Tell me how WP is any less of a CMS than…

Yes, some uninformed comment there, particularly “I think WP as the CMS can be successful with small sites only. Maybe sites which are 15 – 20 pages. Anything more than that, you should go for a professional CMS like Joomla.”

I have about 600 pages on one WP site and it works fine. Okay, the Page management system on the backend sucks in some serious ways (like the templates being in random order and the page parent drop-down being virtually unnavigable) but otherwise it works just great.

If Joomla has better role management out of the box then that’s an obvious advantage for people who need that and who aren’t confident about plugins, but then again I looked into Joomla before settling for WP and found it incomprehensible.

WordPress is very oriented towards being a “blog”. It’s very good for that.

By this, I mean that it mainly focuses on a single list of content which is time oriented in nature. Your posts, basically. It has added functionality to this to allow for other things, but this is the main focus.
-Pages are posts but without the time orientation.
-The Bookmarks (Blogroll) is essentially a list of links with attributes.

You can heavily customize it and fit it into any of several needs/designs because of the theme separation, but internally, this is how it’s organized.

It wouldn’t fit well to build, for example, a large scale sales site. Sure, you could actually do that with it, but it would be difficult and overly time consuming. There are better ways to do that sort of thing.

So WordPress is a special-purpose CMS, in a sense. It has functionality that fits it well to some needs, but not to other needs. Joomla is the same way, as is Drupal, and as are all CMS packages. They each operate differently and thus fit different things in different ways. You focus on what you need for the site you are building and pick the best fit to that. No one package, not even WordPress, is going to be the best fit for everything.

So WordPress is a special-purpose CMS, in a sense

I tend to agree very much with Otto42 on this.
My understanding is also that CMS is a much broader term than, let’s say, blogging tools. (In WP terms: “blogscript” would be a subcategory of the “CMS” category ??

So, it all depends on what you need – that’s why sometimes my advice here in the forum is “find the proper tool” for what you want.

otto and moshu, I agree with both of you.

Pick the tool which serves the purpose.

And I fully agree that WP doesn’t fit every need. However when WP transitioned from 1.2 to 1.5 I think it became much harder for someone to dismiss WP as simply a blogging application. And with the 2.x series I don’t see how Joomla can be considered a superior CMS. I’m not saying that it’s worse because it is a pretty slick little program, but for the majority of purposes I most certainly don’t think it’s better.

It’s the mindset that upsets me. WP is dismissed out of hand as being an incapable CMS. But there’s never justification for the dismissal from the other CMS envangelists. Just vague generalities.

I alluded to some of these in the thread, but I’ll add to it here. When I’m setting up a site:
If permissions are important = GeekLog
If Forums are important = phpBB or invision (paid)
If sales / commerce are key = ZenCart / Cubecart / osCommerce.
For most everything else = WP

I’m not saying that the other CMS packages aren’t good, I pick WP as it’s the one I’m most comfortable with. All I’m looking for from them is specifics on WHY shouldn’t WP be considered? Which to this point they’re incapable of answering as eloquently as you have.