Learning curve for a non techie-Business Catalyst. Two specific questions.

Question

Hello everyone,
Thanks for reading. I am a non techie who is looking at website development as a secondary skill.ie. having the know how to atleast relay my ideas to web developers and ideally to be able to tweak and in the end able to create my own websites.
In this regard, I feel Business Catalyst is an excellent tool, for people like me which mitiagtes the knowledge of coding to an certain extent. I am currently going through some of the content listed in the forums. Is there a book that provides end to end detailed steps of all the implementation to complete a fully functioning website and how much is the learning curve in this regard?
Also,
Business Catalyst offers all in one features, is it possible to use 3rd party in place of default tools for specific function, say use wordpress for blog and a different email marketing service?
Have a good one.
Thanks
Satish

Answer 1

I personally would tend to prefer wordpress for a small non-commercial website/blog. Its ecosystem of plugins is far more diverse than BCs and you get direct access to the code if you want. BC's blog and forum modules seem somewhat like afterthoughts designed by marketers for marketing, and there's some unevenness to the way they implement what HTML and templates you have access to and what you don't in different context, so to a degree wordpress gives you more fine-grain control over a site.
The transverse of this is that with open source software you don't necessarily have the quality control or guarantee of long-term maintenance that you might with BC. Business Catalyst is far more initially optimized for business (obviously) and its servers can likely experience a higher load and greater uptime than you might get on a typical hosting service with wordpress.
Wordpress is kind of notorious for being hackable, mostly because of its ubiquity, although if you work on it it can be secured to a reasonable degree I think -- I'm not aware of any security issues regarding Business Catalyst, apart from recent issues with the captcha and spam which might have been resolved with Akismet and Recaptcha (both of which you can also get on Wordpress obviously) but personally I don't like having all of my accounts linked with a single Adobe username/password.
But then again, I have to trust that Adobe has their **** together and there isn't some festering zero-day sitting at the heart of all of it because the price you pay for playing in BC's sandbox is just that -- it's their sandbox. They're not releasing the code. If you can't change it with an existing module setting or can't hack around with with javascript then complaining until they fix it's your only option.
In short, I think it depends on your needs. Neither is entirely the wrong answer, and both have their issues. I've been just as frustrated with some of the rendering bugs and limitations in BC as I have with the way Wordpress (IMHO) overdoes abstraction while simultaneously sticking with its horrendous code-and-content mixing template style. If you have inventory and need to push stock and don't really care about mucking around with server-side code or anything really complex than BC will probably work for you, and of course there are always sites like bcgurus and these forums to help out with edge cases.