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Yup, WordPress follows all bad practices of a typical PHP project: mixed PHP and HTML all over the place, lots of global functions instead of classes and direct

by huskyr 14y ago

Yup, WordPress follows all bad practices of a typical PHP project: mixed PHP and HTML all over the place, lots of global functions instead of classes and direct calls to the MySQL functions instead of PDO so you can't use another database like Postgres. Pity it's so widely used, and there's little competition...

cooperadymas 14y ago
Saying there's little competition is a huge stretch. WordPress is the dominant force by a large margin. But from small static site generators, hosted platforms, other open source alternatives, to enterprise-ready solutions there are a lot of competitors hitting nearly every segment of the market. http://trends.builtwith.com/cms http://trends.builtwith.com/cms provides some good trends of the big players, but I wouldn't put too much stock in it. That said, as a developer who has fallen into the WordPress business out of necessity, there are a lot of great products out there that are built much better than WordPress and I wish one of them were the dominant player. Still, WP manages to get the job done most of the time.
- intelliot 14y ago
  > there are a lot of great products out there that are built much better than WordPress and I wish one of them were the dominant player. Honest question: Can you name one? I'm seriously looking for a WordPress alternative, but I haven't found one that is truly BETTER.
  - cooperadymas 14y ago
    What I mean by this is others have a better structured, more solid & easily extendable code base, better separation between presentation and logic, etc.. Obviously, this is somewhat of an opinion, and it only refers to the underlying structure. For the end user, WordPress is probably the best. A large part of this is due to its ecosystem of plugins and themes. You shouldn't need to build custom code on top of WordPress unless you are doing something very unique, building an application (as opposed to a "website"), or attempting to tie together several plugins. Sticking with PHP, both http://modx.com/ http://modx.com/ and http://www.silverstripe.org/ http://www.silverstripe.org/ are fairly popular and well-built. I've also heard good things of http://www.concrete5.org/ http://www.concrete5.org/ , http://www.movabletype.com/ http://www.movabletype.com/ , http://textpattern.com/ http://textpattern.com/ , and http://ellislab.com/expressionengine http://ellislab.com/expressionengine . http://habariproject.org/en/ http://habariproject.org/en/ has also been built specifically to address many of the faults in WordPress and other popular systems.
    - eclipticplane 14y ago
      Isn't MoveableType in Perl?
      - cooperadymas 14y ago
        Possibly - I've never done anything with it. The PHP statement was really only for the first two, sorry for the confusion!
  - mars 14y ago
    depending on what type of project you are building you might want to have a look at yeager (http://www.yeager.cm http://www.yeager.cm). although the site states beta, the tool is stable and used in live environments since several years.
smacktoward 14y ago
In fairness to the WordPress developers, the quality of the product has been pretty consistently getting better over the last few years. There's still plenty of warts, of course, but that seems true of just about every widely used piece of software -- bad decisions early on in development become very hard to walk back later when any of millions of sites/themes/plugins/etc. could turn out to be depending on that bad decision being there...
pknight 14y ago
So you're basically saying that following bad practices is inconsequential since - among the thousands of CMSes, WordPress is the most widely adopted, despite an abundant availability of alternatives that claim to be simpler, more powerful and prettier. Interesting thought.
- jeremyjh 14y ago
  Worse is better. http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
icelancer 14y ago
No one is forcing you (or anyone) to use WordPress.
znowi 14y ago
Speaking of competition. A while ago I saw an announcement of the Habari project, set out to build a "WordPress done right". I checked just now and they're still around. Released v0.9, which is PHP 5.3 only. It may be worth a look for those who seek a more modern approach. http://habariproject.org http://habariproject.org
MikeCodeAwesome 14y ago
I wasn't aware of this, but mildweed posted later that PDO is coming. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4907099 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4907099

by huskyr 14y ago

cooperadymas 14y ago

Saying there's little competition is a huge stretch. WordPress is the dominant force by a large margin. But from small static site generators, hosted platforms, other open source alternatives, to enterprise-ready solutions there are a lot of competitors hitting nearly every segment of the market. http://trends.builtwith.com/cms http://trends.builtwith.com/cms provides some good trends of the big players, but I wouldn't put too much stock in it. That said, as a developer who has fallen into the WordPress business out of necessity, there are a lot of great products out there that are built much better than WordPress and I wish one of them were the dominant player. Still, WP manages to get the job done most of the time.

intelliot 14y ago
> there are a lot of great products out there that are built much better than WordPress and I wish one of them were the dominant player. Honest question: Can you name one? I'm seriously looking for a WordPress alternative, but I haven't found one that is truly BETTER.
- cooperadymas 14y ago
  What I mean by this is others have a better structured, more solid & easily extendable code base, better separation between presentation and logic, etc.. Obviously, this is somewhat of an opinion, and it only refers to the underlying structure. For the end user, WordPress is probably the best. A large part of this is due to its ecosystem of plugins and themes. You shouldn't need to build custom code on top of WordPress unless you are doing something very unique, building an application (as opposed to a "website"), or attempting to tie together several plugins. Sticking with PHP, both http://modx.com/ http://modx.com/ and http://www.silverstripe.org/ http://www.silverstripe.org/ are fairly popular and well-built. I've also heard good things of http://www.concrete5.org/ http://www.concrete5.org/ , http://www.movabletype.com/ http://www.movabletype.com/ , http://textpattern.com/ http://textpattern.com/ , and http://ellislab.com/expressionengine http://ellislab.com/expressionengine . http://habariproject.org/en/ http://habariproject.org/en/ has also been built specifically to address many of the faults in WordPress and other popular systems.
  - eclipticplane 14y ago
    Isn't MoveableType in Perl?
    - cooperadymas 14y ago
      Possibly - I've never done anything with it. The PHP statement was really only for the first two, sorry for the confusion!
- mars 14y ago
  depending on what type of project you are building you might want to have a look at yeager (http://www.yeager.cm http://www.yeager.cm). although the site states beta, the tool is stable and used in live environments since several years.

smacktoward 14y ago

In fairness to the WordPress developers, the quality of the product has been pretty consistently getting better over the last few years. There's still plenty of warts, of course, but that seems true of just about every widely used piece of software -- bad decisions early on in development become very hard to walk back later when any of millions of sites/themes/plugins/etc. could turn out to be depending on that bad decision being there...

pknight 14y ago

So you're basically saying that following bad practices is inconsequential since - among the thousands of CMSes, WordPress is the most widely adopted, despite an abundant availability of alternatives that claim to be simpler, more powerful and prettier. Interesting thought.

jeremyjh 14y ago
Worse is better. http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

icelancer 14y ago

No one is forcing you (or anyone) to use WordPress.

znowi 14y ago

Speaking of competition. A while ago I saw an announcement of the Habari project, set out to build a "WordPress done right". I checked just now and they're still around. Released v0.9, which is PHP 5.3 only. It may be worth a look for those who seek a more modern approach. http://habariproject.org http://habariproject.org

MikeCodeAwesome 14y ago

I wasn't aware of this, but mildweed posted later that PDO is coming. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4907099 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4907099