Have I Been Led To Believe a Lie about WP?

It all depends on what exactly you are wanting to achieve. Understand that WP itself is a big system that allows you to do amazing things. I believe he was stating that the more you add to this system things might slow down as many things need to load as is which can be true. There are many variables in play to declare an answer.

What are you wanting to achieve with your site?

LOL

Truth is WP is great for MOST projects, it does have its shortcomings but there is a reason it is so popular. There are plenty of very successful online businesses built solely on wordpress, including membership sites and authority sites.

Your coder/developer may not be comfortable working with wordpress or maybe just doesn't like some of the downfalls wordpress does have (some security issues, load issues for php, updates, etc...). If you're going to have your developer on for the life of your business, then do what he wants. If not, then wordpress might be a blessing for you when it comes to finding a competent developer once your current one isn't around for one reason or another.

My two cents:

1. I saw a post this morning by someone that said that even though he hadn't used anything else to build websites, that WP was absolutely the best. So there is a lot of Koolaid being passed around. If people say it's good long enough and loud enough then people begin to believe it's good no matter what the truth is.

2. Remember that WP is at heart a blog. You post your thoughts for the day today and then you post more thoughts tomorrow. What they've done, in my opinion, is taken that core and maximized it or even exceeded what it was originally intended for - that can be good and bad.

It was never intended, for example, to be a classified script. Could it be used as a classified site? Sure. It was never intended to be a true membership site. Could it be used as one? Sure. It was intended to be a blog where the information is freely available with no payment needed and limited number of private posts.

3. Depending on your needs there are lots of other choices for niche sites, classified sites, article sites, membership sites, family photo sites, etc.

A built from scratch membership script that was designed for a membership site with perhaps some content free and most hidden until payment, would have all those features built into the core. It wouldn't be the core plus this addon and this extra and this workaround. All those addons, extras, and workarounds make it too slow and too much of a resource hog for some people.

4. Every person has to look at their own needs and look at the pros and cons. Why are their thousands and thousands of people who use Drupal or Joomla or HTML, for example? Is it that they haven't been "enlightened" yet or is it that they are happy with Drupal or Joomla or HTML?

Again this morning I saw people saying that anyone that would use HTML is just wrong. Why is it wrong? Do they know my needs? Do they know what my site is about? Do they know about the widget I paid to get developed that only works for HTML and not on WP sites? Do they understand my industry's privacy and security rules which may look down on open source software provided by a mishmash of unknown developers? Etc. Etc.

5. In the end it comes down to every person making a decision after looking at the facts. My advice (many scars to prove my experience in this realm) is that once you make the decision don't keep looking at the new feature that system x just put in place and start considering changing.

And finally it doesn't really matter what system you use. People don't care about your system or refuse to buy because you use Drupal instead of WP for example. They care about the information you provide, the customer service you provide, the value you provide and wonder what is in it for them. They go to read something, make a decision, and take an action such as buy that something or sign up for a newsletter. Last relevant example, they don't care if the newsletter came from Aweber, Iminica, GetResponse, ConstantContact, or MS Outlook. They care about what's in the newsletter.

Everyone has an opinion whether it be about the best autoresponder, anitivirus, blog platform, membership script, forum, or whatever. It's just their opinon though. It may be right for them but may be totally wrong for you.

Good luck.

Mark

No he's bonkers. Wordpress isn't great for all projects, obviously. But its solid for most, and you can strip it down and tweak it in infinite ways to suite your needs. It sounds like your friend lacks imagination or programming skills.

EDIT: I use it for both an authority site AND a membership site and it works great. I DON'T use it for my thin adsense sites because it's clunky. Since I own thousands of sites the bandwith and hosting charges would be prohibitively expensive running wordpress installs on all those sites. So it just depends...

Actually your friend is right ,I think,
because raw php give you many facility than wp,
raw php provide you a facility to use css templet and also customize it ,more over security,
on the other hand if you use .net it is also reliable and secured,but wp,
now a days it is a toy of child.