>one cannot customize Wordpress without writing more than a few php tags
The tags you need to know to create a basic theme are pretty straightforward, and the market you can reach by learning them is massive: Wordpress is said to power 23% of all websites. If you're a designer who knows HTML and CSS, the learning curve for those templates might be a little bit steeper than for other CMS products, but the number of potential buyers for your theme is dramatically larger.
>It's an horrible peace of software, with horrible PHP code 4.x style, a db schema only a beginner could have come up with
I've been tasked with making Wordpress do things it never should have done, so in service of that I've read a good chunk of the source and I totally agree with this, some of the code is truly abominable.
On the other hand, of everything I've built that has been handed over to clients for content management, Wordpress-backed sites are the clear winners in terms of how much support is required after delivery.
Smart use of custom post types and custom fields, however hideous the code behind them may be, saves time in development, allows you to build an admin that makes sense to non-technical folks, and helps prevent you from re-inventing the wheel for each and every project. It also means that a pretty huge set of developers will be able to pick up your work later on.
The tags you need to know to create a basic theme are pretty straightforward, and the market you can reach by learning them is massive: Wordpress is said to power 23% of all websites. If you're a designer who knows HTML and CSS, the learning curve for those templates might be a little bit steeper than for other CMS products, but the number of potential buyers for your theme is dramatically larger.
>It's an horrible peace of software, with horrible PHP code 4.x style, a db schema only a beginner could have come up with
I've been tasked with making Wordpress do things it never should have done, so in service of that I've read a good chunk of the source and I totally agree with this, some of the code is truly abominable.
On the other hand, of everything I've built that has been handed over to clients for content management, Wordpress-backed sites are the clear winners in terms of how much support is required after delivery.
Smart use of custom post types and custom fields, however hideous the code behind them may be, saves time in development, allows you to build an admin that makes sense to non-technical folks, and helps prevent you from re-inventing the wheel for each and every project. It also means that a pretty huge set of developers will be able to pick up your work later on.