Websites Pushing WordPress Beyond Its Limits

I spent a LOT of time totally pushing WordPress to its limits to create my main site, so I can really respect the efforts of others to push, pull,and tweak WordPress to new limits to develop their own sites. 9Rules’ Building 9Rules post explains what they did to create their innovative membership blog.

…So, at this point the challenge was handling the sites that we wanted to allow into the Network. Should I build an entire database for handling our members? Again, WordPress came to the rescue. What I ended up doing, was using WordPress to manage our member sites as blog posts. This allows Paul and Mike to add, edit, and delete members without needing to learn a new system. It also saves my own time by saving me from building an admin just for our members.

So how do I store our members in WordPress as blog posts? Pretty easily actually. WordPress inherently is an extensible data management system. Remove your blog from the equation, and really all WordPress is doing is storing data. So, what I did was setup a category, with many sub-categories in our WordPress installation that we keep our members categorized in. Then, on our blog, I simply block that major category from appearing.

Do you know of any sites that really pushes the limits of what WordPress can do? I’m not talking about pretty WordPress Themes but deep internal changes or additions to WordPress to make their sites work. Let me know and I’ll do some investigating and come up with an article that addresses some of the power methods they are using to push WordPress beyond its out-of-the-box limits.

Site Search Tags: wordpress, programming, database, 9rules, website, advanced, intermediate, techniques
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen

8 Comments

Michael

Posted January 27, 2006 at 2:23 am | Permalink

Did you see the guy who was using wordpress to document the civil war? http://www.pddoc.com/cw-chronicles/

I thought it was an extremely interesting idea. Oh, so you like 9rules too? Aren’t they great? I love their methodology.

Lorelle VanFossen

Posted January 27, 2006 at 8:42 am | Permalink

Oh, wow, oh wow!!! The Civil War Chronicles is awesome. Thanks for bringing that to my attention. Amazing.

And 9Rules is really great. I wish I’d jumped on the original offer for inclusion. I get so many things like that, I turn just about everything down because of the quantity and lack of quality. So it means I miss out on the rare quality things like 9Rules. Maybe they’ll reconsider me? 😉

Chris

Posted March 1, 2007 at 6:03 am | Permalink

I have made heavy database/template changes to get my two newest sites to use WordPress: http://adclustr.com and http://pghdesigners.com – Both are wordpress installs that use it for something other than regular blogging.

Cliff Stanford

Posted March 11, 2008 at 5:46 pm | Permalink

Does having a site with no text on it whatsoever count as pushing limits? I just finished a coding a site for Sylvia where she said she wanted to write, not type, dammit!

OK, I cheated on the forms but I made up for it with the postit note at 30 degrees from the horizontal and with linkable text, didn’t I?

Cliff.

Carl

Posted October 4, 2012 at 5:25 am | Permalink

hi Lorelle, this is of interest to me as I’m split as to use WordPress or Drupal for the selection of company websites, as the sites in question are fairly small size in need of a blog platform & feed, on second thoughts I’m sure WordPress will be fine

- Lorelle VanFossen
  
  Posted October 4, 2012 at 10:01 am | Permalink
  
  If the sites are small, go WordPress. Drupal has improved greatly, but is often over the top for what most people need, adding a learning curve and extreme modularization when you don’t need it. WordPress has that capability as well, but it sounds like WordPress is perfect for you.
  
  Interesting. So few people ask for feed capability today. Good for you.
  
Franquias

Posted January 9, 2015 at 7:35 am | Permalink

If you know how to wisely use Custom Fields and Custom Post Types, “WordPress limits” are not so easy to push. One can make almost everything over the WordPress platform…

- Lorelle VanFossen
  
  Posted January 9, 2015 at 11:52 am | Permalink
  
  You’re right. Custom Fields and Custom Post Types are a great way to push WordPress beyond. Hopefully soon someone will make it easier to use both. They are trying… 😀

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