Tibor SzászInteraction matters

The Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress triangle

First of all, I'd like pin down, that this post is not about bashing these softwares, this is just a warning, that you may accidentally will be lost in between them.
I used all of them and created working sites based on their foundations, modified them, hacked them, upgraded them, but never understand any of them deeply. My fault. That's why probably I dislike them. They are different in as many ways as you can imagine.

You may consider yourself a good sailor, and you are probably right. You sail across the known sea of open source software, you visit your favorite ports on a daily basis, do the same routine again and again. No risk, no problem, unless you leave the walked path.

The problem comes when you start to visit all the three ports of the Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress Bermuda triangle and try to use them parallel. Unintentionally though, but you will get in a vortex of bugs, security holes, plugins, modules, components, minor and major version updates; all the horrors of open source the same time.
I think this is too much for a single person to maintain. This strong vortex will drag you down to the bottom of the sea and keep you there, leaving you a small chance to get to the surface to get some fresh air. This can mean drifting away deadlines, unsolvable problems, ugly hacks, incompatible modules, unhappy clients, frustrated developer in the end. This is not just a worst case scenario, it happens many times to inexperienced people, who switch back and forth.

The safe solution is to set up a research center at one corner of the triangle, that fits you future plans. Learn every bit of the the system, learn security issues, system API-s, mainstream plugin features, etc. If you aware of everything there is a small chance that something will surprise you. I know many people and teams who picked a corner and started to heavily modify the source code that fit their needs, good for them. They invested the time (which is money), the sweat to make it rock, and it probably does.

I you want to enter just go straight ahead, but don't say nobody warned you.