there is worse php than wordpress out there. remembering the time i had to administer magento. it was routine, and recommended in the docs, to set permissions to 777. nothing fucking worked or made sense. i can't say what we were paying for it, but i *can* say it was publicly priced at $13k/year for 4 users. i ran it inside a concrete sarcophagus with a 30km exclusion zone, made of severe apparmor (or was it selinux?) constraints and a once a second cron job to chmod -R o-w on directory trees it REALLY REALLY WANTED to 777. i don't recommend magento.