WordPress vs. HomeMade PHP Website

After my graduation in 2005, I started drawing some cartoons -which is nowhere near my favorite cartoon series “Fox Trot” or anything like that..- It was just for fun, spending some time while learning some tools.. Anyway, I also wanted to display these cartoons on the internet. But I didn’t have a WordPress account back then, or didn’t know about it yet.. So I decided to make my own PHP website in order to display the cartoons dynamically.

Here is the design I made for the database:

2 tables only. Nothing fancy :-)
One for the images “TBLIMAGE”, and the other for the subjects “TBLSUBJECT”.

Image table has the columns below:

• imageID: unique id
• fileName: name of the file that we will show
• subjectID (key for getting the subject name from the subjects table)
• filePreTxt: Some text to display just before the image
• filePostTxt: Some text to display just after the image
• strImageQueue: Within the subject every image has a queue which shows their priority to be shown

TBLIMAGE

Subject table has the columns below:

• parentSubjectID
• subjectText: The title of the cartoon will use what ever text is in here
• strSubjectDate: We will order the cartoon files first according to their subject dates

TBLSUBJECT

And here are some parts of the PHP codes, that you may find useful:

Setting up the configuration file by assigning the dbname, username, password values to their variables respectively:

$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbuser = 'yourdbusername';
$dbpass = 'yourdbpassword';
$dbname = 'yourdbname';


Opening the database connection to work with:

$conn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die ('Error connecting to mysql');
mysql_select_db($dbname);


And finally, defining and running my query:

$query = "SELECT filepretxt, fileposttxt, filename, subjecttext, strimagequeue FROM tblimage, tblsubject  WHERE subjectid = parentsubjectid order by strsubjectdate asc, strimagequeue asc";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die('Error, query failed');


Well, I didn’t forget to close the database connection of course.

mysql_close($conn);


So, here is my question:
Now that we have a chance to use a powerful and easy to integrate web application like Wordpress, would you rather use it, or make your own PHP Website for displaying your works/cartoons/etc.?
Or lets put it this way:
Which one is better?
Whibdatt [WordPress] or Whibdatt [HomeMade]?

Special thanks to W3Schools for their nice and explanatory web development tutorials ^^