[wp-hackers] WordPress as CMS (was: wordpress security)

[Otto]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 4:15 PM, Doug Stewart <zamoose at gmail.com> wrote:
> Otto:
> Seems to me that folks are primarily advocating for WordPress(.org) to
> be seen as a self-installable incarnation of the service offered by
> providers such as Squarespace (http://www.squarespace.com/), wherein
> you simply create a website and along with that comes comments,
> forums, photo galleries, polls, and yes, even blogging capabilities.

It's a neat idea, I grant you, and perhaps in the very, very long
term, WP will turn into something like that. I can see bbPress making
great strides lately, and full integration of it with WP is getting
easier all the time.

But the generic "page" dynamic within WordPress is way too immature
for it to realistically be anything other than a "blog" at this point
in time. Even the general WPMU architecture is focused primarily on
blogging continual streams of content instead of static designs.
"Pages" are a bolt-on type of hack to the Posts system.

WordPress won't be good at static sites for until somebody comes along
and actually fixes all those bits up. Because of this, it's going to
be pretty poor at being a "traditional" CMS in the static site sense.

Now, it is getting better. The recent updates to add custom post type
taxonomies is a decent start. WordPress is getting more generic,
getting rid of code that was specific to a thing and made it more
generic to apply to a variety of things. Tags and categories and link
categories are all the same thing now internally: terms in taxonomies
which apply to posts or links. Soon, posts and pages, though already
pretty close, might get more generic means of referring to them, which
will allow for some types of optimizations that don't exist at
present.

I personally look forward to the day when somebody figures out that
comments and even links are really just another form of post, with
their own taxonomy. Then we'll be really getting somewhere and you'll
see rapid progress.

Anyway, once things are made generic, then interfaces can be made for
them. You'll be able to drag and drop a comments section onto the page
you want, or not, or whatever. And it'll be neat.

But that day isn't quite today. It's not up for it yet. WordPress is
indeed a CMS, but that depends on how you actually define "CMS". If
you think "Content Management System", then that's true, but if you
think that means every type of "content" under the sun, then you've
still got another think, I'd say.

In the meantime, it makes a damn fine "blog" system, and I'd advice
people to stick with that. If they want to help make it more generic,
then I'd work on those bits. Post taxonomies is the next big thing
that needs that sort of work.

-Otto