What do I lose if I use Wordpress instead of a php framework for a complex but "standard" webapp? Is the tradeoff worth it? [closed]

It's a fairly broad question, so here's a fairly broad answer...

Wordpress is a CMS. It's a good, flexible CMS with lots of built-in goodness, but its sweet spot is managing a site that's primarily about content, where content is very broadly defined as "words, pictures and other assets". The plug-in model lets you build/use additional functionality, and the wide user community provides lots of stability/security/scalability help.

Code Igniter is a framework that's designed for functional web apps (in practice, this usually means database-driven apps). Its sweet spot is managing complex interactions with a business domain. It is a framework for building any kind of app (including, if you were glutton for punishment, a CMS).

If your business domain is about content (and I don't think it is, based on your description), Wordpress is an obvious winner. In your case, I think you could probably build the solution using Wordpress, but it would be a real edge case - and the benefits you mention of "security, stability, robustness" would likely not apply, because you would need to build a lot of custom code. I think you'd very quickly get to the "well, it's not the way Wordpress wants me to work, but to deliver this feature, I just have to do it this way" point.

When business users say they want a CMS, they usually don't mean they want Wordpress (or Drupal, or Sitecore, or Magnolia); they want to be able to manage their site without having to go to the techies. If your site is primarily database-driven, that means screens to manage database records.

It's about structure and function in my view. Both CMS(Wordpress) and PHP Framework provide structure/functions to build your own functions. You can do the same things on CMS and Framework. They shouldn't have much difference on performance and security amongst well known Frameworks and CMSs.

However, CMS focus on Front-end (contents?), provides with ready to use CSS, Javascript (Front-end) in order to build / manage websites and web based applications easy and quick. Though, it's not very clear in structure comparing to MVC model.

Both would do the same job if you develop yourself, but in a team, framework could provide benefit.

It's only my view, I am using Wordpress a lot and a little knowledge on framework.

I use CodeIgniter and my bias is for that because you've already built the bulk of your app in it and because it seems more flexible/less pre-configured than Wordpress. I also get the feeling that CI is growing in use relative to WP with developers so CI seems possibly more future-proof, though to be fair they are both popular.

Can you make clearer you're bosses demands? The way I read what you say is that you're 80% of the way there and then are considering scraping (or at least possibly having to heavily revise) that 80% because the other 20% seem more logically done in Wordpress.

As I learn PHP more, I'm actually finding myself using even less of CI and writing more straight up PHP or actually JavaScript (for even better UX). So I guess I'm surprised to hear of someone wanting to switch from a minimal PHP/ruby/Python framework to a heavier one since most of the work is shifting to JavaScript these days.

Another key point on going towards straight-up PHP is that the number of people who know PHP dwarfs the number of people who are familiar with CI- or WP-specific syntax. So you are more likely to get help/collaborations/career advancement focusing on a solid foundation in the "mother tongue" over these minority dialects. Doing this with PHP is also having the benefit of helping me understand other languages such as JavaScript better since the level of abstraction is on the same page with php-ruby-python, whereas a framework brings in an entirely different (an in my increasing view, extraneous) vocabulary.