleep well :-)

If you compare to other open-source CMS/Blogging platforms - they will suffer more or less from the same "diseases".

If, however, you desperately need a solution for content editing, and you do not want to spend $ on a commercial - there are two ways, in my opinion: a) take WordPress, find a premium theme, which will provide you with all the functionality (that will cost $ instead of $$$) - and use ONLY that theme and only their plugins. Once you start mixing plugins from different vendors, one day you upgrade one, and it will bring down another, because they do not know each other, and write whatever they want, overriding the core functionality.

Or b) Because WP writes into MySQL table, you can use PHP to extract the content from there and publish it your way. That's similar to having a premium theme, but also allows you to put WP on a different server, solving thus some security problems (the WP can be installed even at your home, as I said)

There is a1) - write the Premium Theme yourself :-)

I tried the a) and a1) approaches since WP was born, and each time I ended up with version b) or with no WP at all....

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