Would anyone ever use wordpress over processwire for a particular project?

[dazzyweb]

I am continuously bombarded with Wordpress this and Wordpress that, from all directions on how it is the best cms and the go to cms out there. It is starting to get a little silly.
I can hardly read an article or visit a page without the mention of the holiness of Wordpress.

It seems to have become some sort of mantra.

Of course i don't agree. But it got me thinking.

Are they all wrong?
Are there any circumstances or reasons that anyone would use Wordpress over Processwire for a particular project?

[Craig]

If you have little to no web development skills, WordPress is probably best platform for throwing together pre-made themes and plugins to create something resembling a website or blog that is relatively straightforward to manage.

But it won't necessarily be "good." Scalability, extensibility, customisation, performance, suitable page size, code quality, upgradability, integration... many things that are an afterthought, difficult to accomplish, or require even more mediocre plugins to address.

I can't think of any projects where I would use WordPress over ProcessWire.

[pwired]

PW is chosen, WP is followed.

[dazzyweb]

PW is chosen, WP is followed.

Nice. Totally agree.

[Raymond Geerts]

I hear with ravensburger you can have beautiful paintings on your wall too, some people will be satisfied with that.

Other people prefer a Dali, da Vinci or van Gogh.

I prefer a framework where i can decide how to do the things i want to build, not the other way around. ProcessWire gives me that freedom.

Like Craig mentions i wouldnt knwo any project i build in the past two year or so where i would use Wordpress over ProcessWire

[dazzyweb]

I hear with ravensburger you can have beautiful paintings on your wall too, some people will be satisfied with that.

ha ha. That vid is a great comparison.

[Joss]

I do use WP for a couple of blogs, though I probably would not bother now as when it comes to integrate with social media and things like open graph, it is easier to do that in PW, to be honest.

Outside of that, I find it cumbersome.

Edit:

One thing I would add is that because WP has a huge, non technical user base, they have spent a lot more time thinking about usability that some other CMSs like Joomla or Drupal, and I think a lot can be learned from them.

[bwakad]

I can't say I use PW for a long time, but I as a basic php coder/designer (newbie) I am definitely sold to PW.

Can't tell you enough how painful Wordpress and Joomla are. True there are many plugins available, but none of them are same preferred coding. On top of that they all interfere with CSS because of integration in these plugins. Many times, even if you find a nice theme, you end up searching which part was doing what that you want to modify.

In the time I have used PW I never once looked back on other CMS because PW give me the feeling truly anything is possible. Besides, I like the learning curve of it.

I also called some payment providers Mollie/iDeal to see if integration is possible, and of course it is. That will be the next fase in my website design.

Thinking SEO, layout, coding, security, any kind of website - PW is my favorite!

[MarcC]

Are there any circumstances or reasons that anyone would use Wordpress over Processwire for a particular project?

Sure, there are many. Let's be clear:

• Don't know ProcessWire exists
• Never had any experience with it and worry about the learning curve
• Don't see any books about it
• Don't see lots of themes for it
• Worry about commercial support for PW
• Don't know anybody who uses PW
• Web host doesn't offer pdo_mysql (for example)
• Plan on blogging and don't see much blogging info for PW
• Need a website for posting photos and words, and their nephew offered to install WordPress for free

PW certainly has an audience that is some subset of, or some small intersection with, the WordPress audience. But comparing CMS to CMS, there are so many differences in the community alone. If your goal is to attract more of the WordPress folks, you'd probably want to identify what type of WordPress folks first, and then provide resources and communication that attract them to PW.

I have to explain to about one out of three clients that I did consider WordPress before suggesting ProcessWire. To them there's a bit of a risk with this ProcessWire thing. If I mess up the job, it becomes one more pain point. "And what was this Process thing he suggested? There are ten guys in town who do great WordPress sites!"

These clients usually already talked to three or four people who seem pretty savvy, and a few people around the office, and most of them said some variant of, "if somebody could set up a WordPress site for us, we could take it from there." This is because there are a lot of people who work with WordPress, understand what it can do, and who maybe aren't--for various valid reasons--aware of ProcessWire's existence.

So there's some fear about ProcessWire when it comes up. Sometimes.

Finally, WordPress is not just a CMS; it's a community and a business (well, Automattic is). Automattic might at some point do the equivalent of Facebook buying Instagram. They might pick up or bring on board some other really sharp CMS, and ProcessWire users, the Instagrammers of the CMS world, might start to wonder when PW is going to turn really hard in whatever the new direction is. Or maybe they should start using this new Automattic thing. You never know.

But with all that said, yes, ProcessWire is an amazing tool. Fresh off of a WordPress site build myself, I have to say I can see why people are so keen to jump into building their own tools. They want something that fits better. Which is, I guess, how we got ProcessWire. Maybe the cost of the precise fit for us PW users is some chunk of audience that would otherwise come from e.g. the WordPress community.

[teppo]

When we were evaluating CMS solutions a few years ago, the main reason WordPress seemed inviting was the availability of themes and modules, both free and commercial.

In a nutshell you can just register to any of those theme sites popping up everywhere and (for a very modest price) get hundreds or thousands of great-looking themes. Grab one, customise it a bit (change the logo and perhaps a few colours) and show it to a client. Congratulations: if the client is happy with that, you've just saved quite a bit of work.

That's not what you'll want to do when a client wants really customised look and feel or a set of custom features running behind the scenes for their site (which is exactly where ProcessWire shines) but for those clients that don't care if it's unique and 100% customised to their needs.. well, you get the idea. If the client later decides that he/she needs something more complicated, offer them an upgrade to ProcessWire 

Custom work, whether it's design or programming, takes time and costs money, period. ProcessWire makes development fun and easy, but won't do it for you. You'll still have to do the work and the client will still have to pay for it.

For the record: I'm not saying that one should ever use WordPress (don't get me started on the downsides), but I can definitely see why some folks would prefer it. We've chosen ProcessWire as our main tool and never really looked back. It's working amazingly well for us and our customers.

[Pete]

I'll keep it short: no.

The longer version is that every time I've dealt with Wordpress it was to upgrade it due to security issues and every time I did that it broke a plugins and updatingthe plugins broke some template or other.

Now I don't accept work with Wordpress unless it's to move a site away from Wordpress.

The problem is that so many people out who use it are oblivious to the security issues that keep cropping up in their software but if you look at the update history every 2-3 updates fixes some XSS or other big security flaw.

I actually used a hint from a website that allows you to check the version of any Wordpress website to highlight the issue to a customer whose WP was about 5 versions behind so you can - if you had the time - let folks know just how out of date and unsecure their sites are.

This is almost certainly how hackers target sites too. You can do the same for Joomla easily too (same customer had a Joomla site on the early 1.x branch - some 15 versions behind the latest in the 1.x series and well behind the 3.X branch of course!).

[Pete]

I just don't understand how the guys making Wordpress could still have enough XSS and other serious bugs I'm their code that every few updates fixes another one.

So if you have a client that's set on Wordpress and doesn't heed warnings about security updates and the fact they'd have to pay you to update is several times a year just to keep it secure then don't take them on. It will only lead to headaches for you in the long run.

[Pete]

In fact, I'm not done yet. If you've got Chrome, download this free tool to check for outdated versions of Wordpress, Joomla and many more as you browse the web: http://www.whitefirdesign.com/meta-generator-version-check?pk_campaign=MGVC-Chrome

A cursory look at web dev companies in my local area shows an alarming trend not updating Wordpress. One company has their own site running version 3.3.1 which is from January 2012. 30% of their portfolio shows out of date installations (could have been higher but two links were incorrectly linking to other sites in their portfolio and not all are necessarily built in Wordpress). Another agency had more than 50% of their sites running older versions of Wordpress that are vulnerable to attack.

*sigh*

But it perfectly highlights how complacent people get with updating Wordpress. If you're not going to bother checking for updates for software on client sites, build them solely in HTML and at least they're not at risk.

[bwakad]

Of course it is also because they don't know PW.

The majority of developers say they develop. They charge huge amounts of money while they simply click and install. That is certainly not developing. And yes, their advantage is there is a huge amount of themes and plugins, and because other software from their start was not so easy, there is a huge amount of people using it today. Just take a look at themeforest forums, or respective developer websites, and you will understand there are so many flaws in themes and plugins the only benefit are for those whom creates these flaws.

As a example, you install WP, install a theme, then plugin 1, 2 and 3. Now they conflict. Developer plugin 1 says, take it up with developer from plugin 2. But that one tells you, it is an issue in your theme - go there for support, and that one probably will tell you to update WP (again, if possible). etc. etc. etc.

Bloggin. As I understand one can make a page/article in any software and let people comment. This is also available in PW.

Commercial support. There is certainly more reason to doubt Wordpress/Joomla commercial support.

Themes e.g. Profiles. In PW it's all possible in the way you want. If you say you are developer in WP/Joomla, you will know PW better.

Books about. As long as the processwire.com is available, who need books? Where I live, books are almost gone, density for internet is the highest.

So, if one choose WP/Joomla: good luck with that! But nor for me ;-)

[WillyC]

yes i like wp for.install exploit script , irc bots , pharmz , game servers   etc

   without wp i wolud have.to get   my own hosting

[Soma]

Would you choose a premade cake over a selfmade cake?

[Pete]

Would you choose a premade cake over a selfmade cake?

Yes, but only from good cafés that I trust to make decent coffee (I'm liking this analogy ).

[PhotoWebMax]

Building sites for other people (clients) using Wordpress can be a time saver. 

But why usually happens with clients is that they will invariably ask "say, can we change this or add that to the design?" This is where I find Wordpress gets tricky to work with. You have to pull back all the onion layers from the theme. There is a lot of prefabricated structure with a themed WP install. Customizing a site can lead to more work and frustration than building a site from scratch. I found MODx much better to work with because you had a blank canvas to work with initially. Much more designer friendly in the long run. ProcessWire offers similar advantages. 

One thing that site owners have to deal with is the backend admin system. Some CMS platforms offer a million control settings and panels that seem overwhelming. This is where PW shines. I think it offers site owners a nice, fast, clean system...

[diogo]

Are they all wrong?

How clever do these people sound to you?

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/white-hat-seo/672816-whitch-web-engine-should-i-choose-my-niche.html

[Pete]

@diogo - nobody asks the guy what he wants to do, but "there's a plugin for that" (paraphrasing Apple of course ).

[Joss]

Would you choose a premade cake over a selfmade cake?

You see, this is talking MY language. I never understand how people communicate without having a mention of food somewhere in the argument - it just aint natural!

[Pierre-Luc]

All the WP sites I did in the past (way too many of them, now I switched entirely to PW, I even redid whole clients simple "brochure" websites pro-bono to save me the hassle) have been ok, but there's always something with the API that doesn't work quite right (future dates in queries, good luck!), maintenance issues, compatibility issues (loading 10 versions of jquery and the like). Some things might work right when developping, but often I need to change the plugins code to improve them, which is a problem. Then when new versions of everything comes out, it's a mess. WP sites don't seem to grow very well either, so as complexity increases, it all falls apart. Speed issues are also a big thing and really hard to optimize to get good load times. All that time waiting for the admin to do stuff is wasted time in billable hours (I charge a minimum of 30 mins for maintenance, most things take less than 15 mins to do, the process is usually much faster in PW I've found so far). 

Also take into account that when you do full-custom work like I do (I'm a designer AND a programmer), WP always comes with either too many or not enough features. That's time I need to just do configuration to get rid of the unneeded parts, which sometimes isn't really straightforward. I also do a lot of multilingual things, WP can do it with plugins, but the workflow is kinda weird and involves a lot of support calls from clients. Some of the features don't work so well either.

So far what I've launched with PW is trouble free. It does everything much better and faster. I can say with big relief that WP's custom post types are a thing of the past. I was able to implement different relatively "complex" things (well, would be in WP) like 100% custom event systems, payment/donation systems, etc (hopefully will be able to package some of them nicely to reuse later and share in modules) in next to no time.

Now I'm happier, clients are happier, work is faster, everybody wins.

[Pierre-Luc]

Just to drive the point across further, recently I've been forced to maintain a bunch of WP sites (medium-high complexity) that are simply unmaintainable clusterfucks of modules inherited from other agencies… PHP directly into fields and the like… Just this week, I've found ~5 SQL injection vulnerabilities in extensions that look like they are rather popular in the WP community, bunch of totally ugly code, no comments to be found. This is what happens when people think WP saves costs, it just simply doesn't!

To be fair, WP can be used to do great stuff, but it's a rarity unless you throw an insane amount of $ in it.

/vent off

[MarcC]

I agree, Pierre-Luc. It reminds me of the way I felt about people using Microsoft Word for desktop publishing after I learned to use Aldus Pagemaker. Especially when those macro infections really started to go around 

I noticed that clients don't really appreciate it much when I pretend to faint at the mention of WP and generally play the victim card on CMS issues. So lately I tread really carefully when I need to communicate my CMS angst. But when I communicate with web designers, it feels like more of an opportunity. Nobody wants to be preached to, myself included, but we can and should educate each other as fellow devs & designers.

[Marty Walker]

Aldus PageMaker? You're showing your vintage Marc.