[patio11]

YMMV, but the best solution I've found for this is either:

1) If your CMS just needs to be used in-house, then roll your own. It takes a week or less, you can deep-integrate it into your applications, and you'll be guaranteed to get more or less exactly what you want.

2) If you either need it to be exposed to external/non-technical people or you absolutely do not want to spend time developing CMS features, use WordPress for content pages and your app stack of choice for app pages. You can have them share the same domain if a requirement for e.g. SEO by using reverse proxy tricks -- trivial to Google if you know the words "reverse proxy." If not a requirement, don't do it that way.

One of the nice parts about using WordPress is if you have a high-generalizability problem like "It needs to work on an iPhone" then you are basically guaranteed that some 17 year old designer has hacked together a plugin which makes it mostly work on your iPhone. The downside of using WordPress is that... feel free to rephrase the last sentence.

[dgunn]

I've actually wondered about this a bit before. You're kind of the "Marketing Engineer" around here so I'll ask you.

Do you do what you described in option 1 or 2? I know you use WP for your blog but what do you do for the marketing/landing pages of your apps? Do the marketing pages live in the same code base as the app? I'm inclined to do it this way personally so that integration of something like ABingo! is easier.

[patio11]

Bingo Card Creator is 95% #1, Appointment Reminder is #2. Client sites depend on what I can convince them to work with, largely tending to follow whomever "owns" the marketing site internally (engineers prefer #1, non-technical folks prefer #2).

[krapp]

There are likely to be pretty reasonable Wordpress themes and plugins for most common use cases, though. For something responsive, really the default twentytwelve theme or Responsive I think are good bets. Every now and then though you come across something weird and have to write something custom for the functions file and you end up hating life because Wordpress has some byzantine crapfest way of doing things which should be simple (walkers, i'm looking at you.)

The real downside is security. The hardening wordpress[1] article is pretty good but I also found some decent tricks in the .htaccess file for the html5 boilerplate[2] that seem useful too. You end up having to install it, then fix it, which is never good.

[1]http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress [2]https://raw.github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/master/.htacce...