Over at ZDNet, Larry Dignan has written a great post about how the media sector is addicted to custom building Content Management Systems where Wordpress is more than powerful enough.
Having built a massive amount of sites ranging from standard blogs, shops and even social networks on the Wordpress platform, it’s my starting point for all projects that need rapid development on a tight budget. The reason I find developing web applications on top of Wordpress so easy is because it already has tools such as user management and templating in place, all accessible through a well documented API.
That’s not to say that Wordpress is suitable for every project, the templating system can be quite restrictive when you’re building “non-editorial” websites and the dashboard can become somewhat wild for the end user.
In these situations, Code Igniter is my choice because, like Wordpress, the basics are taken care of meaning I can focus on the code that really matters to the project, saving the client time and money.