Does anyone have a better solution?

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/05/designing-for-over-twenty-million-users-wordpress-3-0/

John’s an active (and vocal!) member of the WP community and we’re hoping to talk to him more in future articles.

Let’s see!
Anyway, a great article, thak you!

waiting your coming article about Wp 3.0 ;)

Very much looking forward to the post on custom post types that you’ve got in the works.

Of course I should say I haven’t tried it out yet, but that’s where my mind kind of goes fuzzy

This is one thing Movable Type does very well. Each theme uses a configuration file to set up what you can touch and what you can’t touch within the backend. This is excellent for developers building sites for businesses that can’t be trusted to touch advanced features (or where certain features just aren’t necessary).

That’s where I think WordPress can allow advanced functionality yet give theme developers control over whether those features are enabled and available for users.

Having worked with WP3 I really have no qualms about upgrading all our WP sites to it. Simply put it’s a considerable improvement upon the existing WordPress platform.

So it was very refreshing to see this quote from Elliot Jay Stocks: “My only beef with WordPress is that it can take a lot of hacking to get what you want, and I’m hoping that WordPress 3 will solve this problem.” Yup. 80% of my time spent on building WP sites is spent on hacking. That’s fine for a product in the alpha, beta, or even “version 0.9″ range. But for something approaching version 3 to be missing such vital stuff and requiring “hacking to get what you want” is nothing to be proud of.

I am just about to bail out on developing any future sites in WP. I can be much more productive, fast, and profitable using other tools. I’m willing to take a fresh look at version 3, but it is really going to have to blow me away for me to “come home to WP”.

I appreciate the article, and the comments from industry heavyweights. I’m pleased that my sense of WP’s weaknesses is not just in my head but that others see them, too, and are hopeful that version 3 will make them fading memories of frustration.

Will be interesting to see some of the themes that come out when WordPress 3 hits and how extensively they support the new functionality available to them.

I myself have only had a bit of a look at WordPress 3; looks like I better get my hands dirty and have a more in depth look prior to it’s official launch.

Nice article Richard, keep them coming!!

Custom post types aren’t really meant for that use; they just got named poorly because they live in the Posts table in the database. Think of them more like custom objects/content types. “Custom post types” are great for things that are more or less catalogued: products (in an e-commerce site), listings for a real estate site, etc. For regular content creation as described in the quote, you can already do what that person is suggesting by using custom taxonomies and/or stylesheets to make post templates (the P2 theme does this).