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I am working on an online shopping platform that acquires it's data from various affiliate programs through XML files. I am talking hundreds and thousands of items per program here that change often if they go out of stock.

My clients choice of CMS was WordPress. I am guessing he assumed the user friendly interface would make life easy for him. However, the fact that he hired me to parse the XML files, store data in the back-end and basically make everything work tells me he had very little clue about what he was getting himself into.

My impression is that WordPress has a very specific way of handling data as it divides everything into categories/sub-categories in the back-end which is very counter intuitive to a business model where data exists in numbers of over hundreds and thousands of items and is further cross referenced by programs so that any change in the programs XML file can easily be reflected products page.

Conclusion I have a very specific database model implemented for handling my clients needs. However, this model conflicts with how wordpress chooses to save data in the back-end natively. I am absolutely convinced WordPress is geared towards anything that might resemble a blog and definitely not THIS. I am thinking about asking my client to shift to a custom CMS. Before making my pitch though, I wanted to run this by the stack community.

Thanks for the input in advance.

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You can implement custom database structure (as well as the other functionality you describe) by rolling your own WP Plugin - codex.wordpress.org/Creating_Tables_with_Plugins That said, WordPress probably wouldn't be my first choice (based on personal preference and past experience in WP plugin development). – msanford Oct 10 '12 at 20:34
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The sad part is I have come to this logical conclusion 1 month into developing plugins for my client. I have almost given up though on WP because of it's nature. For example, on the nav bar we have a brands menu which on hover displays a collection of brands in the back end. This collection of brands comes from a specific table, however to appease word press I have to make copy of these items and store them in a WP specific table as a custom post which seems beyond what one would just call inconvenient.. – SPI Oct 10 '12 at 20:39
+1 SPI I've come to the same conclusion myself. WordPress is useful for many things, but I've often scoffed at their code is poetry tagline when trying to do something complex; it is indeed beyond inconvenient in many arenas. – msanford Oct 10 '12 at 20:52
closed as too localized? I would really like to hear what other people think about using wordpress as a CMS for shopping platforms built around affiliate programs. What is up with the extreme moderation? – SPI Oct 11 '12 at 10:00

closed as too localized by Robert Harvey, ChrisF♦ Oct 10 '12 at 21:00

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