Hi, My name is Alex. I run ThePhotographyBlog which currently runs off of WordPress and I am not necessarily actively looking for a change, but as any entrepreneur and developer should be, I am trying to keep my options open. I love WordPress, but there isn't much to love about it anymore. It isn't the only platform to choose anymore. How does WordPress compare to PyroCMS? Would you switch, or are they very different?
Alex, I used to use Wordpress but gave up years ago when just about every site I worked on kept getting hacked. Wordpress is still a nice tool from an ease-of-use perspective but with the growing popularity to the hacker community, it's too much of a target and just too decentralized in that anyone can build anything for it and seriously compromise security and stability when installed. I've now built several applications on PyroCMS and find that while it's a learning curve, it's profoundly better than Wordpress from a security a stability standpoint. The base application includes most of what you need to run the average blog/informational site. With the addition of a number of the "PRO" addons you get some pretty powerful functionality without having to really write any code. The only downside I personally see to PyroCMS currently is the severe lack of pre-built themes to choose from. This is one area that Wordpress seriously kills. You can find just about any theme you want for Wordpress to the point that you don't even need to do any customization half the time. But currently I haven't found any publicly available front end themes for Pyro. You have to build your own or use the built-in starter theme, which is very basic. I think that someone with a creative skills and coding ability could make a killing designing a bunch of nice front end themes for Pyro and selling them through the store. If/when you are seriously considering moving your site away from Wordpress, I would highly recommend Pyro.
I am not going to repeat things @emergingdzns already pointed out - but i agree with them all. Being an MVC, it's easy though to just use html themes you can find on the web everywhere and implement them with Pyro functionality. On the note of themes, i have some ideas of themes to be created and released. However, it won't be released until we have blocks/layout editor or whatever it's going to be called released. Simply because i am guessing it will introduce new functionality people would like to use. And then i am afraid a theme will have to be largely refactored.
What is the progress on that/those @ryanthompson ? And am i correct in my assumption?
I would also recommend moving away from wordpress.
Layouts has paused for the time being but revisions and blocks are moving forward @william - I have a laundry list of blocks to include as well (I've been building sites with blocks using Grids for a while and have been accumulating / abstracting them). And you're spot on with HTML templates too - SO easy to take an HTML template off a site and slice it into Pyro. SUPER easy.
@thephotographyblog IMO.. Wordpress is awesome for someone who doesn't know any better and just wants to put up a whatever site for themselves. However it's hard to justify for a professional team to use it aside from maybe cost.. and at that I don't compete to be the cheapest freelancer for example. I compete to produce the highest quality bespoke system for my clients to operate their business with. However I am a developer / we have an agency and it's different if I was NOT a developer but still trying to put up my own site as a gardener or something.. I would not use Pyro cause I likely wouldn't know much about development. So there's that. I would like to say though that we're moving toward that market a little but but Pyro 3 is young. It takes time to think and execute ^_^ And it will also help developers since they can deploy even faster yet.
And on the mention of cost.. which also means time.. Pyro does a good job of helping developers produce custom / high feature results very fast (sure.. some learning curve but everyone's got one) through it's structural API (Streams) and automated generators for everything. So it has it's cost benefit as well but they have a different audience.
Speaking as an agency.. we make good money as well (every month we have 1 or so) helping new clients move from WP to Pyro cause they got hacked and lost their site or it was otherwise compromised.