WordPress – Pros and cons
At Angry Creative, we use WordPress for pretty much every website we build. It’s an amazing piece of software that currently powers about 20% of the world’s websites – And the great thing is that it’s completely free, open source and owned by the community. In this article, we’ll look at WordPress as a software, why we recommend it, how we work with it, and some of the limitations you should be aware of.
Why WordPress?
The self-hosted version of WordPress is a force to be reckoned with, currently powering millions of websites. We believe it offers the best balance of usability, functionality and ease of development for most website requirements. It is:
- Powerful – WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that gives you the ability to update your website without the need for additional involvement from a developer.
- Extensible – We can usually find ready-made plugins and themes to add functionality not provided by WordPress core. It’s easy for us to write custom code in the form of plugins and/or themes to further extend that functionality.
- Supported – With hundreds of millions of people constantly using WordPress, there’s a guide, tutorial, support forum or tutorial for almost anything you want to do. Whether it’s a step-by-step guide to adding an image to a blog post or learning how to build a theme – it’s there for you to learn and access. Most of it is published on WordPress sites!
- Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) – WordPress is continuously developed, tested and supported. No other web CMS has anywhere near as many man-hours invested in it – we consider that one of the best signs that WordPress is a good choice for the future as well as the here and now.
Don’t just take our word for it. The WordPress.org site is very well documented and we recommend you review some of WordPress’ features and capabilities. We can’t cover all possible features, functionality, and limitations in this article.
Potential limitations
We try to be clear about the benefits, limitations and risks of using open source software. Here are some things you should consider:
- Ownership – WordPress and much of its software ecosystem is free and open source. We can’t control its future development or the impact updates may have on your site or business.
- Updates – It’s crucial that your site is kept up to date to current versions of WordPress, plugins and themes. We will never compromise your ability to update your WordPress site, plugins or commercial themes without specifically informing you of the consequences.
- Third-party code – We can’t be responsible for other people’s code – this means we won’t modify or extend the functionality of WordPress, plugins or themes unless it’s specifically included in a scope of work we’ve agreed to. You should be aware that where functionality or design is provided by off-the-shelf software, future changes may be easy to make. In the future, if you request changes that are beyond what off-the-shelf software can provide (or you are unwilling to use that software) then costs may increase significantly.
Theme and plugin development
When we undertake work on WordPress themes and plugins, we supply ready-made installation packages that include files and templates developed from PHP, (X)HTML markup, CSS for style and discrete JavaScript for feature detection and behaviours.
Within reason, we will adhere to WordPress coding standards: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Coding_Standards to ensure that our work is easy for other developers to understand.
Future security and ongoing care
WordPress is the most widely used and best supported open source content management system in use in the world today. While it’s impossible to predict future requirements for something as complex as a website, WordPress is an incredibly versatile, capable, and extensible platform. We believe WordPress is a safe choice for future websites.
Software licensing
Some themes or plugins that we install and use may be proprietary and commercially licensed. We will inform you of such software that we use in our proposal to you and detail their cost. Unless otherwise stated, you will be responsible for the cost of licensing such software both now and in the future. If you fail to maintain current licences for the software, you may be unable to access updates and support to keep your website functioning.
Angry Creative may grant you (as specified within the proposal), the right to use a developer licence owned by Angry Creative for as long as a commercial relationship exists between us. If/when that relationship ends, it is up to you to obtain your own licences.
WordPress is GPL-licensed software and any theme or plugin we produce is considered a derivative work and therefore inherits the GPL licence. You should understand the implications of this for the IP ownership of the code and markup we write for you.
Summary
Angry Creative believes that free open source software is a force for good in the world and that WordPress in particular is a great choice for many new websites. However, it’s important that you understand and appreciate the implications and limitations of using an open source platform for your business.
Want to know why WordPress is a smart choice for large businesses? Read more about the benefits of using WordPress on the page Why large businesses should use WordPress.