Posted on Wednesday 4th of April 2007 at 13:46 in The Internet

Can you make a commercial site in Wordpress?

As I approached in my most famous Wordpress sites article; is it actually possible to make a commercial site in Wordpress?

I really don't see why not. You certainly can in systems like Drupal or Joomla and Wordpress is a CMS of sorts with a thriving community behind it. Unfortunately Wordpress was designed and implemented as a blogging solution but is that where it has to end? It manages file uploads, content, full editing etc but it also has more plugins than you could ever wish for.

There are Google Sitemap plugins, admin plugins, stats packages and any number of things so why can't you build a large site in Wordpress?

Templates are limiting
The templates provided upon the install of Wordpress are limited to blogging (largely) and that's exactly my point. Here you have a CMS that is only limited to blogging because that's what the templates were designed for - you could quite happily run a news site from Wordpress. But why not something more?

Why can't you do more in Wordpress? There's plugins for polls and advertising positions - these are traits of larger sites

Large sites have lots of content but they are also feature rich and that's something Wordpress isn't (by default) but with the ability to easily (and quickly) install plugins developed by the community - the functionality can be dramatically improved. Polls, slideshows, presentations, ad-management etc save Wordpress as a large-site solution.

Just a passing thought really but why not use Wordpress? It's easy to use with a very intuitive interface, powerful content management and media integration. Unfortunately it lacks templating which is a major concern for large-scale development but I dare say you could create a sexy content-heavy microsite in it without any problems. I'd be amazed if clients couldn't use it.

Also it is free, which saves you shelling out for an off-the-shelf solution.

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Showing most recent 10 of 10 comments

I noticed that other day that the official website for the British Prime Minister is run on Wordpress, http://www.number10.gov.uk/

by Chris Seal on Saturday 29th of November 2008 at 04:22

My view is that Wordpress is an excellent CMS these days. Yes, without Plugins you might find it a little restrictive but there are so many out there, you can do pretty much anything. We actually write our own plugins such as these below and have extended WordPress to act more like a commercial CMS than a simple blogging tool.

Multiheader plugin 0.25
Make muliple header management for WordPress. By Andrzej Zglobica / New Brand Media.

NBM Plugin Pack 0.6
Including: ShowPages multi-function widget. Secure area, Multisidebar and more. By Andrzej Zglobica / New Brand Media.

CSS Manager 0.8.1 wp 2.2
Provides you control with including particular CSS code on specified pages or categories to optimize your average CSS-per-page size. By Andrzej Zglobica / New Brand Media.

CV Form 0.5
New Brand Media CV Quicksend Form. By Andrzej Zglobica / New Brand Media.

Here are these in action on our new site in development: http://www.newbrandmedia.co.uk/html/

Let us know if we can help with your endeavors?

by Jonathan Porter - New Brand Media on Monday 11th of August 2008 at 06:47

You can most certainly use WordPress to build a commercial site. It’s quite flexible if you know a little xhtml, css, and php. Even more so if you’re not afraid of digging into the mySQL database. That being said, it’s probably not a good solution if you’re trying to run it "out of the box". I’d say the same of Drupal. The best Drupal implementations have a lot of customization done to them. Although, Drupal can do a lot more with a stock implementation...

by Chris Hanck on Friday 29th of February 2008 at 13:09

The Web site for the School of Journalism at Indiana University is run on WordPress: http://journalism.indiana.edu/. As Web developer for the school I can tell you that, with a little elbow grease, WordPress makes for a very powerful CMS.

by Jeff Johnson on Friday 2nd of November 2007 at 12:30

which plugins. ? for instance im currently trying to do this and need my users to be able to post guides and also i need a plugin that will allow the first few lines of the blog post to be displayed then a more tag that allows the post to be opened in full... any help is appreciated ?

by lazynewt on Friday 4th of May 2007 at 03:55

Yeah that’d be a good idea

by Harpo on Friday 20th of April 2007 at 10:22

hey Craig, why dont tou tell us the link to your site so we can see it?

by anonimous on Friday 20th of April 2007 at 08:36

I use wordpress like a full CMS on my site.
You need to tweak a few thing to get it working comfortably, nothing major though.

by Craig on Thursday 19th of April 2007 at 02:56

You article is nice but a bit confusing,

you ask many times but you don’t quite answer

i’m still wondering if you recommend WP as CMS or not

i guess you did?

by M4rc0 on Tuesday 17th of April 2007 at 11:11

You can use WordPress as a CMS, using plugins.

by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 5th of April 2007 at 02:28