Is WordPress For Everything and is Everything Better With WordPress?

Short answer: No

Long answer: Yes

No

In the beginning, WordPress was built to help people share their thoughts via blogging. The biggest thing that led to its rise was the fact that it was open source and free, and still is. At the time, the only other options were Live Journal, Typepad (paid), and others which I do not care to remember right now.

WordPress flourished and soon allowed people to write ‘plugins’ and customize themes. That was it. They were home.

Ever since then, it has advanced to have a whole range of abilities added to it to help it become one of the most popular blogging tools, publishing platforms, and CMS.

But out of the box, apart from allowing you to create a site and/or a blog, it doesn’t do very much else. All the rest of the functionalities have to be bolted on via a specialized plugin, theme, or a combination of both. The casual person, who may have just been introduced to it, won’t even know what option would work best for them?!

Update: WordPress default themes have grown exponentially to allow customizations since this article was published. Gutenberg, the block-based post/page builder has been welcomed by many, with reservations expressed by a few.

WordPress has grown on the back of developers adopting the platform as their playground. The best part is that almost all WordPress themes and plugins, free and paid, have support attached to them. Without which I doubt the new user would even dare try the CMS on for size. We know, we sell our own as well.

So while one can accomplish a lot with WordPress, using it on its own can seem daunting. Don’t worry though, the support ecosystem is mindblowing.

Yes

The real power of WordPress is unleashed when you start to develop with and for it. In the long run, this is probably the best option for building a customized setup that can be easily modified, adjusted and completely revamped should the need arise.

If you are a non-developer the payoff to hiring a technical lead will manifest itself as soon as you deploy. A lot of developers have built world-class plugins and themes that can help you manage hundreds to even millions of users, visitors, and interactions.

So while you may ask yourself in the beginning if WordPress is the right choice for me now, the answer would probably be somewhere in between Yes and No (depending on what you’re doing with it). But if you ask yourself will I feel like I should have tried WordPress back when I had the chance, the answer will probably be – Yes.

You never know, you might find yourself modifying a theme or plugin file just for the rush it gives at being able to edit open-source code and watch it do something you intended it to.

It’s true what WordPress says, that ‘Code is Poetry‘.

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