New Member - Can I use wordpress for a non-blog site?

Hi,

I'm starting a website (more complicated than a blog) and would appreciate advice on which framework to use.
A person on my team uses wordpress and is enthusiastic about its possibilities, but a friend who works on rails is lobbying against it ("But it's for blogs!"). Both can help me get started so I'll probably chose either wordpress or rails because of that.
The question is : which?

What I want to do :
The site is centered around comparing and commenting constitution articles.
Users will browse articles by country and by topic, comment and vote on the articles, suggest topics for the articles (=tag them), post their suggestions of articles.
Users will create polls (like Facebook questions more or less) that other users can answer.
I'd also like a forum section where they can start discussions about a given article or a topic.
Users will also post links/documents relevant to an article or topic.
I want my users to be registered, give me certain info (gender, age, country…) and then get statistics about who voted/commented on what articles (It will be helpful for research).

Wordpress looks cool because of how easy it looks to get something together and integrate plugins, even for a non-technical person, and there's a huge number of plugins. But it's designed for blogs so I'll probably run into trouble and do dirty hacks because what I want to do is not a blog.
Rails looks cool because it's designed to do things like that so I can get precisely what I want, but there aren't as many plugins, and it will require longer to code.

I'll be spending the next 2 months on this, and when I leave the the person who has to take care of the site has little technical background (except wordpress), and I don't want to have to do heavy maintenance after I leave.
I'm not scared of learning, but I do have limited time and I'm the only developer (though I might get help from volunteers.). I might not get all the functionality I want before I leave, but I do need to get something together.

What is your opinion here?
Thanks for your help!

What you described actually sounds a lot like a blog.

You can use Wordpress for sites other than blogs. I've used it as a CMS for clients (who don't have a blog on their site) and it works great, you just have to get familiar with the software.

When I needed to create a site for my new web development firm named tech-prastish.com, I immediately turned to WordPress as my CMS of choice. Not only is it the CMS I am most familiar with, but because it is flexible enough to get the job done with a minimal amount of keyboard-pounding.

Though WordPress is known as being a blog platform, as the Squeeze Theme shows, it can be used for much, much more. However, that doesn’t mean that all of the pieces fit neatly together out of the box and you might not have to make some adjustments.

However, most of the adjustments have more to do with how you think about WordPress than the program itself.

In short, it is much easier to tweak what you know about your existing CMS than to try and learn a whole new one. It’s that simple.

I think that WordPress is the best choice. You can find a lot of plugins and it has a very good documentation. I also used wordpress for my client and he was very impressed. Cya

I've used Wordpress for both blogging and non-blogging sites and it works great! Plus, if you ever decide to add a blog to your site it is very simple.

Yes of course you can, though wordprss.org is known as one blogging tool but you can create website with Wordpress, You can customize your Wordpress website and can create website design which look like purely website not like a blog