Changed my long held view of WordPress

I’m a classic dev starting in the years when a dev needed to be fluent in SQL as well as the code language(s) and tools for front ends, been coding the web since before it was called the web and so the fundamental of WordPress (data munged into displays) is just ‘duh.’ But WordPress itself has never been more than a quickie system because running real RDBMS database features alongside the WP core but in discreate data stores had been a pain. But recently I had a group that was most comfortable with WordPress and wanted something “real” along with their blog posts and pages AND they didn’t have time enough for a full new system. I looked at PeachPie and was very impressed for getting the advantages of .Net Core compiled code instead of script, but it’s alpha level at best and while great on Azure the group doesn’t have the money for Azure. So tested Participants and was very impressed at the ease of hooking data results – but the multi-table option is in need of updates for WP6x. That lead to Formidable but while it advertises with the term “RDBM”, it isn’t – it is very, very pretty but the relational limitation and no hooks for obfuscating the internal ids set it aside. Then… I spotted WPDA. Bad searching on my part, I had never seen it before. Ahhhh. It took a few days to get the muscle memory of the system and Peter was IMMEDIATE on answering my noob questions and my somewhat less noob questions. He speaks the language of an Oracle/Sql Server developer. A week after my test install, I bought the full pro package for unlimited sites. As the title of this review says, having a tool that lets me do what I think a website should be able to do while retaining the ease of the WordPress blog-based core has changed my view of WordPress itself. I am still keeping PeachPie on my back burner because – you know, COMPILED CORE CODE and full .Net Core abilities – but until that is ready for trusting for releases, WPDA is going to be a fundamental tool for projects for my WordPress loving organizations.