Popular misconceptions about WordPress:

• WordPress is powerful enough to be modified to accommodate most website features well
• WordPress is a strong enough CMS to be used for any website on the internet
• You can replicate all of the features of other less user friendly CMS through adding tons of plug-ins

What WordPress is terrible at:

Organizing large amounts of different types of content
Since WordPress limits the content types to posts or pages, it’s not very good at organizing large amounts of content, even for a site that has a portfolio of past projects. You can organize all the content in WordPress by categories and tags, which can help people find it, but at its core, it only has those 2 content types and uses the same display for each one: a teaser with the title and paragraph.

This is adequate for small websites, but when you get into sites with hundreds or even thousands of pieces of different types of content (different types of users, for instance, with robust profiles), you start running into problems finding, displaying and organizing content. People don’t like to spend brain cycles searching for content on your site. They prefer to point and click. With a more advanced CMS  (content management system) you can create the content types that make sense for your company or site. Instead of being limited to a post or page you can create custom types for portfolios, galleries or collections; you can even display videos and the teaser as an image. You can create custom search and reporting views and summarize data more effectively, with clumsy third party plug-ins, which may be buggy, have conflicts with other plug-ins, or may even disappear from future versions compatibility completely.

Site-wide features
In WordPress, you can easily create a blog with multiple users. You can even use a modified version of WordPress called WordPressMu (Multi-User) to have multiple blogs on a single install of WordPress, where when you add a user, you add a whole website.  However, if you want to have common features like a shopping cart across all of the blogs, you cannot do this easily in WordPressMu; and WPMU in general is not as user friendly for the novice to install and maintain, although it is improving rapidly lately.

User accounts and advanced (social networking like) profiles

WordPress uses a separate administration “dashboard” outside of the regular site and theme.  It does not have public profiles like what you are accustomed to  seeing on modern social networking sites- without heavy modification and additional templates (there are add-ins like BuddyPress and BBPress for more advanced profiles).  By the time you got to all that trouble and expense, you are better off with Drupal, or even Ruby-on-Rails if the budget allows this.

There is no easy to way to display a directory of all the site’s members and sort those efficiently or modify the profile questions.  If your needs require advanced user profiles, and you have a budget for a more elaborate and flexible CMS like Drupal, we do not recommend  WordPress.

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