Dan Shafer's Blog

But the question was intriguing anyway so I thought about it for a bit. There are a lot of things to like about WordPress. But I have a hard time with people who think it's the Ultimate Web Development Panacea. In reality, it's a very good content management system augmented by tons of well-designed plug-ins that enable you to cobble together something relatively usable with relatively little programming effort. But like all such tools of which I'm aware, it has huge walls at some points. For example, changing not just the UI but the UX is very challenging for most WP users and designers (though somewhat less so for developers). If you need custom DB access in, e.g., a Web app, WP is not likely to be easy to bend to your will.

But I digress.

The singular most important advantage I think WordPress has over its competitors from a technology perspective is its high level of granularity. It is so relatively easy to add major chunks of functionality to your site with plug-ins. For example, eCommerce, full-blown membership site infrastructure, and a few dozen other such things are ready to drop in. They integrate nicely and for the most part relatively easily. If you want or need to custom-tailor them, that's sometimes a real challenge.

For my money, though, I'm still using NOLOH for everything except heavily CMS-driven sites and I'll soon be using NOLOH for those, too. It's a matter of waiting for the NOLOH development team to put together some good editors for their in-place-editing CMS model, which I find vastly superior to and more efficient than the wizard-driven editor approach of WP and other CMSes. No walls. Growing community (though it will probably never be as big as WP's, which is the latter's other big advantage).