I recently received this email from a reader, and wanted to address it here for everyone.

Hi Kevin,

Great site, port­fo­lio, and articles.

I had a quick ques­tion if you can spare some time…

I’ve worked with Word­Press for about a year now, and have lately won­dered if some­thing like Modx is more appro­pri­ate for larger sites.  I love work­ing with WP, but the approach with Modx is nice.  The only rea­son why I have wavered is that WP doesn’t seem as well geared to facil­i­tate a 200 page site.  Unless there is a hid­den plug-in that I don’t know about that allows for each page man­age­ment that you know about?

I’d like to con­tinue to work with WP because if a client wants to sell online, easy imple­ment.  Easy man­ag­ing of a lot of basic things like forms, media, etc.

But other things like mul­ti­ple fields, where Modx excels at out of the box, is always done with a plu­gin etc.  Or even the page man­age­ment that I’m talk­ing about, again, that modx does great out of the box.  It just seems like more of a real CMS to me, but Word­Press seems to have so many plu­gin solu­tions that make things very easy.

Any insight to this would be much appre­ci­ated.  I hate think­ing that I’m not using the best sys­tem and some­times its hard to find good com­par­isons online.  I was think­ing since you’re such an avid WP user, that you could sway me back toward WP. ;)

Thanks for your time Kevin,

Best Chris

I would like to start by say­ing that I have lit­tle hands on expe­ri­ence with MODx, but have used sim­i­lar options such as Sil­ver­Stripe, and believe that both are very pow­er­ful and well built tools in their own right. By no means do I advo­cate that they could not han­dle this job well, I am sim­ply stress­ing that Word­Press is capa­ble of han­dling many com­mon CMS sce­nar­ios as well. It doesn’t deserve the bad rep it get’s.

I con­stantly see crit­i­cism of Word­Press being strictly for blog use, and it really has great poten­tial as a CMS. With the most robust plu­gin library around, you can quickly bolt on func­tion­al­ity as needed.

Word­Press plu­g­ins are not “hacks”

I con­stantly see argu­ments against using Word­Press as a CMS because you need to “hack” it in order to make it work. I think this is a mis­un­der­stand­ing best explained by the bad taste left in your mouth after trou­bleshoot­ing issues that result from a faulty plug-in. The real trick is know­ing how to choose the right plu­g­ins for the job, along with gain­ing a thor­ough under­stand­ing of the Word­Press func­tions avail­able for use in your themes.

Choos­ing the right plug-in for the job

A few rules I live by when choos­ing a plug-in for a spe­cific CMS setup:

1. Be sure that it has a decent sized amount of sup­port­ers & users. This will tell you that most of the fre­quently encoun­tered issues you may face have likely been solved already. You can usu­ally gauge this by the num­ber of down­loads that plug-in has.
2. Be weary of using plug-ins with lower than a 3 1/2 star rat­ing. Take this with a grain of salt, as you never really know why those rat­ings were given. This is just a gen­eral rule of thumb I tend to follow.
3. Be sure that the plug-in is com­pat­i­ble with the lat­est build of Word­Press. This tell’s you that the plug-in is still being sup­ported and devel­oped. It prob­a­bly has a decent sized com­mu­nity of users behind it con­tribut­ing to it’s code too.

How to han­dle Chris’s spe­cific sce­nario with WordPress

Now, how could we go about han­dling the spe­cific predica­ment that Chris is encountering?

• You could use the More Fields plu­gin to add addi­tional edit­ing fields to Word­Press, mak­ing it func­tion sim­i­lar to the way MODx does.
• Next, you could tap into the Word­Press Page Tree plu­gin to make man­ag­ing 100+ pages easy.

For more con­sid­er­a­tions on decid­ing whether or not Word­Press is the right choice, be sure to check out Devlounge’s amaz­ing post, Things to con­sider when using word­press as a CMS. Chris, best of luck. Let me know how it goes and what you finally decide on.

Choose what you’re most com­fort­able with

At the end of the day, I say use what you feel works best and are com­fort­able with. I’m sure you’ll find that if you hang around the MODx forums, the trend will be that MODx is the choice to go with. If you hang around the Word­Press forums, I wouldn’t doubt that the oppo­site is true. It’s all per­spec­tive. If you’ve spent your time focus­ing on learn­ing one solu­tion over another, of course you’re biased towards pro­mot­ing that solu­tion; because you know it far bet­ter. You know what’s bet­ter about your sys­tem, because you don’t know the poten­tial of alter­na­tives. Be open minded, you may just learn something.

Any other thought’s out there? I’m all ears.