[wp-hackers] One CMS to Rule Them All (was This was painful to read...)

[Mike Schinkel]

On Dec 2, 2009, at 2:12 PM, Jared Bangs wrote:
> I totally agree. WordPress should primarily focus its efforts on doing
> what it's designed to do, and doing it well.

All those arguments sound well and good when discussed in the abstract, but is a strawman that falls apart when discussed in specifics.  

Drupal and Joomla are bloated because of their highly-coupled architectures not because of the address functional needs.  WordPress' architecture is much less coupled and making it easier to theme and to use. 

The only thing WordPress needs to get past the "It's not a good general CMS" criticism is support for custom post types and custom URL routing that are both easy to manage.  Adding that will not significantly "bloat" WordPress; base support for custom post types is already in 2.9; all we need beyond that is admin functionality to support it.

Honestly I can't see why people push back on this, and I won't venture a guess as to why.
> 
> My advice is to expand your horizons, and become familiar with other
> options: other platforms (like Drupal) and more low level frameworks
> for general purpose web development.

Personally, I used Drupal for two years prior to starting with WordPress.  I recently used Drupal again for a client which reminded me of what a nightmare it is and how much better WordPress is.  So forgive me but I'm far more familiar with Drupal than I'd like to be.

As for lower level frameworks like Django and CakePHP, they are good for the 20% of websites that need seriously custom functionality (i.e. SAAS sites like Freshbooks, etc.); the other 80% could be serviced with WordPress having custom post types and custom URL routing.

> This will help to avoid the urge to pound a square peg requirement into
> the round hole of the scope of what WordPress can or should do.

Again, that's a strawman. Talk specifics, not platitudes.

> WordPress is a proud part of the open source community, and a key
> benefit to that community is that there's no need to capture market
> share or dominate over (and push out) all other peripherally related
> products.

That's irrelevant.

> Like Otto said, much better to focus on doing something
> well. There's no harm in acknowledging that other solutions are better
> suited to other needs, and no reason for that to inspire jealousy in
> regards to the features of another product.

I have absolutely no jealousy here; I'm a pragmatic entrepreneur who knows how to program.  I want a business solution, not to follow an ideology.

-Mike Schinkel