[...] The article you linked to does highlight some serious issues with PHP, and sure you will run into some struggles regarding those. It doesn't make programming in PHP impossible though. Every language has its quirks, some more than others (if you truly want to rage at a programming language, try VB6). This is part of choosing programming as your profession though - these are things you will simply have to deal with as a programmer. The author of that article makes a nice analogy with a carpenter's toolbox, but that is flawed in so many ways.. Earlier in his post he writes that programming is still a very new thing (which is very true), and then he goes to compare that to a profession that has been around since who knows when. I'm sure that when carpentry was as new as programming is now, they had weirdly shaped hammers too! And who is to say today's hammers are perfect? Maybe we haven't found the perfect hammer yet either :D Stop. Hammer time. Anyway, like I said, PHP has some serious quirks, but that's what gives it character imo, it's what makes it what it is. I've worked with PHP since version 4.2 (10 years ago?), and of course I've struggled, but you get over it and you learn how to deal with it. (at the time, the only alternative I was aware of was perl.. you know..)

I agree that there are no perfect languages, but it doesn't mean that you must stay with Mister Paamayim Nekudotayim :)

[...] Going by the general opinion in this thread you would have to make something from scratch in a language that hasnt been invented yet (because god forbid you use a language that has flaws) Alternatively, wordpress will do fine for what you're after imo. Yes, it has flaws, php has flaws, mysql has flaws.. Everything has flaws. At some point you're going to have to be realistic though - most of these things aren't even going to bother you unless you're going into very technical specifics. Your main challenge will be to find a coder that actually has experience with wordpress coding. This is important because coding with wordpress can really get messy if you don't know where to draw the line between using a wordpress feature (which you would otherwise not know existed) and writing a dirty work-around for stuff wordpress lacks. tl;dr nothing is perfect - you can spend the next 15 years looking for something that is perfect, or you can just deal with it and start working Just my opinion.

What would you suggest to use instead of wordpress? The main reason I guess on why we were going to stick with wordpress, is because of twitch tv embed stream feature and few other ones.

[...] Yeah you might use wp_rewrite to redirect to your plugin php file, but as far as I know you can't just create frontend plugin page.

[...] This is simply not true and just goes to show you have very limited knowledge of wordpress.

You can't make league system without either making it depend on the theme (using theme's functions to render league pages instead of wordpress ones) or changing wordpress core files

Coming from an Oracle/SQL Server background, I've never delved much into MySQL. Out of curiosity though, what are some of the reasons which make it suck? Is it just for a back end to Wordpress or are there more common limitations in the RDBMS itself? Apologies for the off-topic question, but I'm interested.

[...] I'm glad you didn't mention me there, because I do actually disagree. The ETF2L code doesn't use wordpress the way it should be (for legacy reasons - many features that now exist in wordpress didn't yet when etf2l was originally written). End of the day if you keep your league code and tables separate from wordpress code and tables (think MVC-like here), you won't be facing many issues. Yes, wordpress has its limitations, as does every pre written system out there. Ideally of course you'd write something like this from scratch (good luck maintaining your cup pages and news posts etc), but if you insist on choosing from an existing CMS-like system, wordpress most definitely isn't far down the list. Wordpress' codebase is very nice, has many features that lets you customise just about everything and it's extremely well documented, too. Using it properly does require a certain amount of experience, but such is life. As for PHP and MySQL sucking, that's just your opinion :)

Take a theme, modify color/size/position , job done. Lot of people can do that byte :p

emb, dave, slate, ST8, Deneussbeer and anyone who has ever touched the ETF2L source code will agree I guess.