Another Wordpress question

carlmango11

Hey,

I know there's a new thread about Wordpress but I thought it'd be better to make a fresh one for my question.

I'm wondering, just exactly how customisable/extendible is Wordpress? When I search the web I see loads of articles singing its praises about how it can do a lot more than blogging etc. But is this aimed at non-developers?

Basically, I'm a developer that might be getting involved in construction of a website that should do the following:

1. Show various different posts about events
2. Have these events sortable, filterable etc.
3. Have a members area
4. Have an events calender with bookable events
4a. Take payment for these events
5. Suggest other events based on user's history
6. Advertise

So, do you in your professional opinion believe Wordpress is the way to go? Personally I like to build from a lower level up but I don't want to waste time re-inventing the wheel. Especially because I might not even be spending time on this - it'll be a former project manager who might be taking the wheel. He has some programming experience but might be a bit rusty etc.

On the other hand I don't want a lot of time to be invested in Wordpress just to find we're hitting brick walls regarding new functionality.

Is Wordpress up to the task? Or should I stick with a regular web framework?

EDIT: What about Drupal? From what I read it sounds like a happy middle ground

Graham

There's a rake of event management/booking plugins for WordPress that you should take a look at, no point reinventing the wheel. Give a few of them a test run.

Talisman

Through the use of plugins, WordPress can do everything you want except ...

5. Suggest other events based on user's history

You won't find a plugin that can provide that kind of functionality so some code would have to be written. Have a look on Github for recommendation engine projects you could use.

Do you need a CMS?

WordPress / Drupal? Coming from a development background I preferred Drupal because I saw it as more of a Framework than a CMS that had to be worked around. It's not for people who don't want to have to write some code, recently I've done some work with WordPress and found it has improved a lot. I find that people who advocate WordPress are generally plugin crazy - this approach comes with its own risks.

The application you outlined could be developed quite quickly using a framework like Laravel and would remove the overhead of the CMS.

Graham

I'm a big fan of Laravel as a PHP framework but a custom WP plugin would be much much quicker than writing an entire event management system from scratch.