A partner and I are looking to start a project that involves typical CRUD functionality, as well as user permissions etc.
We are both relatively experienced front-end developers, with limited back end (basic PHP) experience.
Personally, I prefer to build things from scratch - but as we are only two people I understand that one should not reinvent the wheel and should leverage existing code which have been tested and accepted as best practice etc.
My partner is recommending (due to our lack of back end experience) to use wordpress as the CMS/user control system. I generally dislike wordpress as a solution for clients...but that is mainly due to how themes manage content and code. We would be building this project from the ground up, essentially making our own theme.
Just wondering if this is advisable, or if there are any pitfalls you see to this (despite the obvious security holes wordpress brings with it).
Any other recommendations would also be great to hear about.
at work, we started to use wordpress for clients who didn't know what they wanted but they wanted it asap. the problem with that is they didn't really take care of it. they started to use poorly-made plugins and they didn't update wordpress when updates were available. many of the sites got hacked and we were left with the clean up. luckily it didn't take down the whole server. i look at wordpress as windows. it can work well, if it's maintained. i have looked at the source code and tried to develop themes and plugins. for me, it was a mess. i didn't like the structure or how to develop off it.
have you looked at other CMS-like software? there's ghost, which is suppose to be just like wordpress.
for clients who gave us more time and they knew what they wanted, we built things using laravel. it's a php framework and does a lot of the heavy lifting for us. we can build CRUD fairly quickly. you will need to understand MVC. once you do, it becomes easy.
for sites that don't change often, we use jekyll. it's a static content generator.
at any rate, we are always left with this question, do we give clients what they want or do we give clients what they think they want. the answer is always different.
I hear all that with client work, and yes - I think wordpress is a poor client tool, based on it's lack of security, and general poor cms design (it's overwhelming for people who just want to write posts, and they can severely break stuff if they don't know what they are doing). I'm sure there are permissions to remedy that too, but I don't really bother with it enough to care.
However, my question wasn't so much around using it as a site structure, but as a backend, for user submitted material and user management. We aren't super familiar with MVC, but that is something that i'll have to tackle at some point soon for sure.