Seriously Sick of WordPress -- Back to Typos
Posted by Mathew Abonyi Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:02:00 GMT
I should have listened to myself ages ago when I discovered Ruby and said to myself: “I hated PHP before there was an alternative. I hate PHP even more now that there is one.” So why did I convert from Typo to WordPress? I really, really do not understand why there are more posts about converting from Typo to Wordpress than vice versa.
My dear peers, pelt me with rancid tomatoes. I don’t know what I was thinking when converting to a PHP monstrosity. WordPress is such a bloated and badly coded blog engine (and that is much due to the way PHP itself encourages you to code). Every time I try to dig into its code, I become nauseous and frustrated, despite years of PHP experience.
What brought me to this realisation is an innocent attempt to upgrade… the quality of a software distribution and its development practices always reveal themselves when you upgrade, because it is in the care and attention to backwards compatibility which show developers have really considered what they are doing, not just chasing the new shiny thing.
So in trying to upgrade from WordPress 2.0 to 2.2, I found my entire day wasted chasing down errors, discovering none of my plugins will work, finding my theme broken in numerous places, and just plain frustrated by the idiotic process of removing, moving, copying, overwriting and double-checking files and directories. Upgrading WordPress is the most painful form of manual labour I’ve experienced in a while.
So, without further ado, my list of complaints before saying Adieu! to WordPress:
- Biggest of all: upgrading is a serious pain in the arse, even with my upgrade.rb script (notice the irony)
- Upgrading breaks almost every plugin you use
- Plugin compatibility is atrocious. There may be a lot of them in their plugin repository, but look at the fine print and you’ll see they range from pre-1.x to 2.2 compatibility, and that doesn’t mean 2.2 works with 1.5 or vice versa. You need the right version or, more likely than not, it won’t even be recognised. So, really, each version has more like 30 plugins available, not 3000.
- With every upgrade, you are welcoming security bugs (the worst kind) and I just don’t like the idea that upgrading to fix one is just introducing a new one. The reason for this is that WordPress is not a framework; its core functionality is part of its higher functionality, and with every upgrade they are mucking with both. I’d suggest to the WordPress development team that they extract the underlying HTTP management and the overlying CMS functionality… but then, why not use something like Django, CakePHP or Rails?
- Their plugin architecture is horrendously 90’s
- The admin interface is hideous and unintuitive—where do I set pings and trackbacks again? Why do plugins enable new menus in weird places? I can never remember where anything is because nothing is organised properly
- Creating and editing posts is so slow I find myself making a 10-cup cafetiere every time.
- Does WordPress send pings? I never see my blog appear after a post. I can only assume it doesn’t, even when I tell it to.
- The WordPress helper functions are megolithic and cryptic. I can’t cuss them more, really. And they don’t even cover every situation. I’d rather have thousands of little ones to learn that three which do vastly different things, none of which do what I want. That means editing themes is a serious pain.
- Lastly, I just despise PHP and giving it support by using it.
But this isn’t just about me whinging. I have positive reasons for moving back to Typo:
- It’s written in Rails, which lets me do whatever I want with it, in a pleasurable way. I know Rails well enough to muck around. All I need to do is learn how Typo works, and it isn’t that complicated—nothing written in Rails, that I’ve encountered, is too complicated to grok in a day or two.
- Typo 4.2 is going to introduce multiple blogs within a single installation, which I really would like to have. So I’m in for the long haul.
- The latest Typo (4.1) uses Rails 1.2, which was one of my concerns with 4.0.
- The rumour of an admin interface redesign is rather thrilling, but then, I still really like Typo’s admin interface as it stands. I’m very curious what they’re going to do.
- Typo now uses Rails plugins to do everything. I intend to write a FeedBurner plugin that lets you do all sorts of things, like FeedFlare, Feedburner redirects and other nifty FeedBurner stuff. Now that it is easy to write a plugin, I’m keen to test it out and prove its worth.
So, back to Typo 4.x. Let’s hope its developers sorted out some of the issues that put me off it and caused me to so whimsically (and stupidly) change to WordPress.
Note: Over the next week, my dear readers, you may encounter a few problems. These are only temporary as I muck around with Typo 4.1 and juice it for all its worth.
Oh, and thank you for waiting the few months while I was deeply involved with a major project. I’m back permanently now, on freelance. It’s good to be free and back on the Rails.
I think I’d agree with most of your observations about WordPress here.
But WordPress probably also has the largest amount of available documentation and plugins and a large community surrounding it. So in a lot of cases abandoning WordPress wouldn’t be the best solution because reinventing the wheel every time you need some specific feature can be wasteful depending on what type of site you’re building.
There are some interesting other Rails options besides Typo. Mephisto is one of them, though I don’t know how active that project is right now.
See my post on the positives about Typo. I don’t see adding to Typo as reinventing the wheel, per se, because developing for it is so easy. Typo can easily outmatch any other blogging engine in terms of features if its users really wanted those features. But a lot of the plugins out there for Wordpress (if they work with your particular version) are not very important to the core principles of blogging: publishing content in a manner you find comfortable and getting it out there to as many places and as seamlessly as possible.
I feel no lack, other than a Feedburner plugin (which I intend to write soon), in terms of features.
As to Mephisto, I like the idea of making blogging more like a CMS, but I don’t see its development as active as Typo’s. Choosing between Mephisto and Typo is more like choosing what flavour you like. I prefer the look of Typo, personally, but I can just as easily understand people who select Mephisto.