WordPress is Infinitely Extensible

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The main “Extend” page on WordPress.org states:

One of the core philosophies of WordPress is to keep the core code as light and fast as possible but to provide a rich framework for the huge community to expand what WordPress can do, limited only by their imagination.

That’s a statement I’ve heard about countless platforms before, but have often been disappointed to find it to be more of a marketing catch-phrase than anything concrete. Not so with WordPress!

I’ve been doing research on how to achieve specific goals with yet another plugin project, and the more I look, the easier it gets. Every time I catch myself thinking “hmm, this one’s gonna be tough”, a quick trip to the WP Codex changes my attitude within just a few minutes. Everything is possible.

Don’t get me wrong, WP is far from the only extensible platform out there and everybody has their personal pet peeves with the code base, but when coupled with amenities such as the wp-hackers mailing list and the wp-plugins dev repo, Matt and Automattic sure made it easy to adopt WordPress as a full featured scaffolding. And that’s coming from a guy who’s usually happy to start his projects from scratch.

Comments

16 responses to “WordPress is Infinitely Extensible”

December 27, 2007

Michael

Straight to the point: This is exactly the same I recently thought when building a rather complex website for the first time with WordPress – used as a CMS!

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December 27, 2007

Jeffro2pt0

Well said. As a user of WordPress, I’m always thinking of ways to improve my blog or add a few more features that I think would be nifty and taking a trip to the WordPress plugin database almost always provides me with a plugin that has already been developed with my ideas in mind.

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December 28, 2007

ScaredCrow

the simplistic approach (at least for me) of WP made it suitable as a framework and work with ease. the community around WP is also very helpful.

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December 28, 2007

Varun

Check out Drupal. Drupal code is way more extensible than WP. If you are happy with WP you are going to be delighted with Drupal.

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December 28, 2007

Tadd

WordPress amazed me when I started using it. I was never a fan of the whole ‘blogging’ thing, so I never really payed much attention to WP. However, a friend of mine talked consistently about the power of WP and I did some coding for his site, and saw how simple it really was – yet versatile.

I’ve used countless CMS before. PHPNuke, PostNuke, Subdreamer, Joomla, Mambo, PHP Update, Fuzzy CMS and a slew of others that I can’t even remember their names – but WordPress is probably the best, and most accessible package I’ve ever used.

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December 28, 2007

Dino

@Varun: Drupal? No way. WordPress is King.

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December 28, 2007

s

yep. i love the wp codex too.

i’m more of a java/solaris/jboss and asp.net/windows/iis person, so php is not familiar to me (even though it is easy to get into it) and wp codex helped a lot with the latest theme i did from scratch.

🙂

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December 31, 2007

Dennis

I just spent 8 hours going through our servers and updating all of our WordPress installs for yet another security issue. What’s that? 9th one this year?

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December 31, 2007

Stephane Daury

@Dennis: with infinite extensibility comes infinite “exploitability”. 😉

But seriously, svn is your friend when it comes to incremental updates. Just checkout the appropriate branch, then svn update as needed.

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January 1, 2008

John B

Drupal is good for everything, but it’s not great for anything. I find that if I’m trying to do something “blog-like” then WordPress is by far the best choice.

I’ll second Stephane. SVN is your friend — the couple hours it took me to figure out how to use it has been repaid hundreds of times over.

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January 1, 2008

Stephane Daury

@Varun: Drupal is indeed an excellent platform, and I do praise their commitment to PHP5.

I’m always happy to tackle a Drupal project, but WP is still more ubiquitous and seems to be an ever recurring theme in the industry, with projects such as Diso‘s first implementation, etc.

Like @John B, I think both projects have great values, but in slightly different spheres. I’d compare more Drupal to Joomla vs. WordPress to Movable Type.

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January 2, 2008

Pop Stalin

@Varun: As someone who almost exclusively uses WordPress as a framework for all my site work I do, I’d have to disagree about how great Drupal/Joomla are. I’m speaking strictly from the client -side of the park with this statement. I’ve a web designer/developer and would consider myself an advanced Internet user; clients would never be able to make their way around the admin sections of Drupal/Joomla comfortably.

Yeah, they may be more extensible but for me it comes down to ease of use for the client and you can’t get much easier than WordPress plus it’s pretty powerful to boot. The only thing I wish you could do more easily with it that you can’t now are the community aspects that Drupal/Joomla provide via plugins.

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January 2, 2008

onur

drupal is cms, wordpress is blogging tools. this is the difference 🙂
if you planning big social site, drupal is the best.
if you planning professional blog site, wordpress is cool 🙂

i think like that.

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January 2, 2008

Stephane Daury

@onur: Diso and BuddyPress are shaping up to be great tools in the social sphere on the WP front too.

@Pop Stalin: I definitely agree with you on the usability of the admin section subject.

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January 4, 2008

John Koetsier

Dennis: get WordPress Automatic Upgrade.

I just posted about it here:
http://sparkplug9.com/2008/01/03/wordpress-automatic-upgrade/

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January 13, 2008

Infinitely Extensible at blog.rotracker.net

[…] WordPress is Infinitely Extensible. “And that’s coming from a guy who’s usually happy to start his projects from scratch.” […]

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