I’ve heard many different arguments to this question over the last couple of years but its only recently where I’ve looked into this into more detail myself to see just how difficult it is to make it work in a non-conventional workflow

You can read some of the details of what I have been working on here.

I have to confess getting it to work so far has been pretty hard work, I have dedicated nearly 2 weeks of effort to get it into a place where I feel it works the way I want it to without having to resort to hacking anything inside Wordpress itself, some of this was down to my lack of experience with Wordpress itself as I’ve only really used it as my personal blog before but also some of the quirks which I have documented here and here.

I am pretty sure that as I require more plugins that I will be spending more and more time patching things, where I need to do this I fully intend to offer patches back to the plugin authors, I’ve been trying to do with with “Simple Ad’s Manager” where I have offered to create a patch and filed an issue with the plugin author View Github Issue I just hope that the authors accept these patches and I will do my best to make sure they don’t break any existing functionality.

I think for Wordpress itself needs to become more enterprise friendly however, driving this from the core and encouraging plugin authors with stronger coding standards I think Wordpress will be able to fill a void which I don’t think it currently can.

Some of the things I think are needed to enable Wordpress to better support the needs of enterprise users

• Support for Dev/QA/Stage/Live workflow for development and configuration (not content)

• Provide the ability to store cache content / Debug logs outside of WP_CONTENT_DIR

• Update coding standards to not recommend plugins writing to WP_PLUGIN_DIR

This isn’t a complete list and I will be coming back to this subject a number of times in the future I think as I gain more experience with the platform.

There are also a number of things plugin authors could do as well, for example, just about every caching plugin that I’ve found sends a “flush” command to memcache when wanting to purge the entire cache, this works great for a single website but when you need to manage 40 sites and can’t have a dedicated memcache cluster for each one then finding an alternative solution is necessary.

I will be attempting to fix some of these issues myself, so I’m not just asking for others to do my work for me and I will donate as much back to the community as I can but I think this will need a lot of effort from a lot of people, I just hope people in the Wordpress community embrace some of the idea’s that I have and I know quite a few other people have about it and offer suggestions on alternative solutions where idea’s just aren’t workable.