WordPress is Infinitely Extensible

The main “Extend” page on WordPress.org states:

One of the core philosophies of WordPress is to keep the core code as light and fast as possible but to provide a rich framework for the huge community to expand what WordPress can do, limited only by their imagination.

That’s a statement I’ve heard about countless platforms before, but have often been disappointed to find it to be more of a marketing catch-phrase than anything concrete. Not so with WordPress!

I’ve been doing research on how to achieve specific goals with yet another plugin project, and the more I look, the easier it gets. Every time I catch myself thinking “hmm, this one’s gonna be tough”, a quick trip to the WP Codex changes my attitude within just a few minutes. Everything is possible.

Don’t get me wrong, WP is far from the only extensible platform out there and everybody has their personal pet peeves with the code base, but when coupled with amenities such as the wp-hackers mailing list and the wp-plugins dev repo, Matt and Automattic sure made it easy to adopt WordPress as a full featured scaffolding. And that’s coming from a guy who’s usually happy to start his projects from scratch.

16 thoughts on “WordPress is Infinitely Extensible”

@Varun: Drupal is indeed an excellent platform, and I do praise their commitment to PHP5.

I’m always happy to tackle a Drupal project, but WP is still more ubiquitous and seems to be an ever recurring theme in the industry, with projects such as Diso‘s first implementation, etc.

Like @John B, I think both projects have great values, but in slightly different spheres. I’d compare more Drupal to Joomla vs. WordPress to Movable Type.

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@Varun: As someone who almost exclusively uses WordPress as a framework for all my site work I do, I’d have to disagree about how great Drupal/Joomla are. I’m speaking strictly from the client -side of the park with this statement. I’ve a web designer/developer and would consider myself an advanced Internet user; clients would never be able to make their way around the admin sections of Drupal/Joomla comfortably.

Yeah, they may be more extensible but for me it comes down to ease of use for the client and you can’t get much easier than WordPress plus it’s pretty powerful to boot. The only thing I wish you could do more easily with it that you can’t now are the community aspects that Drupal/Joomla provide via plugins.

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drupal is cms, wordpress is blogging tools. this is the difference :)
if you planning big social site, drupal is the best.
if you planning professional blog site, wordpress is cool :)

i think like that.

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@onur: Diso and BuddyPress are shaping up to be great tools in the social sphere on the WP front too.

@Pop Stalin: I definitely agree with you on the usability of the admin section subject.

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