You literally said you had only experience with WordPress. Yeah those failing project make a lot of sense now.. Do you know WordPress was build by web-designers, not actual developers?
Using it for anything else then a forward facing website is a bad idea. Even using it for a website is a bad idea btw, because it was made for blogs, but whatever, nobody listened then, nobody will listen now. But I have peace with it, as long as it's only used for simple stuff.
For clarity: I never said I only have experience with WP. I'm not grandparent commentor. Though I am old :)
I started serious with PHP early in the PHP 3 era. Back in 1998. Coming from Perl and C (in cgi-bin). Like everyone back then, I wrote my own CMS, hacked on PHP and Perl portals, hosted PHP forum software and finally did most of my work in Drupal.
I've seen stuff. And many of it requires eye-bleech if you ever want to look at code again.
Using it for anything else then a forward facing website is a bad idea. Even using it for a website is a bad idea btw, because it was made for blogs, but whatever, nobody listened then, nobody will listen now. But I have peace with it, as long as it's only used for simple stuff.