31 ms·

Every time I have to debug another problem in Wordpress, every time I encounter another bug in WP's core code I raise my head up and cry, impotent rage against

Every time I have to debug another problem in Wordpress, every time I encounter another bug in WP's core code I raise my head up and cry, impotent rage against the nameless void. Wordpress' architecture resembles a plate of spaghetti. It's abominable, a horror upon the face of this planet. I don't mind PHP though :)

SwellJoe 12y ago
And, yet, the results for users are stunningly great. I heavily use both WordPress and Drupal for sites. WordPress may be uglier on the backend, but to people just using the software, the differences could not be more stark, and Drupal does not fare well. Things like upgrading the core software...with WordPress it's so easy that it doesn't even take thought; hell, they've made upgrades automatic by default a few days ago. With Drupal, I'm months into a migration process to get our site onto Drupal 7 (not even kidding). It's been more complicated, and more error-prone, than the process of migrating from OpenACS to Joomla and then from Joomla into Drupal 6. WordPress also seems to have the ecosystem right. No matter what kind of task you're trying to solve, there are a dozen plugins for it, some free, some commercial, some a hybrid of the two (sometimes annoyingly spammy about it). I've whipped up several websites in the past few weeks for various side projects I have, and it's downright fun to build complicated sites with WordPress. And, because there are more themes than there are people using WordPress (exaggeration to make a point), getting a site looking good and not like every other WordPress site is trivial and cheap. I find myself wanting to make new websites because it's more fun than working on my company website running Drupal. When it comes to building custom code, I prefer Drupal (mostly), but I do that pretty rarely; I interact with the frontend and admin interface daily. I've almost talked myself into migrating my company site to WordPress+bbPress. I wonder if there's a really good ticket tracker option for WordPress...
- mtbcoder 12y ago
  "No matter what kind of task you're trying to solve, there are a dozen plugins for it, some free, some commercial, some a hybrid of the two (sometimes annoyingly spammy about it)." This is a double-edged sword that can get you into trouble quickly. Personally, I prefer systems that focus on one thing and one thing only.
  - SwellJoe 12y ago
    But, I need more than one thing on my websites. Sure, you can have many disparate parts all doing their one thing well ..but the user experience for that often sucks. Controlling notifications from four different tools in four different places is deeply user hostile, for example, and that's the situation I'd be putting my users in for our website (unless I built a unified notification UI for forums, content, tickets, and store applications). Likewise unifying logins/sessions is often a nightmare (I've done it but don't like doing it). Handling spam across multiple tools that allow user content, etc. There are big costs to single-purpose tools. For some folks the cost is worth paying.
taf2 12y ago
I had the exact opposite reaction to Wordpress - I found it an excellent reference for studying how to build a great CMS. For me its code is concise and easy to follow. The time I spent with Wordpress was a great adventure in someone else's code... I think debugging WP is pretty fun!
- BorisMelnik 12y ago
  agree, while it may have some technical limitations it is one of the most successful CMS's ever, and gaining in being a very successful open source program as well. I'm a bigtime WordPress user and really don't have any problems with it. Most of my websites load in under 2 seconds (with a lot of tweaking) so I really can't complain.
  - eropple 12y ago
    Perhaps two whole seconds fine for your needs, but to put in perspective your performance-is-fine claims in multiple posts in this thread: I won't go live with a site that doesn't render in under 150ms, because I consider doing worse than that disrespectful to my users and wasteful of their time. The amount of effort I have had to put in in the past to make WordPress perform even adequately has been disgusting.
    - taf2 12y ago
      I think the confusion is a page can render in 150ms but load time in the above comment was more about when the load event would fire on your site. 2 seconds for load event is pretty good. It's not google fast but it's not bad if your site has any images or loads css/js - most the WP sites I've ever dealt with have 50-60ms render times...
      - eropple 12y ago
        Two seconds to fire a load event would not be allowed out of the test environment anywhere I have worked.
      - 12y ago
toast0 12y ago
I spent two days replacing WordPress with custom PHP that does exactly what we need for our blog (read a bunch of static text from files), and then I never had to care about the horrors of WordPress (or worse, the plugins) again!
rbanffy 12y ago
If this WP API thing gets traction and people start deploying lots of front end themes that rely on it rather than direct calls into WP's internal organs, it wouldn't be impossible to redo the core in any stack.

SwellJoe 12y ago

And, yet, the results for users are stunningly great. I heavily use both WordPress and Drupal for sites. WordPress may be uglier on the backend, but to people just using the software, the differences could not be more stark, and Drupal does not fare well. Things like upgrading the core software...with WordPress it's so easy that it doesn't even take thought; hell, they've made upgrades automatic by default a few days ago. With Drupal, I'm months into a migration process to get our site onto Drupal 7 (not even kidding). It's been more complicated, and more error-prone, than the process of migrating from OpenACS to Joomla and then from Joomla into Drupal 6. WordPress also seems to have the ecosystem right. No matter what kind of task you're trying to solve, there are a dozen plugins for it, some free, some commercial, some a hybrid of the two (sometimes annoyingly spammy about it). I've whipped up several websites in the past few weeks for various side projects I have, and it's downright fun to build complicated sites with WordPress. And, because there are more themes than there are people using WordPress (exaggeration to make a point), getting a site looking good and not like every other WordPress site is trivial and cheap. I find myself wanting to make new websites because it's more fun than working on my company website running Drupal. When it comes to building custom code, I prefer Drupal (mostly), but I do that pretty rarely; I interact with the frontend and admin interface daily. I've almost talked myself into migrating my company site to WordPress+bbPress. I wonder if there's a really good ticket tracker option for WordPress...

mtbcoder 12y ago
"No matter what kind of task you're trying to solve, there are a dozen plugins for it, some free, some commercial, some a hybrid of the two (sometimes annoyingly spammy about it)." This is a double-edged sword that can get you into trouble quickly. Personally, I prefer systems that focus on one thing and one thing only.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  But, I need more than one thing on my websites. Sure, you can have many disparate parts all doing their one thing well ..but the user experience for that often sucks. Controlling notifications from four different tools in four different places is deeply user hostile, for example, and that's the situation I'd be putting my users in for our website (unless I built a unified notification UI for forums, content, tickets, and store applications). Likewise unifying logins/sessions is often a nightmare (I've done it but don't like doing it). Handling spam across multiple tools that allow user content, etc. There are big costs to single-purpose tools. For some folks the cost is worth paying.

taf2 12y ago

I had the exact opposite reaction to Wordpress - I found it an excellent reference for studying how to build a great CMS. For me its code is concise and easy to follow. The time I spent with Wordpress was a great adventure in someone else's code... I think debugging WP is pretty fun!

BorisMelnik 12y ago
agree, while it may have some technical limitations it is one of the most successful CMS's ever, and gaining in being a very successful open source program as well. I'm a bigtime WordPress user and really don't have any problems with it. Most of my websites load in under 2 seconds (with a lot of tweaking) so I really can't complain.
- eropple 12y ago
  Perhaps two whole seconds fine for your needs, but to put in perspective your performance-is-fine claims in multiple posts in this thread: I won't go live with a site that doesn't render in under 150ms, because I consider doing worse than that disrespectful to my users and wasteful of their time. The amount of effort I have had to put in in the past to make WordPress perform even adequately has been disgusting.
  - taf2 12y ago
    I think the confusion is a page can render in 150ms but load time in the above comment was more about when the load event would fire on your site. 2 seconds for load event is pretty good. It's not google fast but it's not bad if your site has any images or loads css/js - most the WP sites I've ever dealt with have 50-60ms render times...
    - eropple 12y ago
      Two seconds to fire a load event would not be allowed out of the test environment anywhere I have worked.
    - 12y ago

toast0 12y ago

I spent two days replacing WordPress with custom PHP that does exactly what we need for our blog (read a bunch of static text from files), and then I never had to care about the horrors of WordPress (or worse, the plugins) again!

rbanffy 12y ago

If this WP API thing gets traction and people start deploying lots of front end themes that rely on it rather than direct calls into WP's internal organs, it wouldn't be impossible to redo the core in any stack.