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The commenters here bitching about how crap Wordpress is (dev-wise) could only dream about having a product even a hundredth as popular Wordpress. I know this

The commenters here bitching about how crap Wordpress is (dev-wise) could only dream about having a product even a hundredth as popular Wordpress. I know this is a kind of shitty riposte but if you don't like the code-base or some feature it is open-source you know. (I say this in the full knowledge that I hate this come-back but for a project of Wordpress's popularity I think that it's valid enough.) I have to deal with a lot of non-techies who want to get stuff online and nearly all of them gravitate towards Wordpress. It's a dead simple model, the admin UI is uncomplicated and it's pretty ubiquitous. How it got to be ubiquitous is another question, of course. Full disclosure: I use it myself even though I could conceivably hand-roll my own blog if I absolutely had to, but why should I when it does what I need which is post a missive or two that know one will ever read. Congrats on the Four Oh I say, long live our PHP blogging engine overlords.

x0x0 12y ago
The bitching is because I have to support their crap. Along with the wordpress security hole of the day lottery, I have to deal with php (and it's cruft and security holes), plus wordpress constantly spamming you with "new version" with zero indication of whether it's just another code dump likely to break plugins or if it fixes zero days, yet still likely to break plugins. Happiness skyrocketed with octopress. edit: competent devs would issue long term releases with only security fixes backported. As it is, getting a set of plugins plus a theme working is fine, but it then requires ongoing maintenance because wordpress constantly internally churns and breakage regularly occurs, partly due to their apparently ill-specced internal api. I presume they don't do this either because of lack of engineering ability or because they want to drive people to their hosted product. Either way, it's not a good product.
- mindctrl-org 12y ago
  You can legitimately argue about the legacy code base, but the bit about regular breakage is total bullshit.
  - x0x0 12y ago
    Nope, it's my experience (and a brief google will tell you the same). Feel free to clamp your hands over your eyes and sing la-la-la to suit yourself, though. ps -- if you google why wordpress doesn't issue stable releases, it's because it's too hard. Which rather demonstrates the quality of people working on wordpress, I think, given real developers manage to do it for whole OSes, which are a tad more complicated than a cms [1] [1] http://wordpress.org/support/topic/long-term-support http://wordpress.org/support/topic/long-term-support
    - georgestephanis 12y ago
      So then Chrome is a stupid hacky browser because it doesn't ship a long-term-support version, and just expects everyone to update?
girvo 12y ago
> I know this is a kind of shitty riposte but if you don't like the code-base or some feature it is open-source you know I'm aware. Which is why we've developed many in-house and open-source plugins, and the like. But, fixing Wordpress' API and developer interface is impossible. To do so, would require breaking backwards compatibility (or building a compatibility layer, that still won't be 100% due to how many plugins do nasty nasty stuff and rely on implicit behaviour) with the ecosystem of plugins; which are the entire point of Wordpress. So, we've been building a way to wrap Wordpress' back-end in Laravel. To have proper Composer and Packagist and PSR support, to be able to follow proper development practices, hell, to be able to unit test our code properly: these are things that Wordpress makes far more painful in 2014 than they should be. PHP may have a reputation for being a nasty hacky language, and Wordpress may have contributed a lot to that reputation, but in this day and age we can do better.
vatotemking 12y ago
Most devs fail to understand how important user-centricity in softwares are. Look at PHP, Windows, WordPress, or even Photoshop. They don't have the most beautiful code bases, yet look how successful they are. Clearly there is something to it. Laravel is beautiful but its new and it still needs to prove itself. I've yet to see a project written in laravel (or any of those "modern" frameworks) that would stand the test of time. WordPress code base is a result of its long history (11 years). Backwards compat is no easy task. For that alone I applaud the WordPress team and congrats on the 4 point oh!

x0x0 12y ago

The bitching is because I have to support their crap. Along with the wordpress security hole of the day lottery, I have to deal with php (and it's cruft and security holes), plus wordpress constantly spamming you with "new version" with zero indication of whether it's just another code dump likely to break plugins or if it fixes zero days, yet still likely to break plugins. Happiness skyrocketed with octopress. edit: competent devs would issue long term releases with only security fixes backported. As it is, getting a set of plugins plus a theme working is fine, but it then requires ongoing maintenance because wordpress constantly internally churns and breakage regularly occurs, partly due to their apparently ill-specced internal api. I presume they don't do this either because of lack of engineering ability or because they want to drive people to their hosted product. Either way, it's not a good product.

mindctrl-org 12y ago
You can legitimately argue about the legacy code base, but the bit about regular breakage is total bullshit.
- x0x0 12y ago
  Nope, it's my experience (and a brief google will tell you the same). Feel free to clamp your hands over your eyes and sing la-la-la to suit yourself, though. ps -- if you google why wordpress doesn't issue stable releases, it's because it's too hard. Which rather demonstrates the quality of people working on wordpress, I think, given real developers manage to do it for whole OSes, which are a tad more complicated than a cms [1] [1] http://wordpress.org/support/topic/long-term-support http://wordpress.org/support/topic/long-term-support
  - georgestephanis 12y ago
    So then Chrome is a stupid hacky browser because it doesn't ship a long-term-support version, and just expects everyone to update?

girvo 12y ago

> I know this is a kind of shitty riposte but if you don't like the code-base or some feature it is open-source you know I'm aware. Which is why we've developed many in-house and open-source plugins, and the like. But, fixing Wordpress' API and developer interface is impossible. To do so, would require breaking backwards compatibility (or building a compatibility layer, that still won't be 100% due to how many plugins do nasty nasty stuff and rely on implicit behaviour) with the ecosystem of plugins; which are the entire point of Wordpress. So, we've been building a way to wrap Wordpress' back-end in Laravel. To have proper Composer and Packagist and PSR support, to be able to follow proper development practices, hell, to be able to unit test our code properly: these are things that Wordpress makes far more painful in 2014 than they should be. PHP may have a reputation for being a nasty hacky language, and Wordpress may have contributed a lot to that reputation, but in this day and age we can do better.

vatotemking 12y ago

Most devs fail to understand how important user-centricity in softwares are. Look at PHP, Windows, WordPress, or even Photoshop. They don't have the most beautiful code bases, yet look how successful they are. Clearly there is something to it. Laravel is beautiful but its new and it still needs to prove itself. I've yet to see a project written in laravel (or any of those "modern" frameworks) that would stand the test of time. WordPress code base is a result of its long history (11 years). Backwards compat is no easy task. For that alone I applaud the WordPress team and congrats on the 4 point oh!