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The dire state of WordPress

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Re: The dire state of WordPress

#91

Post by ebbv »

chc wrote: post #80
ebbv wrote: post #71

Words are wind and WordPress is not gonna be "fixed" any more than PHP itself will. If you want something different/better, start it yourself and evangelize it. If it really is better and you do a good job hopefully it will eventually win out.

PHP has gotten a lot better over the past few years. I would argue that PHP is making more progress than WordPress is.

That's probably fair but PHP is never gonna be totally sane. There will always be weird quirks that are just ingrained in the language. Every language, every application has weird shit because it's all made by people who are just bundles of weird shit.

The problem is when someone else's weird shit is incompatible with your weird shit.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#92

Post by ebbv »

tunesmith wrote: post #87
ebbv wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like ExpressionEngine if what you really want is a CMS.

As someone who hasn't spent a ton of time extending any CMS but uses a lot of frameworks, I enjoyed EE too during the short amount of time I used it. Out of wordpress, drupal, and EE, EE is the one where writing plugins felt like normal programming since they hooked right into code igniter. (Not sure how things have changed in the last couple of years though.)

Still pretty much the same.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#93

Post by wonderyak »

mildweed wrote: post #62

Wordpress is making big steps in the right direction. * Their wild pile of oddly-named functions are being deprecated and moved into well-designed classes. * Better templating options are being promoted. * Yes, the global $wp_query leaves some to be desired, but at its core, wpdb's WP_Query is a decently powerful database abstraction, and if used right can perform well at scale. No, the hooks aren't going away, nor i…

I think curation and code review should really be an important part of the theme and plugin repositories.

Perhaps they need 'approved' and 'Open' directories for the repositories?

There used to be this issue with people having issues distributing plugins; now with github, that is much much easier.

There is just so much bad code floating around, people not following best practices and loading JS libraries that core includes, conflicts with other plugins, etc. Its a mess.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#95

Post by wonderyak »

jordanlev wrote: post #55
jsdalton wrote: post #7

To paraphrase Churchill, Wordpress is the worst CMS -- except for all the others. I'd love to find an open-source CMS (preferably in Python or Ruby) with clean, secure, elegant code and a well-organized framework that comes with a friendly admin and active, responsive development community like Wordpress, but so far I've got nothing. (If anyone has any suggestions, please do feel free to share them!)

I discovered Concrete5 ( http://concrete5.org ) a few years ago after building many Wordpress sites (large and small), and totally fell in love with it. It's not perfect, but it's much better than any other CMS out there for end-users, designers, and developers: * Editing UI is on the front-end -- users just go to the page they want to edit and click on things to edit them, which is much more intuitive than a back-en…

I liked Concrete5 when I was playing around with it. I was very excited by its potential; especially looking at projects where maybe WP was overkill.

Where the bottom fell out was in two areas:

1. Paid plugins

I cannot rationally tell my clients 'this software might have a few cases where it is easier than WP to use and manage; but you'll be spending several hundred dollars replicating free functionality available on WP'.

Its a non-starter.

2. The software still looks kind of 'hokey' compared to WordPress

WordPress has lots of issues and there are a ton of other great alternatives. But, its like Facebook vs. all other social networks -- you go where the people are because it makes everything better.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#96

Post by jordanlev »

wonderyak wrote: post #95
jordanlev wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I discovered Concrete5 ( http://concrete5.org ) a few years ago after building many Wordpress sites (large and small), and totally fell in love with it. It's not perfect, but it's much better than any other CMS out there for end-users, designers, and developers: * Editing UI is on the front-end -- users just go to the page they want to edit and click on things to edit them, which is much more intuitive than a back-en…

I liked Concrete5 when I was playing around with it. I was very excited by its potential; especially looking at projects where maybe WP was overkill. Where the bottom fell out was in two areas: 1. Paid plugins I cannot rationally tell my clients 'this software might have a few cases where it is easier than WP to use and manage; but you'll be spending several hundred dollars replicating free functionality available on…

1. Yes, there is a lot more of everything available for wordpress (free and paid plugins/themes). I think this is what a lot of the comments here are saying about why Wordpress is so prevalent... not because it's good necessarily, but because it just has so much stuff available for it.

FWIW, I build custom-designed sites for my clients, and I deliver complete sites that don't require any additional functionality. I don't even bother telling clients how to install new plugins, so for my situation this is a moot point.

When I do pay for plugins, it's because the functionality it provides would take me much more time to build myself (so if my rate is $100-150/hr., paying $30 or $50 or even $200 for something that would take me 4-8 hours of work is a complete no-brainer).

2. Not sure what you mean by "hokey"... the front-end is entirely designed by the person building the site, and the back-end uses Twitter Bootstrap (as of version 5.5 which was released last year). But to each their own :)

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#98

Post by the_imp »

jsdalton wrote: post #7

To paraphrase Churchill, Wordpress is the worst CMS -- except for all the others. I'd love to find an open-source CMS (preferably in Python or Ruby) with clean, secure, elegant code and a well-organized framework that comes with a friendly admin and active, responsive development community like Wordpress, but so far I've got nothing. (If anyone has any suggestions, please do feel free to share them!)

I maintain a number of sites that use PmWiki [1] as a CMS. The community's small (though active), it's in PHP, and the editing isn't WYSIWYG, but the reason I ended up with it in the first place is how well the framework is organised and how easily add-ons can be packaged and included to add to or even replace core functionality. Templates are also completely separate from the PHP.

One feature of PmWiki that I've yet to come across in any other CMS are PageLists, which allow you fetch semi-structured data and other content from the rest of the site and displaying it using a custom template.

[1] http://www.pmwiki.org/

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#99

Post by beatpanda »

Somebody writes this article every few years, and whenever it's published, a greater percentage of the Internet runs on WordPress than at the time the last article of its type was published.

WordPress is pragmatic, and that has paid off for the project. I think more projects should follow their example.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#100

Post by wwweston »

lysol wrote: post #23

This article is good but misses a minor point: Wordpress was never intended to be MVC, the developers had probably never even heard of MVC when it was first developed. Wordpress is a bastard. I've thought about how terrible actually hacking on Wordpress actually is, and truth be told, the horribleness is so entrenched that any kind of form or community effort to improve it would introduce incompatibilities with the e…

> Wordpress was never intended to be MVC, the developers had probably never even heard of MVC

Not only the developers, maybe even most developers outside of certain communities. I'd been exposed to the concepts, but I'd never worked on an "MVC" site until about 3-4 months after the first release of WordPress, and I'd been doing for over five years at that point.

> I've thought about how terrible actually hacking on Wordpress actually is

Hacking core is pretty bad. Heck, even reading core to try and understand what's going on under the hood can be a challenge.

But writing themes and plugins is not that bad -- indeed, if it was, I suspect you would find a far smaller mass of them. It's not MVC, and particularly if you're used to that organization of a web app, it's disorienting, but the APIs are reasonably organized, well-specified, and let even n00bs get things done.

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