Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.

Wordpress provides little structure of framework for your plugin. There are plenty of hooks and functions to use, to integrate with each step of the rendering process, but other than that, you're on your own. Each plugin tends to provide it's own miniframework... or lack of one. A plugin tends to look like it's own self contained PHP web site from 2005.

Trying to integrate several different WordPres plugins is a challenge, as they each tend to be written in their own style.

It's php, there are a lot ways to write code that result in desired functionality - that's a plus in my book. There are thousands of differents types of programmers writing plugins for WordPress - more than any other open source project, so it's darn obvious there are going to be lots of different ways plugin writers approach their plugins.

Having said that, there are guidelines and best practices found in the codex (for one, all the hooks and filters that are available which are generally well documented) and there is some quality control when submitting plugins to the WP directory. In addition to that there is a fantastic handbook (professional WordPress plugin development) that gives both beginners as well as veterans a healthy education in the best ways to write plugins. And there's a big blogging community writing detailed tutorials.

I'm not sure what you mean with integrating plugins - what does that accomplish? Most plugins run fine when running concurrently on an install.

A lot of these criticisms toward WordPress in this thread are a bit ridiculous if you ask me. Yes it's written in PHP, big deal. Yes there's a lot of code that if written afresh today would look different. Yes there's variable quality in code written by various plugin/theme developers. At the end of the day WordPress is plain accessible for people - and that is a big reason for its success.

I started out years ago knowing zero about code to where I am today. My first plugin was shit and know I'm getting pretty good at it. Because developing on WordPress has been so much fun I taught myself Php, html, css, javascript (including ajax and jquery). Clearly, I'm not the only one as it is the most active community of all the CMS choices out there - and a lot of people are making a living thanks to it.

Jesus Christ. Can we stop all this "PHP Sucks" nonsense? We get it, a language like ruby is better for you. And hell, there's not much of an argument against how PHP looks; Ruby and Python, to me, look much much nicer.

But complaints about its technological capability are completely false. It's super easy and simple to learn, and even a HTMl/CSS guy like me is able to build pretty powerful, dynamic websites and simple apps with WordPress and (gasp!) PHP.

Before you start shitting on PHP, realize that a) you're arguing over a programming language lol b) it's been around for a long time and thus has a huge community, good documentation, lots of books and resources, and comes preinstalled on a lot of servers, etc, c) great applications like MailChimp, Wikipedia, Digg, and FaceBook use PHP extensively d) the learning curve is low e) yeah, it is ugly. But its easiness to learn got me into quasi-programming with WordPress, and since seeing .rb files I've begun to get curious about ruby. But the basic programming knowledge is there from PHP experience and facilitates learning other languages.

Sorry, it's just frustrating to see people making fun of a language and criticizing the people who work with it.

My point was that raw PHP is a little too unstructured and powerful for the tasks that many plugins are made to accomplish.

By integration, I mean adopting plugins from various authors and making them work as part of your theme. There are all sorts of issues involved... random visual design, clashing HTML doctypes, possible poor coding, adding functionality, fixing security issues... creating a coherent, secure and functional site by piecing together various WordPress plugins is not as easy as installing some plugins and whistling off into the glorious sunset. Simply finding a plugin for a certain purposes which actually works can be a challenge.

I wasn't attempting criticize WordPress or PHP in general, just the quality of the average plugin and the lack of consistency and order.