Occasionally I run across developers who only work with one platform and will tell you that their platform is superior to all the others. In my experience, these developers are always - you guessed it! - WordPress developers - or more accurately, entrepreneurs who build websites using WordPress. They like to claim that you can do anything in WordPress that you can do in any other platform.

My short response to that claim is "maybe" and my long response is "actually, not". Furthermore, I have run across three such individuals in the recent past each of whom built a WordPress site for a client and NEVER SHARED THE ADMINISTRATOR PORTAL (which is one reason these three clients came to me). The business logic is obvious enough. By keeping the administrator portal to themselves, they could then bill said clients an exorbitant rate for making simple edits, like updating content. This runs against the basic idea of.a CMS, .i.e. a Content Management System that is supposed to help non-technical audiences build and maintain their sites.

Is this ethical? I do not think so.

Furthermore, there is no shortage of online articles and debates about "WordPress vs. Drupal" or "WordPress vs. Joomla" or "Wordpress vs {you fill in the blank]".

I find these debates tiresome and misleading, especially for organizations and business owners who are talking the big step of setting up their first website.

Here is what I find in my experience:

• WordPress is a fun, easy-to-use platform for an organization that needs a basic "brochure" style website.
• It has an extraordinarily deep catalog of beautiful, eye-catching themes.
• It also gives access to thousands of plugins that can extend the site functionality in many directions and vertical markets, including e-commerce, CRM, calendars, registration, etc.

Here's where things can go quickly off the rails: managing WordPress plugins is a complex and often frustrating experience for site owners. Plugins may be buggy (i.e. do not do what they are supposed to) or conflict with other plugins. It is also difficult to customize the extended features that the plugins bring in.

That is why I agree with many highly experienced WordPress developers who recommend a different platform IF the organizational requirements and/or business logic includes complex features like e-commerce, CRM, discussion forums, community portals, newsletters, user management, event management with calendar integration, online registrations, complex data applications (forms that repeatable data or more than 20-30 fields) and so forth.

The real takeaway is that when planning to build a new site, use your imagination to think about how the website should evolves and function over the next 3-5 years. In other words, do a lot of research and think big. WordPress might be a perfect solution initially. It could also entail a lot of wasted time and money.