Re: WordPress for Technical Documentation

[jimmy -at- breck-mckye -dot- com]

The Wordpress community and blogosphere in general is already very 
eager to give you the "pros" of Wordpress, so I won't bother. Instead, 
let me run through the "cons".

Firstly, Wordpress is not built for serving large amounts of traffic, 
or sites with a large volume of content. Being a PHP application, it 
can't exploit multithreading, which puts a low ceiling on its 
performance outside some rather specialized configurations. And being 
designed for blogging, WP is not built to index and efficiently traverse 
the large bodies of content that a tech comms team might put out. If 
you're expecting any kind of large-scale demand during the lifetime of 
your knowledge base, then Wordpress may be a poor solution.

Secondly, Wordpress' popularity makes sites using it a target of 
attackers, who run scripted automatons that roam the web in search of 
obvious WP hosts, then try to execute various known exploits in order to 
gain access to the site and modify its content for advertising purposes. 
Wordpress doesn't have to be a liability, but it must be updated 
religiously, even when updating breaks third-party add-ons.

Which brings us to the third drawback - the brittleness of plugins. 
Most of Wordpress' capability comes not from the software itself, but 
rather a rich ecosystem of independently authored add-ons that provide 
everything from e-commerce functionality to public Q&A forums. New 
plugins are introduced almost every day, but the quality and reliability 
of these add-ons can vary. Some add-ons only work with certain versions 
of Wordpress, and others can disrupt one another if poorly written. The 
barrier-to-entry for writing plugins is typically quite low (and there's 
no review process as such), so it's hard to trust the less common 
add-ons, and because most authors are hobbyists, they're free to abandon 
their plugins at a moments' notice. If you need something outside of 
WP's core capabilities to serve a business-critical requirement, then 
you are making yourself very vulnerable.

Fourthly, the more general weakness of Wordpress is that it just isn't 
built ground-up for technical communications. Features like structured 
authoring, author management, content curation, version control and 
translation management aren't supported out of the box and rely on 
hacky, trial-and-error plugin configuration. If these features are 
important to you, you may be better served by something built ground-up 
for your specific context.

In some ways, you might compare Wordpress to Microsoft Word. Yes, Word 
*can* do everything - from bake sale flyers to 400-page aerospace docs - 
but it's going to involve a lot of tugging, and there's only so hard you 
can pull before things start to tear.

On 2013-01-13 18:37, Bill Swallow wrote: