Postnuke benefits include:
1. Modularity: easy to program distinct units of code. Module standards ensure minimal name conflicts, and a greater degree of readability.
2. Wide array of built in modules: this is really cool since i dont have to constantly reinvent the wheel. For example the FAQ system is a stock commodity in any website.
3. Excellent session management: postnuke performs some pretty fancy variable handling under the hood. Most noteably is its handling of GET, POST, and SESSION vars.
Some drawbacks i encountered:
1. Lack of standards in modules: postnuke has standards imposed on top level function signatures. However, once inside the function, a developer can include random php libraries and then really just start doing crazy things.
2. Difficult to locate modules. the website modules.postnuke.com is pretty useful. It has news postings of new and updated modules. Sometimes I find it hard to use. Ideally, I would like a more freshmeat.net type index, where a single project won’t have multiple entries. This way I could easily view an index and see the range of modules that are available.
3. Limited extensibility of layout. This is not a black and white statement. Postnuke has excellent theme support. Additional modules such as centerblocks also facillitate this customization. However what I was looking for in particular was 1.) customizing the left and right blocks on a per module basis. I will have to give them credit though. This is not an easy task. In trying to implement this scheme, I found severe difficulties in actually how to organize this information.
4. Limited user/password system. I was intent on trying to build a ‘My Account’ area for postnuke under a seperate SSL server. Its a considerable hack to seperate the website like this. I’ve seen some posts on on the postnuke message forums concerning moving user.php. This does work, since this is the gateway for all my account functionality. However, it was getting to be a bit ugly, and so i decided to put this idea on the back burner.