Monthly Archives: February 2008
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How Well Does WordPress Measure Up?
After nearing completion on a mid-size WordPress site, it seems an appropriate time to ask some questions about the scalability of WordPress. How far can you push the puppy before it yelps. This post is a follow-up to the previous posts:
The site, which will be launched in the next couple of weeks, has several hundred pages going several levels deep. It is definitely a good example of how far one can extend WordPress as a content management platform.
My overall take on the platform is fairly positive. For anyone with a decent knowledge and sense for development, it offers some built-in components that allow for creative and flexible applications:
- Custom Fields. This powerful feature allows for populating either viewable data or variables for custom apps.
- In one case the name and address of a teacher was published to the page with a custom field.
- In another case custom fields were used to populate the variables needed to query and display rows from a spreadsheet. This enabled a very efficient application of a custom application.
- Page Templates. I have not found a really good plug-in yet that provides a rock-solid way of inserting code into a WordPress page. My biggest beef with WordPress is it’s inability to run PHP natively. Page Templates provide a good alternative for including a file or application to the page. They also work nicely for redundant information on multiple pages.
- Parent-Child Relationships. For the most part I’m very satisfied with parent-child relationships in WordPress. It handles multiple levels and I have not yet seen any indication of a ceiling for the number of possible pages one could publish. That said, the interface for parent-child assignment is through a single drop-down selector. You can imagine how unweildy this could get after a point. After a couple hundred pages WordPress also does not display all pages in the Manage section. It’s not a deal breaker per se as pages can be searched with a filter or edited by navigating through the site directly. Still, it reveals some limitations.
WordPress shines brightly for small scale sites. This specific client is looking towards expanding with a multiplicity of sites rather than scaling-up this one site. For that reason I believe the platform will serve them well.