We developer custom WordPress Themes from scratch and existing platforms like Roots (Trellis, Bedrock and Sage), as well as custom WordPress Plugins. We’ve done so for almost the entire time we’ve been in business (circa 2005). Over time we’ve gradually discovered the limitations with WordPress but ultimately decided that the alternatives were just that: an alternative. Nothing was really better or worse, they just did things differently. We concluded that the companies and platforms that succeeded committed to their community and invested in custom development and contributing to the core.
However, over the past 4 years or so we’ve seen an awakening that there was a better way to do things, and that a CMS was not the same thing as an applications. Ecosystems like Laravel and NodeJS have popped up and made our lives, as developers, better in many ways.
While we have done development in Laravel, the vast majority of our work has been WordPress primarily because we were heavily invested and have a good system in place for developing sites and apps that rely on WordPress. But as we’ve advanced in NodeJS and Laravel we’ve decided it’s time to begin fully migrating from WordPress.
So to help educate our own staff we compiled some key comparisons to help traditional and ordinary WordPress developers wrap their brain around Laravel, NodeJS and the respective CMS and eCommerce solutions for each. We hope this article helps you evaluate it as well!
This author corrected and clarified my perspective on this. And I found it extremely helpful in appreciated both platforms, the differences between them, and how to make a decision. That article, however, is 4 years old so it’s pretty outdated but does give a good technical list of differences. There’s some things he says that are inaccurate like Laravel not having a large community and probably some comparable things about Node.
“Pretty much everything is a threat to Laravel because it is written in PHP.” – hahahaha so true
I found this article written by a NodeJS fanatic that worked backward to Laravel and then explained it from that perspective. I found it very helpful in understanding both sides.
Pros
Cons
Not much documentation, training and community in the world of CMS. A lot of projects, but nothing particularly mature.
Apparently Laravel ships with Vue.js. I don’t know anything about Vue though, but FYI.
It seems that Vue is a descendant, of sorts, to Angular. Which is a descendant, of sorts, to jQuery. It’s also a full blown framework. However it seems it’s recommended for simple applications, not a large application like a CMS.
Angular / AngularJS is just a slightly different way of doing things, and is a little outdated in terms of it’s performance compared to Vue.js. In the same way Angular is to jQuery.
This came up as a lead result for NodeJS CMS’, and it has an eCommerce module.
Platform Agnosticism
With systems like Ionic and Phone Gap we can develop mobile and desktop applications in our
Seems totally unstable and with virtually no community.
This looks like a great place to start if we go with NodeJS. Seems very stable and mature. Albeit with an ugly UI, but that might be intentional to suggest it’s agnostic.
They have a clear vision that I totally agree with. And it’s amazing that they only have one developer and have accomplished what they have. I love that they have a business directory because that tells me they’re reaching out to enterprises – which is what will keep the project alive and moving.
This claims to be “The best NodeJS CMS in the universe.” haha.
There seem to be a lot of great things about this one. Seems very comparable to Roots in the best ways. For example they mention they auto deploy with Git – I love that.
Overall, I really like the direction and future of NodeJS for all the reasons you shared and more I’ve learned about.
It seems it’s less code, faster, asynchronous so no more Google Page speed issues. Etc…
However, every CMS I looked at is very young and has a very small community with unfinished websites and documentation. The only exception was TotalJS but I have some concerns about that as well.
This to me says “Leland is right that this could be the future.” and also “But now is not the time to adopt it as a replacement.”
So my conclusion is that we should invest time – starting at some point in the next year – to getting certified in NodeJS and experimenting, following and contributing to these CMS – beginning with TotalJS and Total eShop since that appears to be the most complete and adopted.
And, for now, we continue developing sites with WordPress + Roots. And do a few test sites with Laravel with a plan to fully transition to it over the next year because of its completeness, stability, community and training / certification infrastructure.
Then, in another year, maybe NodeJS and the respective CMS’ will have gained enough traction – or maybe we’ve learned them well enough to be true experts and go forward on our own.
We will be migrating some, or all, of our clients from their existing WordPress setups to Laravel into the OctoberCMS (I have to test other CMS’ but this is most probable). Additionally, I will be writing an article, similar to this, outlining the experience and pitfalls.
If you’d like to be notified of those applications and when this article is done please post a comment below!
Since 2005 we've been offering digital and content marketing strategy and implementation. Including website development, search engine optimization and marketing, search marketing and more.