PHP sucks

OK, so I finally quit my pathetic and inactive Guild Wars guild. Most of the members hadn't logged on in over a month and the only guy that played as much as I do, quit and joined his friend's guild.

So instead of taking Rythmdevl up on his very kind offer to join his guild, I decided to create my own guild, force all of my friends to play Guildwars and  make a website for the  guild. Not that I have OCD or anything.....

I figured out  pretty quickly  that a content management system of some kind would be  necessary for the website, so that  I wouldn't have to handcraft everything on the site and users could post stuff by themselves. After perusing my options, I settled on Joomla, because the website said it was EASY and it looked like it was gaining popularity.

I found a host for the site that specialized in Joomla hosting and claimed to have good customer service, they set me up within a few hours and the tech support was indeed very good. After logging in to the administrative interface, I realized two things:

1. Programmers should NOT be in charge of UI design
2. The available Joomla templates (even the paid ones) are flippin boring

No problem, I said to myself.....I WILL MAKE MY OWN!!! 

I used to make websites for my various employers and friends back in the stone age when Netscape was still popular, I remember the basics....so, I'm thinking....how hard could it be to teach myself PHP over the Christmas Holiday?  Well, it's been a pain in the ass. To my eyes, HTML is very logical and is pretty straight forward, but PHP seems unnecessarily cryptic and cluttered. Add to that, the Mambo/Joomla architecture and it's attendant lack of decent documentation or editing tools and it gets a little tedious. I have a week off, so by the end of my vacation, I hope to open up a Joomla template business.

And before all you web programmers get your panties in a bundle and start  flaming me for bagging on PHP,  just remember.............uh, nevermind. Go ahead, flame on.