joel123

I’m not the most knowledgeable WordPress user in the universe and your post isn’t crystal clear (to me, anyway), but here’s my two cents:

The specific application you’re looking to build is relatively unique so I wouldn’t expect help from any substantial plugins (at least not with WordPress). In fact, though I’m not intimately familiar with other platforms, I would suggest checking out Joomla and Drupal. You’ll be able to hack apart anything to make it work, but as far as I can tell WordPress and Movable Type are designed primarily for unidirectional content generation. That’s probably not a real phrase, but I mean that generally content is created by one class of users while another class reads and comments on that content. You’re looking to create a “web 2.0” application (I think), where content is generated from multiple sources, all of whom can interact with the content in specific ways. I suspect this can be done with WordPress, but it is not what WordPress does best.

The generalizations that occur across the interweb about the main open source CMS platforms go basically like this: WordPress and Movable Type are blogging platforms, not “real” CMS powerhouses. They often compete for the same types of users (bloggers, as the stereotype goes). They hold your hand and are easy to use right out of the box. Joomla and Drupal are the “real” CMS platforms, but they’re too complicated to bother with if you want to do something simple (like blogging). Drupal is the Linux of CMS platforms and probably most suited to what I think you’re looking to do. It has a steep-ass learning curve, but once you’ve gotten the hang of it you can customize like nobody’s business. Joomla is a happy medium in that it’s easier to pick-up than Drupal while still being more powerful (in a CMS sense) than the “blogging” platforms.

In the end, I think your best bet is to post your question on the forums at Joomla and Drupal. The people there will know more than the internet stereotypes have told me. You could probably do it with WordPress, but I think it would be easier on Joomla or Drupal.

WordPress will run on PHP 4 and 5 and probably 6. The only real question is whether or not your hosting server supports PHP 5 or 6. I’m betting that almost no one support 6 and probably won’t until 2009. Learn PHP 5 and once you do it’ll be easy to pick up v6 when it becomes popular.

Have a look at Dreamhost or Site5. I’m using Netfirms right now, but I plan on switching off to Dreamhost as soon as my plan expires.

You don’t have to wait if you don’t want to. You mention in your article that Matt Mullenweg is using the nightly build to run his blog and you can do the same. The product is already released every night “whatever its condition.”

I agree that there will always be more bugs found and tickets opened; WordPress is constantly being updated. But if you’re that impatient for a new version, go ahead and grab it right now.