by
hardnova
Published:
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 10:00:50 AM
WordPress does not support [insert feature you need here]!!
On one of the popular Forums frequented by CAFW members we noticed an awful lot of WP cheerleaders (WP makes me ZERO DOLLARS but everyone here says its the best so I do too). Which got us to thinking about both the "peer pressure phenomena" and the ability of these cheerleaders and their regurgitative forum post to mask other solutions that may in fact outperform WP in key areas and therefore represent a huge value to new Webmasters.
The basics of this observation seemed to be that the cheerleaders do the promotion for WP and so new people looking for solutions get forced into using WP by the others (much to their detriment as our recent product shoot-out confirmed).
This constant and blind cheer-leading by those who themselves were bullied into using WP has led to massive WP sales and massive failure by millions of would be Webmasters to create and maintain a useful presence on the web. We used to use WP too, now we dont.
On top of that, the forum cheerleaders do not seem to notice or mind that a few of the more senior/savvy cheerleaders simply feed off of the less knowledgeable, by selling them WP sites, and themes for sites at obscene rip-off rates and/or e-books on how to "make money online" with WP powered websites. These more "savvy" forum inhabitants (Moderators in some of the more obvious cases) simply scrape together and edit third-party information without testing it or proving it in nearly ALL cases. The predatory WordPress cheerleaders then have a real reason to continue touting WP as the end all solution to any online problem; furthermore "buy my e-book and make millions". There was even one shockingly obvious scammer (who somehow was a Moderator in the very forum he was preying on ???!!!????), pretending to be an expert on both the Internet and all manner of associated technology in addition to how to make money online, who literally said "it is impossible that anyone could make a better program than wordpress" and he even went so far as to REMOVE a posting from a supporter of a different product.
HELLO! - These people are simply using the other cheerleaders to make a little extra money because they have not been able to do it using WP or the contents of their get rich scam e-book. So if you are a blind WP cheerleader, we advise you NOT to buy anything from anyone concerning how to benefit from WP, since allegedly you can find a way to use it for free and all the modules you want should also be free etc.
Which brings up the actual usefulness of WordPress as an application and platform with which to build a website. It does this WELL if you can find the modules you need,but it does not support ANY features not directly related to Blogging natively. For additional functionality you WILL have to find free modules that allow WP to do what you want or PAY for modules that offer the needed capability. The reason WordPress LOST the recent product shootout was because of this fact. It is only a BLOGGING TOOL not a CMS or WDA engine.
What that means is that there are in FACT, many other alternative tools to build complete websites that do not require that you go and find module after module to make them work. We obviously prefer this service but have also in the past used WordPress for Blogging (which is what it is designed to allow you to do). There are others like Joomla and Drupal too.
The bottom line to this post is simple, use your own brain to make your own choices, find a product or service you can use with the features you need and watch out for forum predators (especially if they are Moderators) who simply want to sell you their useless e-books that have ZERO value, or there incredibly useless "guaranteed" WP themes, because although they may have been scraped, repackaged and edited with finesse, they have never been used by the WP cheerleaders selling them to generate one thin dime.