nick prignano

03/12/2007 In blogging by nick prignano

I have been an active blogger for nearly a year now. In my time in this arena I have had many good adventures as well as a fair share of nightmares. In my struggles to find that happy medium between blogging functionality and design uniqueness, I have explored several avenues and always came to the same conclusion: WordPress is king.

In recent months however, I have been dipping my toes into the PHP framework game, and have begun to question my aforementioned conclusion on blogging platform. For anyone unfamiliar with CakePHP, this framework ships with a blog tutorial as the intended learning exercise for new users. By testing this exercise, I have discovered some possibilities I never considered while using WordPress religiously.

For one, using WordPress requires you to rely on the WordPress framework for content processing. While WP offers plenty of API hooks and has a robust templating system builtin, the differences between WP and full PHP framework are astounding. I have started to view WP as to PHP frameworks as MAC OS X is to operating systems - as long as you plan to work within the boundaries of the WP infrastructure, then WP is king; but the moment you wish to expand the core functionality of the platform beyond that which is already inherent, you’re screwed.

The benefit of building a blogging platform on a fully extensible PHP framework like Cake is that you can modulate the entire platform and plug it into any other application that runs on the same framework. It doesn’t take a rocket science to detect that the latter is the clear winner when considering accessibility and extendibility.

Of course, I am running this blog on WordPress, so me making a plee for ditching WP in favor of a custom built, framework driven blogging platform carries no credibility as of yet. However, as I move from the world of WP hacker to PHP developer, so too will this blog migrate. And I use this blog to reflect on my experience through every step.