Should I develop atop WordPress?

[Popcorn]

I realize this is perhaps a matter of opinion, but I'm hoping to hear experiences from those who've built a website atop WordPress. Our idea for a website will have many of the same kinds of functionality as you can now find in WordPress and plugins, etc, like Members, Premium Members, Groups, Messaging, Member Blogs, News, Search, etc. but of course I am concerned about maintenance and in particular those occasions where the last step of modification needs to be done.

How easy is it to make changes or even to find where those changes need to be in the code?
How isolated are changes you make?
Is the Wordpress execution flow easy to follow?
How fast is it?
How maintainable is it?

Basically, will I make big gains quickly and then get stuck when trying to exert full control in the future?

Any comments you have will be much appreciated.

[alex.barylski]

WordPress is not the framework of choice, personally. I'd prefer Drupal, module architecture is slightly cleaner. The hang up for msot people is that Drupal interface is very complex. For a developer it makes sense, for the end user probably not.

Cheers,
Alex

[Popcorn]

Thanks Alex,

Drupal seems to have some following, also seen some good things about Codeigniter (and its ExpressionEngine child) but perhaps I'm just hoping to hear horror stories to make my decision easy.....

[Eric!]

Basically, will I make big gains quickly and then get stuck when trying to exert full control in the future?

In a word: yes.

In more words: it depends on what you want to do when you "exert full control". Some things are best left to plug-ins and some you might have to throw out and do yourself in the long run.

I was asked to modify and existing site that was all WP based with tons of crap on it. I did find a plug-in called exec-php which allowed me to easily separate the WP framework from the custom stuff that I needed to do.

There is definitely a learning curve and there are a few weird things that WP does.

Eric

[uday8486]

Well a yes if you have functionality which is limited for the sections you mentioned, But if your changes are going to changing time and again then a framework like code igniter is suitable,

You can have this built in wordpress as it can give you controll, but you must also know how to create a plugin and add your own functions to existing wordpress install to extend what you desire.