WP

Well, well. I finally had occasion to install WP on my localhost to see how it works since I may be working on a defunct WP site as a favor to someone. After about two minutes of working with it, I can see why it’s so popular. Even the installation gave the appearance of being easier since it doesn’t display any checks it may do nor offer a whole page of options as Evo does, and not attempting to create the database itself does save it a lot of potential installation problems. But by that time I had also seen why it’s a real pain for slightest attempt at customization. From what I see so far, it’s great for users satisfied with the (admittedly enormous amount of) existing plugins and templates available, and not too bad for serious developers who have learned its ways, but not so great for the casual developer who just wants one or two simple customizations. Of course, it may well be that the management of it only seemed easy enough to me after all the years of experience using a CMS management system like MODx.

I had a similar experience with WP. The install and management are indeed simple and smooth (as are the upgrades), but I made the mistake of starting with the default Kubrick theme and trying to modify it to meet my needs. It was a nightmare.

Wordpress is a well developed product and it serves well ... for the most part. The problem is when you start thinking outside the box (as we all should) and are in need of doing things to suit your purpose with the website. This is when it becomes a nightmare.

A lot of people do a great job at making custom themes and even develop rich frameworks around their themes to do just about anything you can imagine (there is actually an industry behind this). The problem is that this "framework" is so extremely dependent on core functions that quite easily any update might break it. And if you try to step aside from the framework for just a slight modification, you will get barked at by wordpress most likely.

In my experience this is precisely one of the things modx excels at. Great separation between content and presentation. Sure it will take a bit more work to do some things and more experience is required, but when you realize the cleanness and tightness of your integration you then realize what a true work of art modx is.

Sorry for posting on an old thread, I was just a bit bored browsing and wanted to give some inputs.

Cheers.

My mother has a Wordpress site as a blog, and the only page that has any sort of PageRank ranking is the homepage; the rest of the pages are not getting ranked. When we get a second (translation: when we finish the other project we're working on) we're going to switch that site over to MODX too.

MODX rocks. 'Nuff said.

WP has its place... but I'd rather spend an extra few hours making sure it's exactly as it should be.

My brother set up a WP site for himself, and when I asked him why he didn't track visitors his first thought was to add that to the index.php file. Just the fact that people start to think like that makes me cringe. Luckily (??) he did went for a plugin.

I was thinking of writing a post on "Why I Hate WP".

I just wrote a custom theme for a plugin a client was using. After checking that it worked OK, I noticed there was an update available for the plugin - which I installed. Of course that broke everything.

Not only had the plugin author moved the directory for the custom themes, he was no longer reading the css file. Wasted another hour redoing the code.

My own fault I guess for not doing the update first.

Bah - Humbug

I think WP is awesome until you have more than 10 pages. For blogging, it's great: just blog and forget about it.

But when you care about SER and need lots of pages, you really have to dig through many screens to find what you're looking for and modify that.

In MODX, everything right in front of you. No wasting time.

I recently had to go through a client's30+ WP installs on that many TLDs and different server setups. It was a nightmare

I agree that WP is nice for non skilled users that want "a blog full stop".
I tried it before using modX, never returned.
If you want worse products for customization, there are some like joomla...

I stay with modX.

To me, Articles is the Wordpress blogging platform of choice.

Indeed, Articles and a custom dashboard is fantastic. Add media sources and static elements to the mix and it really shows off what a true application framework Revo is.