Thinking about WordPress as well as other CMS systems

I know WordPress is amazing at blogs but do you think it can handle full CMS features and online stores?

Certainly! Speaking specifically of stores, there are plenty of e-commerce plugins available, like this one:

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/eshop/

For some great examples of folks using WordPress well beyond a basic blog, check out the showcase:

Home

WordPress is primarily a blogging platform but can be extended to include additional functions and features, however whether it is suitable depends on what you will be using it for and what type of page structure you have and the type of content you are adding and how regularly.

Sometimes it is better to use more than one platform, i.e. Typo3 as a CMS and WordPress as a dedicated blog. The difference seems to be in that a CMS can be used for displaying static information while a blog is a time-sensitive ‘conversation’.

Joe

Great, thanks for the replies! Looks like I’m learning another system (all good fun) ??

You’re welcome!

WordPress’ main strength is as a blogging platform. Plugins offer extensions, but the underlying framework is fairly simplistic in terms of architectural paradigms.

In general, I would not recommend it for an eCommerce site, although it is possible.

I have experience with Drupal, Expression Engine, and MODx. Drupal makes my head hurt… redesigning a template resembles compiling Apache more than it does HTML and CSS and I honestly have no idea why it is so widely accepted. Clearly I haven’t drunk the Drupal Kool Aid.

Expression Engine is not free for commercial use, but it has some great documentation and has an elegant framework under its hood (CodeIgniter). I disagree with how they implement some of their features, but it’s a solid system.

MODx is lesser known, but it is the gold standard for customizing templates and it is by far my favorite system. The documentation is lacking, but it is hands down the easiest system to work with when it comes to assembling various PHP scripts and various HTML components, so if you’re dealing with a team of developers and front-end designers, MODx makes it easy to integrate their work into the whole with relatively little fuss.

You can always do what the previous poster suggested: combine a couple options, catering to the strength of each.

Great, thanks for the info. I’m actually thinking about using WP now for blog heavy sites, Joomla and VirtueMart for normal e-commerce and Magento for heavy e-commerce (although I’ve read Magento needs some fairly hefty hosting, not shared to run).
The thing I like about Joomla is I can make new or convert html templates fairly easily. Hopefully WP will be the same for my blog sites.

As I said, MODx offers unparalleled freedom with templates. No comparison. Not with WordPress, definitely not with Joomla… Joomla’s templates make my head hurt almost as much as Drupal’s. The only runner up there in the PHP world is Expression Engine, but it’s a distant 2nd. I’m biased, but holy smokes, I can’t believe what people go through to format their content using other systems. I barely have patience for WordPress templating because I think it’s retarded to have to debug your view layer (call me an MVC snob).

If you are doing more serious business (say $1000+/month), I’d recommend MODx and FoxyCart — it’s a powerful combo. FoxyCart is brilliant because it doesn’t try to be a CMS — you just post data to their system, and it’s up to you style it. You get full control, and you don’t have to sweat the audits and encryption and all the ulcer-inducing stuff that goes along with credit card security and payment processing.

Magento is freeking HEAVY. Basically it’s unusable unless you’re using their hosting or a *really* beefy server. But like so many of those solutions, the failure is that they are a payment platform that tries to be a CMS, and they fail at the latter. Their idea of templating is pretty simplistic. Fairly easy to set up, but hard to customize.

Plugins like VirtueMart for Joomla or plugins for Drupal or WordPress let you have the benefits of your favorite CMS, but they fail to give you a decent payment platform. Again, that’s why FoxyCart is brilliant: it doesn’t try to be a CMS.