The dire state of WordPress • Hacker News Board

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#151

Post by JVIDEL » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 12:48 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #58

JVIDEL wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the templates, some are simply STUNNING it makes you wonder why pro designers charge you so much for stuff that barely holds a candle to stuff you see on WP. Then you install the template and everything goes to shit, you have to read some of the stuff support writes to users, it boils down to "we sold you a broken product and now we will give you just a hint about how to get it to almost work". Still lightyears a…

> Still lightyears ahead of templates on other CMSs... Yup, but I think that's primarily because WordPress has a stranglehold on the market. Nobody will use another CMS because WordPress has all the stuff, and nobody will develop mass-market stuff for another content management system because WordPress has all the users. The network effect is strong, and displacing WordPress wouldn't be profitable enough to be worth…

I think the best way would be to come up with a way to port those templates to other CMS that doesn't involves rewriting the whole thing, or perhaps a wrapper?

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#152

Post by ideadude » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 3:41 PM UTC

I agree with the conclusion that WordPress developers could use more "rules" when developing.

But there's really nothing keeping you from defining your own rules and working within the WordPress system. It's not MVC, but you can get something as good by keeping frontend-related code/templates in a theme and backend-related code/modules inside of plugins.

The problem is that 3rd party plugins you use might not use your rules. So the code you are getting for free (or cheaply) isn't coded how you would have liked. Code it from scratch or re-factor it to suit your needs. If you were using another framework, you probably would have had to code that functionality yourself anyway.

While I'm at it some more pet peeve's RE some common complaints:

* Everything is in functions.php. Cool, so setup YOUR functions.php like this: require_once("includes/config.php"); require_once("includes/settings.php"); require_once("includes/helpers.php"); require_once("classes/class.myclass.php");

Problem solved.

* The posts table doesn't support my data structure. Awesome, just add your own table and add a class wrapper to push/pull data. Add methods to search or whatever you need. Sure this may be slightly easier with other frameworks because they do a bit of that for you. But if you've done this once before, you just copy and paste the code and change the object names, etc.

Maybe I'm wasn't disciplined enough when I used PHP frameworks in the past, but with all of the structure and rules, I found myself wasting as much time working around those constraints in special situations as I was saving using their module scaffolding/etc.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#153

Post by dabaR » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 3:42 PM UTC

Read this so you can get clued in, jshakes: http://wpengine.com/2013/03/alex-king-on-the-maturity-of-wor...

See some of the real world issues, not programmer-level gripes you bring up. Which BTW show your lack of creativity in solving problems through thinking outside of the box.

I'll give you an example:

If you don't like get_permalink(), make yourself a get_the_permalink() { return get_permalink(); }

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#154

Post by jkenters » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 5:47 PM UTC

I'm really surprised nobody mentioned MODX Revolution here. Finally a CMS that's about creative freedom (it's even their slogan) and not about fixing the CMS to be what the client wants.

It really feels great to be in control of every aspect of your site; there is not a single byte of source code I don't want there to be in my html. Without the need to override tons of default CMS generated markup!

And if you need some extra functionality, there are just a few (mostly really great) "packages" to choose from instead of a few hundred badly designed and insecure "plugins" like WordPress has.

Last but not least: it has the best community ever! Friendly helpful people providing real solutions. Quite a few are real experts too.

Why not give it a try? http://www.modx.com

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#155

Post by dpk666 » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 6:06 PM UTC

For all the people mentioning Joomla, are you talking about 1.0, 1.5, 1.6-1.7, 2.5, 3.0? The framework, the CMS, or both? These are all radically different products, which is symptomatic of the challenges that project has had. I'm curious to know who thinks it's gotten better, or worse, and why -- or if everyone's just recalling the 1.0-1.5 era when Joomla had more adoption than anything else like it.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#156

Post by g5604 » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 8:07 PM UTC

No mention of modx yet?

More a framework than an CMS really, the best thing about it is you can build how you want to i.e everything is incredibly flexible. For clients you can easily create a super simple interface for editing.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#157

Post by DowntownRob » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 8:12 PM UTC

To rewrite WordPress successfully (so it doesn't break everything all at once) would take a hybrid approach, making hundreds of rewrites of smaller chunks over time, maintaining compatibility while improving the code, allowing theme and plugin authors to support new implementations as they are offered, deprecating old ones over time.

Which is exactly what's already happening. ;)

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#158

Post by photomatt » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 9:52 PM UTC

Some really excellent comments in this discussion. While there is some predictable reactions (my way is right! your way is wrong!) I'm impressed by the number of people who've taken a more nuanced view of how and why platforms get adopted by developers and regular folks.

One thing I'd encourage people to think about in terms of how we take WordPress to the next level isn't just that we have a ton of plugins and themes that people love, but how we got them in the first place. That network effect wasn't always there, it developed over time, and was caused by something.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#159

Post by jaynate » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 3:33 AM UTC

eamann wrote: post #117

jaynate wrote: post #2

Software rewrites are extremely challenging, and more often than not, fail (good example: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html ). Perhaps a more measured factoring approach over time would be more appropriate?

WordPress is already going through a measured factoring approach. Themes were ported over from a mishmash of procedural calls into the WP_Theme object in version 3.4. Posts (and pages, custom post types, etc) were ported over from an associative array and various procedural calls into the WP_Post object in 3.5. But WordPress does - and likely always will - work to retain backwards compatibility so that existing theme…

Nice. Wordpress's value is derived from its ecosystem as opposed to its technical purity.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#160

Post by jaygilmore » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 10:37 AM UTC

g5604 wrote: post #156

No mention of modx yet? More a framework than an CMS really, the best thing about it is you can build how you want to i.e everything is incredibly flexible. For clients you can easily create a super simple interface for editing.

There was mention of it but it's gone now for some reason.