Will WordPress work well for this site?

WordPress can be suited to that, but without seeing the whoel brief no one can say for sure.

To put your mind at ease, I’ve done a few sites that have over 300 pages, so 150 is nothing it can’t handle.

You can do a page hierarchy by setting a ‘child’ page of a ‘parent’ page.

Say you wanted to have a main Products page, with a sub page being Shirts or something, you just just set the shirts page to have a parent of Products.

I’ve done sites that had 5 levels of sub pages.

I’ve done child pages like you say, but I’m more concerned that you can’t collapse parents so you can see all the site on a single page. You have to click to go 10 or whatever pages at a time or search for the one you want. Or am I missing something that should be obvious?

I’m confused on what you mean there.

Do you want a page with all the top level parent pages listed on it?

When you look at the page listings in the WP view, you see about 10 pages and have to click to see more pages. I want a tree like you’d see in a file browser on a computer (like Finder or Explorer).

Check this plugin out:

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/admin-collapse-subpages/screenshots/

You mean like a menu?

You can set up the menus yourself, or if there’s no menus, WordPress will generate one based on the pages that are in the site. Then you can add that menu anywhere that you want to.

Not a menu. In the admin dashboard when you view pages.

Scott: yes, like that. But, that plugin doesn’t look widely-used (6 reviews) and may be outdated (only verified to work to 3.2.1).

What limits might I face using WordPress for a large(ish) company site? (maybe this is a better way to ask the questions?)

I honestly don’t know. I usually just dive in and see if it works on plugins like that. Maybe just create a test site, make a ton of pages and test it.

OK, I missunderstood that one.

Why are you concerned about seeing all of the pages in the admin area? When I’ve done sites with large amoutns of pages it hasn’t been a big concern. The only thing that you need to take notice of is when you’re creating new pages to make sure that they are nested under the correct parent page. If you do that, everything else just falls into place. If you’re concerned about finding pages, the search does a pretty decent job of that, so from my point of view there’s no need to see every page at the same time. That would jsut add to the clutter and confusion that’s already there.

For the backend, the search does work awesomely. I had a site with 700+ pages one time that didn’t have any problems.

I’m sure there is a plugin that gets ride of the pagination on the backend, but I don’t know why you’d want that.

Thanks guys. Problem is the client wants one of their people to work with me to develop the site and maintain it later. She’s smart and can learn whatever. Problem is the search will only get me so far because I’ll have at least tens, if not hundreds of pages with very similar or identical names under parent pages. For instance, I may have 50 named “MSDS” under 50 different parents. That’s where a hierarchy would be faster, and that plug-in may be great, but may break with an update to WP if it’s not updated.

I’m really on the fence here as DP seems like it will be more useful long-term if she can learn it (and me). But, in the short-term I know WP will be faster to get up-and-running. I think I’ll install Drupal and start with it to see what I think. If I can’t get rolling in a matter of a couple days I’ll have to come back to WP.

Thanks for all the advice.