I have several ideas, and I’m willing to write some code to help accomplish this.  But I would also like to team-up with others, and either create a product or open source project to help other people who want to do the same.

I used PHP-Fusion for at least a dozen different sites, mostly used for E-Commerce.  It was the best thing I could find at the time, after some early disasters with “DotNetNuke“.  I think DotNetNuke was perhaps inspired by PHPNuke, but after comparing, PHP-Fusion seemed to offer more, or at least made more sense to my style of thinking.

As I just checked the PHP-Fusion site, I was saddened to see the passing of it’s founder Nick Jones just a few weeks ago (it’s my understanding he had a long struggle with Musculur Distrophy).  My decision to switch was not at all based on that fact, and I believe as an open source project, PHP-Fusion will continue to grow and improve.

But let’s look at several reasons to make the switch now:

1) Popularity – If you go to YouTube.com, and search, PHP-Fusion has 462 matches, WordPress has 652,000.  Both seem have active communities, but, for example, the StackExchange network has now opened a special site dedicated to WordPress Q&A (http://wordpress.stackexchange.com).  I don’t have the actual stats for downloads or installations, but I sense that WordPress is taking off geometrically.   According to the WordPress home page “Over 25 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home”.
2) Extensions – PHP-Fusion extensions include “Mods” and “Infusions”.  They are difficult to number, but http://mods.php-fusion.co.uk/infusions/moddb/index.php seems to list only 3 pages of them.  WordPress software extensions are called “Plug-Ins“, and they number 12,854.  PHP-Fusion extensions typically require an FTP upload.  WordPress plug-ins can be searched and installed all from within WordPress.  There is of course a plug-in that will backup your SQL database and mail it to you (daily, weekly, or monthly).
3) Hacking – No matter what software one uses, one has to stay with current releases to avoid security holes.  I had several PHP-Fusion sites hacked.  I was always able to recover, but could sometimes take a few hours.  One thing nice about WordPress, there is now an “Upgrade” button right in the Admin panel; it will download the upgrades, install it, and your are off and running in often under two minutes (no FTP required!).  There are also plugs-in for WordPress that will auto-email you when new releases and security fixes become available.
4) Themes – I dont’ have the stats,  but I would imagine that the WordPress themes also outnumber the PHP-Fusion themes in both quantity and probably quality.
5) Databases – WordPress now even has a new feature called “custom post types”, which apparently gets better in 3.1.  This blogs does an excellent job of describing this feature:
http://justintadlock.com/archives/2010/04/29/custom-post-types-in-wordpress.  It suggests for example that you could could store “lists” or “databases” of cars, videos, books, movies, real-estate, etc….

Perhaps one area where WordPress is lacking is the ability to run a discussion forum.  Perhaps they here are good plug-ins for that too.   It does of course allow comments on blogs and posts.  But that is one feature that I really can do without… and if I need it, I can always get the functionality from a GoogleGroup, Facebook page, or something similar.

As an information technology professional, it seems WordPress also opens many more professional doorways.

If anybody can suggest reasons not to convert, I welcome comments here.