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

[Pierre-Luc]

Yep, I don't advocate so much to clients, it's not what they need to hear. The development time and maintenance cost is what usually sells PW. If they're afraid it's too hard to use, I'll show them a previous website. The description field is something most of them feel like is a pretty good selling point! It's those little details that count.

[Macrura]

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

<rant style="wordpress"> recently i helped someone with a hacked WP site; they had no backup; i had to rebuild the whole thing, and they were on Yahoo, so no .htaccess file; consequently the URLs were all page id, and then to make things worse, the dev of this site wrote a couple of pluigns that relied on the id input; took about 10 hrs to rebuild the site from scraps, rewrite some plugins...  and got to see a lot of russian hacker comments.

got another enormous ecommerce site that the client can't manage at all - they find wordpress to be totally inscrutable

(so now i'm getting emails to add products for them, change a word on the homepage)...

and that site is running a heavily customized woocommerce and now the whole thing needs to be updated; updating this will mean cloning the whole thing, and gradually updating each component, and seeing if anything breaks, running diffs and seeing what to fix...

I was surprised recently that a large professional organization that i'm a member of swtiched from Drupal to Wordpress, for their membership site - it's a huge org. I was like REALLY?

and seeing a lot of local businesses and things like libraries going with WP...

upside is that all of these sites are going to become inevitably unmanageable and then they'll come begging to the PW people for salvation

</rant>

[MarcC]

Aldus PageMaker? You're showing your vintage Marc. 

Yeah, my attempt at a shocking little joke there. I feel pretty good about my vintage every time a local high school student tells me they are excited to work at a startup

heavily customized woocommerce

"I'm busy that month eating a sandwich, sorry"

upside is that all of these sites are going to become inevitably unmanageable and then they'll come begging to the PW people for salvation

What's crazy is that there's quite a bit of demand even for WP hawkers being forecast for years down the road. That market anticipation is what's fueling the web design majors that have been appearing in larger universities.

In 2009 shortly after the economic troubles began, my business guy said "in five years you'll have more work than you can handle," and I was pretty skeptical. But as I read somewhere, software tends to expand like a gas. I guess tying your business to something with those properties is not a bad idea.

A business with a Django site called recently; after their dev left and the code started showing its age, they were feeling just as screwed as your Woocommerce guys were. They were excited about using a particular Django CMS plugin to solve their admin usability woes, and I was really close to showing them ProcessWire (and about 10% of the way toward getting excited about relatively familiar Python frameworks and jumping into Django) but unfortunately they said they wanted to stick with the current platform at all costs, and look at these big awesome plugins, as they thought this would be a huge efficiency trick. Now they are going to be calling people for days just to get a handle on their glorified brochureware site, which, if run by a plugin, will be like 10x more likely to take them down more rabbit holes...