ACZoom

You're doing it wrong if you're hacking source code.

Visit Ian Stewart's site or Justin Tadlock's -- both are strongly pushing the notion of "parent themes" in WordPress, and both have developed very impressive Parent Themes to work with.

But you don't have to install a parent theme or learn about child themes... the reason why I bring them up is because both sites offer a wealth of information on how to change basic WordPress behavior without touching core files at all. WordPress has a great, highly flexible API (filters and actions) that I suspect turns out to have more potential than even the original developers suspected.

In earlier versions of WordPress (been using since v. 2.0), I did have to do a lot of hacking to get the CMS capabilities I wanted. But that is no longer true at all.

With templates, a functions file for custom functions, the ability to turn off or filter various WordPress functions according to taste, and a thriving plugin community, you absolutely should not need to hack core files at all.

Learn to think a bit more like a WordPress developer, and you'll be surprised at how flexible a platform it is.

I'm sounding like a fanboy here, but I certainly have had my grievances with it in the past. It has improved tremendously over the last year, and I suspect the next year will be even better.

Yeah, I'm using a lot of plugins, and yeah, the upgrades for complex sites can still be a bit hairy. And yeah, there's a lot of very basic stuff that you wonder why isn't included in the core.

But for all that, if you've been working with something as complex as Drupal, you should be able to tweak WordPress to your heart's content... you just need to start understanding that it's a different approach (an easier one, IMO).

Also, do NOT use those stupid WordPress editing abilities to edit core files, CSS, or plugins. It's an invitation to disaster, editing files on the fly, and I don't know why WP doesn't finally just drop this "feature" (read: security hole and bad practice to begin with) that was probably great back when it was just a bunch of hacked together geekery, but is irrelevant and dangerous today.

Use an editor and FTP, just like you would for any other project.