Somebody asked me last week if we could combine WordPress with Business Catalyst – integrate a WordPress blog into the Business Catalyst interface.  Nice Idea, but not possible without a large development team and a couple years up your sleeve.

But what if somebody was doing that? Making a flexible system that was focused on Internet Marketing and SEO, which had a CRM and store etc. tightly integrated. Now that would be a Kick-ass system. Certainly both WordPress and Business Catalyst have their limitations and for a number of reasons, the BC model is proving to be troublesome. Particularly:

1. Having all sites on a central system means updates are applied across the whole system without exception. It’s generally great to have updates, but what if you had used a whole lot of custom code? What if upgrades conflicted with your code and as a result your site came down or didn’t function properly.
2. BC has no staging area, so when sites are effected by updates, you have to try and fix them on a live site. This is particularly stressful when your client is testing it before your QA team can look at it and often one change affects something elsewhere on the site.

There is also the limitation of having a software company develop, vs having an online community develop. The Internet is changing rapidly and what yesterday was considered “out there” is today considered a standard feature – and the pace is rapidly accelerating.

Will the Adobe software  development style of working be quick enough to keep up with change?