WordPress is excellent, and there are some mighty big WP sites out there. You're barking up the right tree when you say "you need a developer on staff" though. Web sites are not just "set and forget" deals. They need continuing care and maintenance. And the whole idea of having a site that the receptionist can take care of on a Friday afternoon, which I have found pervasive in small businesses, has just never really worked at all.

Wordpress sucks for small business. It's just that simple. It shouldn't, but it does.

Small business needs an easy CMS whereby staff can do most of the tasks without present "IT Crowd". AFAIK WordPress gets it done (with some minor problems - as you wrote fe. updating is a problem for non-technical people and WordPress haves no MVC, so it`s easy to go spaghetti way with the code). WordPress devs are trying to resolve problems which are most voted within the community.

They're not minor problems. Please don't underestimate the epidemic of hacked sites that are a direct result of end-user unwillingness to upgrade and possibly break their site. This is a problem that can't be solved without significant architectural changes. Customers are more willing to risk getting their websites pwned than to risk an upgrade that may take their site down, so upgrades often aren't done for years.

It's not a small problem, its a huge one, and the primary reason why I can no longer recommend Wordpress.

I agree with "Security is a process, not a product." AFAIK security is important for WordPress team. There is a lot of good documentation on a project site and there are some materials from WordCamps (fe. http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress)

Latest WP "hack" via botnets was because of weak logins and passwords which are set by the users. Can you blame WP devs for that?

Speaking about upgrading; making updates easier it`s also one of the goals of the project. Also it isn`t that hard when you develop WP sites using information from WordPress Codex docs.

I hope it will get better with time, and as i wrote people are working to get things better. Sorry to hear that you are not going to recommend WordPress any longer.

@vinceguidry IMHO being out of date isn`t a WordPress problem, it`s a clients or a developer problem. Any software must be upgraded from time to time.

Can you suggest any more elegant solution? In my opinion WordPress is good solution with great community.

With many different people you get a lot of different levels of deployment, so maybe you didn`t have a luck?

It's not Wordpress that's the issue, it's with the current state of the problem domain. People want websites that they don't have to pay a programmer to maintain. Wordpress solved this for blogging, but using it for anything else and not having technical talent on call makes for a giant mess.

Yes, exactly - it`s not a problem with tool, but with use of it. I also wouldn`t recommend using any software without knowledge how it behaves and what can be done with it.

What you're essentially saying here is that only programmers should have websites. This is not a good attitude. Like saying only mechanics should own cars. We need to change the technology, make it more accessible, not just say that only the technically savvy should use technology.

No, i`ve tried to say that WordPress is simple enough (for a non-technical person after a short training) to deal with the majority of tasks. I don`t know easier open source CMS comparable to WordPress.

It's not a matter of Wordpress being 'good enough', as much as being sometimes 'what the client wants and all they're willing to pay for.' You're not wrong about the codebase though, but it's not entirely the fault of developers.