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But other people work on Wordpress all of the time. The sheer number of plugins, themes, etc. all testify to that. And if it's so broken, then why do so many

by jawngee 18y ago

But other people work on Wordpress all of the time. The sheer number of plugins, themes, etc. all testify to that. And if it's so broken, then why do so many people deploy it day after day? Can you cite specific examples of where it is broken? Or why don't you say what you really mean: Because it's written in PHP it must be junk. And, seriously, who is trolling who? You posted how broken it was, and that you're building something new and better, but don't provide any examples of how Wordpress is broken exactly. I can have Wordpress installed and working in under 15 minutes. I'm not sure how that is broken.

jrockway 18y ago
Like I said, it's easy to hack anything to do exactly what you want. The hard part is making your hack work with other hacks. How many Wordpress plugins can you install before things randomly break? How do you detect breakage, anyway? (Do all plugins have test suites? Can you compose these test suites to ensure that two plugins don't break each other?) How are variable and class namespace conflicts handled? How are conflicting database schema changes handled? Is there a way to request similar information from the database in two places without doing two queries? Is there a cache that can consistently share pieces of data between two plugins? I could go on and on, and the answer to most of these things is no. Most of the time, it doesn't matter because the plugin is "too simple" to break things. But simplicity has its limits -- there are a lot of features that Wordpress is missing that I trivially implemented in my Angerwhale prototype (cleanly). As to the number of extensions, it's simple. Wordpress is the only blogging solution out there, and there are millions of PHP programmers. (OK, there is MT also. But MT killed itself with weird licensing, and lost all of its mindshare. Oops.) Those two factors combine to create a huge ecosystem. But it doesn't say much about the design of Wordpress, other than "it works well enough for people with simple needs, and rewriting a whole blogging engine would take a little more time than hacking Wordpress for this one site." Anyway, sometimes good enough is good enough. Sometimes it isn't.
- jawngee 18y ago
  I still don't think you know what you are talking about. We modified the shit out of wordpress to use it as a makeshit CMS to power a large portion of the marketing generated content on our site. We even added workflow to it. It wasn't that hard. The codebase for wordpress isn't that messy. It's not ideal, but what OSS project is?

by jawngee 18y ago

jrockway 18y ago

Like I said, it's easy to hack anything to do exactly what you want. The hard part is making your hack work with other hacks. How many Wordpress plugins can you install before things randomly break? How do you detect breakage, anyway? (Do all plugins have test suites? Can you compose these test suites to ensure that two plugins don't break each other?) How are variable and class namespace conflicts handled? How are conflicting database schema changes handled? Is there a way to request similar information from the database in two places without doing two queries? Is there a cache that can consistently share pieces of data between two plugins? I could go on and on, and the answer to most of these things is no. Most of the time, it doesn't matter because the plugin is "too simple" to break things. But simplicity has its limits -- there are a lot of features that Wordpress is missing that I trivially implemented in my Angerwhale prototype (cleanly). As to the number of extensions, it's simple. Wordpress is the only blogging solution out there, and there are millions of PHP programmers. (OK, there is MT also. But MT killed itself with weird licensing, and lost all of its mindshare. Oops.) Those two factors combine to create a huge ecosystem. But it doesn't say much about the design of Wordpress, other than "it works well enough for people with simple needs, and rewriting a whole blogging engine would take a little more time than hacking Wordpress for this one site." Anyway, sometimes good enough is good enough. Sometimes it isn't.

jawngee 18y ago
I still don't think you know what you are talking about. We modified the shit out of wordpress to use it as a makeshit CMS to power a large portion of the marketing generated content on our site. We even added workflow to it. It wasn't that hard. The codebase for wordpress isn't that messy. It's not ideal, but what OSS project is?