natcolley,
I hope this does not come across as naive or hypercritical, I am asking because I really do want to know. What is the point of using WordPress if your goal is to NOT have it look like a blog? Why not use some other template/cms or do the whole thing from scratch? Is there some advantage to using WordPress in a non-blog setting that makes it worth the extra coding and what not? If so, what is that? Please explain.
There are definitely other CMS, the most popular being Joomla! and Drupal. There are also those written in languages other than PHP, from DotNetNuke (written in ASP.Net) to Plone (written in Python). Let’s take a look at PHP alternatives…
Joomla! has a very rigid taxonomy; it has to be two-level, and each article must belong strictly to one category. Additionally, Joomla’s templating system is substantially more complicated compared to WordPress’.
Drupal, in addition to a very flexible taxonomy, has plenty of other bells and whistles (“traditional” CMS, blogs, forums, even books), but it’s a complicated system that can be customized to the point of needing a dedicated server to run. Templating in Drupal is not for the faint-hearted, either; Drupal comes with three template engines (Smarty, XTemplate, and phpTemplate; you can use whichever you like) and has hooks for building in additional template engines…
