Happy New Year, and welcome to 2013! What resolutions have you made for yourself and your work this year? At WP Engine, we’ve spent December making plans for 2013, and I’m excited to share those with you as we hit the ground running today.
In 2013, WP Engine is going to be adding several new features to our platform, as well as our service. We’re also going to expand our content strategy, and community interaction to match that.
Starting today, you’ll find monthly themes for all the content that we share, both on our blog, and on contributed posts.
January’s theme is “WordPress isn’t just for blogs anymore,” and we’d like to put an end to that misconception once and for all. Now, for many of you, this may not be news because you’ve been using WordPress as your go-to App Engine and CMS for your client work and your own projects since 2010 or so. However, we believe that in 2013, WordPress as a whole is going to see massive adoption inside Fortune 500 companies as those large organizations realize what the WordPress Community has been preaching for the past year or two: WordPress is not just for blogs!
WordPress is for Apps. It’s for Platforms. It’s for online games. It’s for eCommerce. It’s for corporate microsites. It’s for large companies who want to maximize their web presence, and want the simplest solution possible.
In preparation, WP Engine has built an enterprise WordPress hosting platform to be the solution of choice for these businesses while still remaining true to our roots in the WordPress Community.
This month, we’re going to focus on how cutting-edge corporations and agencies are adopting WordPress. These companies already know that WordPress gives your company the tools to efficiently and securely manage a team of content producers on a corporate site, and companies like Constant Contact and HTC already have large WordPress implementations for their content marketing and apps online. They are taking advantage of myriad reasons why WordPress isn’t just for blogs anymore.
A Wealth of Talented Service Providers
There are more than 20,000 people who make their living as WordPress consultants, developers, and designers. This massive community means that for every corporation looking for a solution, there is a consultant with a WordPress solution that will satisfy project stakeholders from start to finish. From custom theming to plugin development, there are thousands of consultants who can bend WordPress to their will, and create a secure, scalable, and elegant solution to your needs, makes your bosses happy, and makes you the hero for your company.
As Secure As You Can Get
These companies have run WordPress past IT stakeholders, and they know that WordPress makes sense as a secure solution. This month, we’ll cover how WordPress Core is incredibly secure, and when you combine WordPress with a managed host that can guarantee your security like WP Engine can, your Director of IT can sign off on the project and rest easy at night knowing your resources are safe and sound behind enterprise-grade security protocol.
Infinitely Scalable
The right hosting solution paired with WordPress can handle the “Oprah Effect.” This means when you get a surge of traffic, your WordPress sites can scale (almost) infinitely on cutting-edge servers with a killer CDN out in front. You never know when that burst of traffic will arrive, and so your hosting platform must be ready to handle thousands of visitors a second without a hiccup and on a moment’s notice. WP Engine hosted the ScotusBlog during the 2012 healthcare decision, and served more than four million unique visitors in a 24 hour period. That’s infinite scalability.
Amazing Out of The Box
Installing WordPress out of the box will give you a fully responsive, deeply functional website. The default theme, TwentyTwelve, is optimized for mobile, and cleanly designed. Even before you begin to customize the theme and the plugins, WordPress is a simple, elegant solution that your stakeholders will fall in love with.
A Fully-Customizable Solution
But your project will need more than just “out of the box” functionality. You’ve got specific objectives that must be met, and that will require customized solutions, delivered on-time and under budget. WordPress can handle that too! Developers have written more than 23,000 plugins that you can use, and each plugin can be easily customized to meet your requirements. WordPress themes and plugins are designed to be fully-customizable, and a trusted WordPress consultant can help you choose the right plugins.
This year, look for WordPress to become the most important solution for large companies who need to build customized, scalable, and secure apps and platforms to meet the challenges of 2013. At WP Engine, we’re looking forward to working with many of you on your sites. We’ll be your WordPress partner. Our platform is your go-to solution for WordPress hosting that is scalable and secure, as well as fully-customizable.
As you explore which solutions will serve your organization, look for more information on our blog about how to implement WordPress at your company: from best practices in enterprise WordPress installations, to the best plugins to use, to which developers we recommend, we’re going to be your one-stop shop for WordPress hosting information in 2013. And of course, if you have more questions, just let us know in the comments!
Happy New Year! Here’s to a successful and prosperous 2013. We can’t wait to work with you.
WordPress should not be used to power every site under the sun. Sure, it has its advantages in thousands of developers, plugins, and themes, but it comes at a cost.
Over the years the codebase has had to grow to cater for ever growing user requirements, and having to be backwards compatibile hasn’t helped. Version 3.5 is 14.9mb in size! Add in a couple of themes and plugins and you can easily take this up to 100mb of disk space! for what could be done in code for a 1/100th of the size! Then, remember that huge portions of this code has to be loaded and processed by the server for each page request. It’s an efficiency nightmare!
Then there are developers which strap in CMS code into a theme. Semantically, that’s horrible!
Dont get me wrong, I have been developing on WordPress for over a year now and it is a decent blogging platform. But i will always use a MVC framework if i want to make a *proper* website.
Does anyone remember PHP-Nuke?
Hey Dale, I’m really glad you feel comfortable enough to leave a comment like this on our blog! Thank you.
I think that many of the developers who put together “proper” websites with WordPress might disagree with you, and give examples like http://Metro.co.uk and http://Androidandme.com as examples of full-blown sites built entirely on WordPress.
However, WordPress doesn’t need to be the answer to every question on the Internet, and as a Community I love how we continue to take inspiration from other platforms to continue to improve WordPress, version after version!
Really, I don’t understand why people love to class WordPress as “just a blogging platform.” In 2013, that’s ridiculous. I understand it started that way, *9 years ago.*
I develop WordPress sites every day, and with custom post types, PHP some creativity, I have yet to be limited in what I can do.
I like WordPress because I can create something very specific for a customer fairly quickly, and if necessary I can really tie down the user interface and make it easy for them to maintain. I don’t feel like I need to really worry about the back end user interface to begin with, which is more than I can say for Drupal, Joomla, Concrete5, etc. People still struggle, but it’s much easier to build a website for a content manager to use in WordPress than in any of those — I like the simple, user-centered focus.
As far as the front end, WordPress (like any other CMS) is only limited by a person’s ability to write HTML, CSS and JS. Obviously, extremely custom sites would still require something beyond any CMS, but I don’t think that WordPress can seriously be dismissed as only a “decent blogging platform” in it’s current state.
I do agree, definitely, that not every site needs to be a WordPress site, but I guess I would argue that there are very few things that could not be accomplished as a WordPress site.
I do think it could grow some in terms of speed and efficiency.
Not to mention SMBs – I can’t imagine why an SMB would not want to host their company site on WordPress (other than lack of awareness).
Loving WPEngine, BTW. The one-click create a staging site was a huge bonus when I swapped WP themes on one of my sites last week.
Hey Steve, you’re absolutely right about SMBs hosting on WordPress. We host lots and lots of business sites that might be considered “small” if you compare them to Google or Apple, but they represent a locally run business that requires a reliable web presence worthy of their brand and customer experience. WordPress is so good out of the box for these businesses that it almost doesn’t make sense to consider another option!
-Austin
PS: I’m glad to hear you’re loving the staging area! Have you tried using Git yet? Visit git.wpengine.com….