But yes, there’s still a point where you have to know how to program if you really want customization, in any platform … by definition, really, because you may want to get beyond the abstractions no matter how full-functioned they are.

CDM started in November 2004, in Mambo (now Joomla), and relaunched in WordPress in April 2006. The forums, createdigitalnoise.com, and createdigitalmotion.com all launched in June 2006.

Yeah if you actually have to write your own plugin to achieve the functionality you’re after. Most likely it will already be done for you and available to download and install in seconds. Many amazing PHP plugins have been written over the years by a rapid community of developers.

You could say this for Wordpress too, or for Joomla, ModX, MovableType… Wordpress has an incredible number of plugins available for all kinds of functions, but I still find myself going inside them and changing things, because the author doesn’t quite do things how we’d like them.

You bring up some interesting stuff about how TXP works, but as Peter said, it’s not really about the platform.

There is no framework which will let you have things just the way you want to without any programming knowledge.

Some are better than others for certain tasks, but unless your requirements are very basic, or you’re happy to make compromises on how things work, eventually you’re going to go “well that’s nice, but I’d prefer if it worked this way”, and at that point you need the programming hat.

Which is why we need the programmer!

Just as in music software, there’s never a single perfect platform that does everything everyone wants. The stuff that tries often isn’t terribly useful. At their core, both WordPress and Textpattern are built in PHP. If you really want to get deep into how they work, you need to get into things on the PHP level. We’ve already done that with CDM, and we’ll be doing it again. We just want to add some brain cells beyond our own.

You get to a point where you start imagining features that require some real development work, regardless of platform. I really like development, though, so I’m not complaining.

The txp:tags is nice, in terms of abstraction and reliability, but WP’s solution isn’t so bad. In either platform, if you want to go beyond the stock functions, you need to know PHP, period.

Yeah if you actually have to write your own plugin to achieve the functionality you’re after. Most likely it will already be done for you and available to download and install in seconds. Many amazing PHP plugins have been written over the years by a rapid community of developers.

I just found this new article interviewing some of the big Txp guys who just wrote the first Txp book.

I don’t know. From what I gather, Wordpress is great in a lot of ways, mainly for bloggers. There’s this guy Paul Stamatiou who I definitely give a lot of respect, who uses a heavily modified version of Wordpress. But really, his blog doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary, and he had to hack it all himself with his knowledge of PHP, just like you’re going to do.

Everything on his site could be done using Txp and a batch of excellent plugins, and you wouldn’t have to know any PHP. This includes the navigation stuff you’re talking about, there are a number of great plugins for Txp that deal with navigation. If you’re interested, peruse the plugin forum to see what’s up and coming.

Rather than rely on others to come up with a “template” or “modified” version of Wordpress that matches closely what you’re after, you can build it yourself with txp:tags, which are easy to pick up by anyone familiar with html.

Excuse my evangelizing, best of luck finding someone with the advanced PHP skills you require.

We’re looking at bbPress for the forum in place of phpBB, and adding WordPress MU (=Multi User).

I don’t quite agree that you need to do PHP hacking to successfully use WordPress; what Textpattern does is impressive, but I think that thread overstates the difference, and that’s not the reason we’re in need of PHP skills. The txp:tags is nice, in terms of abstraction and reliability, but WP’s solution isn’t so bad. In either platform, if you want to go beyond the stock functions, you need to know PHP, period.

For the forum, what enhancements are you looking to do? Just curious.

Textpattern has limitations of course, but it’s preferable to Wordpress for many because it separates the PHP from everything else, you don’t find a lot of people hacking Textpattern to get desired effects like you do with Wordpress. This is taken from this thread: “…in Textpattern it’s just HTML and txp:tags, in Wordpress there’s also PHP in the mix.” So, you have to be a PHP hack to do cool stuff in Wordpress outside the norm, while with Textpattern, you just use txp tags, which are simple to use for almost anyone.

Anyway, sounds like you’re set on staying with Wordpress, and continuing to hack it to get what you want. Hope it goes well, have fun!

We’re not planning on doing any big hacks to WP, either; just some basic work on integration, design, and some functionality. It is possible to use WP plug-ins and hacks without creating something that’s easily broken, though. It’s all about customization.