Wordpress Limitations

Wordpress is great software, and I’ve been a user for many years. Many years. It used to be called “b2” and I used it then as well. There are a lot of more powerful content management systems, a lot of systems that are much more flexible than wordpress these days, and often I get the feeling that other platforms attempt to define themselves in contrast to wordpress. In the larger sense, this post is an attempt to resist this temptation while also exploring the limitations of wordpress.

Wordpress is a pure blogging engine: it provides interfaces for writers to publish weblogs (blogs), manage content (to some degree) and generate pages based on templates. Before wordpress, blogging was done either by hand edited text files, or by systems that complied static HTML from some sort of database.¹ Wordpress is an improvement because it’s easy to install, it’s reliable, and pages generate dynamically on viewing, rather than just when the site owner hits “save” or “rebuild.” In the end, we discovered that systems where managing “websites” was divorced from (even simple) server management had a great democratizing effect on content, and that’s sort of the core of wordpress.

Because wordpress is designed to be a blogging platform, it doesn’t need to be as flexible as other generalized content management systems. Flexibility comes at the cost of complexity, and developers decided that in some cases, less was, in fact, more. There are a lot of things that you could do with b2 (albeit with some hacking) because the site generation/templating system was much less rigid, at the same time, it was much easier to get sites with broken links, and bad pages, particularly as you changed from theme to theme. That’s bad, and it seems pretty reasonable to me to want to avoid that.

The end result is a program that does almost everything you could want it to do as long as you only want a blog, if you try and stretch it too far it simply won’t work. Well it will work, but the advantage of using Wordpress to manage a website that isn’t a blog (or very similar to one) disappears quickly when you have to impose informal limitations on how you enter content in the system to generate well formated pages. It’s a slippery slope, and you’d be surprised how quickly a site goes from being a standard Wordpress site, to requiring customized themes, specialized content entry patterns. And pretty soon, a lot of the things that make Wordpress “simple” and “essay,” aren’t really available to your new site. That’s the limitation of Wordpress.

Knowing where the line is, is often the largest challenge in Wordpress development, and being able to say, “you know, this is the kind of site that you really want to be building with Django, or Drupal, or Rails, or Expression Engine,” Or even saying “you know this is the kind of site that we could probably do more effectively using flat files and PHP includes. Wordpress is great, and in the cases where it’s well suited to the task at hand, it’s the ideal solution. In other situations? Less so.

Onward and Upward!