Posts Tagged ‘cms’

WordPress? Thanks, but no thanks.

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

From a sitebuilder’s/IT fool’s perspective, working with WordPress is a pain in the back. It has no real MVC separation, some things can not be styled with the current hook/override approach (not enough predefined css classes), we have no ajax API at all (and if I do make one, the core WP bootstrap makes it pretty slow), css separation is not perfect (admin install.css #error-page for example, see next), hardcoded error page in functions.php, no masterpage templates (includes everywhere), no unified coding style/QA for plugins and many badly written plugins and so on.
It’s nice and cool actually – until you try to modify things.

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WordPress, first impressions, slight problems

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

I wanted to try WordPress on my host out of curiosity, thought it would be couple of hours, but in the end I ended up tinkering it for a day and I’m totally unsatisfied with the results. Why?

  • the admin interface (compared to blogger) is quite simple; there are many things I couldn’t finetune, except in the template code. It would’ve been nice to include those things at least in a config file (php associative arrays would be totally okay) – so that I don’t end up digging php or looking at the api page…
  • the default new template is, well, not so nice: I find the content:before/after solution for the bulletpoint butt ugly, especially that in IE7 it did not default to the normal for me. I also find the solution for the sidebar annoying, just like the fully uncut header image to mention a few.
  • the default blogger importer totally died on the remote host (no error message, it just ended with one post – and no, this was not an ssl error), while on my local machine it worked. I ended up importing my dumped sql via phpMyAdmin.
  • wp stores some of the paths (with full blown protocol sign) in the db and then renders it into the html code (so instead of “/wp/” we have “http://whatever.com/wp/” which did give me some headaches.
  • the clean_pre builtin formatter function removes all the line break html tags from the preformatted text (formatting.php line 94), which indeed was annoying. Btw html tags inside pre may be uncommon, but are totally valid and I used them in many posts.
  • Wherever I look, maybe it’s just me, but I see php+html+js all mixed together; at least the non-admin “templates” should be nice.

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