How Well Does WordPress Measure Up?
Posted on February 19, 2008
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.
Filed Under Web and Tech Helps, WordPress |
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3 Responses to “How Well Does WordPress Measure Up?”
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Yay, Phil! I’ve been wondering what you’re up to. So what do you know about sites that are designed on grids? Is that something new? (No laughting…)I’ve been looking at a few themes are are built on a grid (whatever the heck that is…) and they don’t completely work on my site. I’m sure it’s more of a glitch in the design which is why my old one is back up.
Don’t forget to tell us when the site is up so we can ooh and ahh your work!
Kelly,
The site should be going live this weekend. I’ll be sure to post about it once it’s up. Yep, it’s one main thing that’s been occupying my time.
I’d have to see the template designs to know for sure, but yeah designing on a grid is a basic concept that most web designers worth their weight start with the concept. Send me some URLs and I’ll be able to tell you more.
Thanks for stopping by.
Phil
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