5 ms·

I can appreciate what wordpress has achieved over the years, and what it has helped to create. But the current wordpress code base is a nightmare to work with,

by john-n 13y ago

I can appreciate what wordpress has achieved over the years, and what it has helped to create. But the current wordpress code base is a nightmare to work with, and doesn't scale well. Having said that, it is an excellent blogging platform and CMS, but this is something that is usually forgotten, resulting in it finding itself shoehorned into the most inappropriate places.

khet 13y ago
I get the feeling that those who "like" wordpress are either heavily invested in the platform or can't read code. Simpler, more specialised blogging engines are so beautifully designed, I don't see myself ever wanting to work with Wordpress again.
- icelancer 13y ago
  If other specialized blogging engines had one-tenth the extensibility that WP has, then I could see myself switching. But when you have hundreds of thousands of people willing to write plugins for free or very little money that integrate with the most complex payment systems and third-party APIs, you tend to deal with the crappy core code of the main module.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- jseliger 13y ago
  Simpler, more specialised blogging engines are so beautifully designed, I don't see myself ever wanting to work with Wordpress again. This reminds me of Joel Spolsky's "Bloatware and the 80/20 myth": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html , in which he says: A lot of software developers are seduced by the old "80/20" rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release "lite" word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses," and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can't use this damn thing 'cause it won't count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy. When you start marketing your "lite" product, and you tell people, "hey, it's lite, only 1MB," they tend to be very happy, then they ask you if it has their crucial feature, and it doesn't, so they don't buy your product. Wordpress seems to have everyone's critical feature, or critical plug-in, or a developer intimately familiar with the platform who can be hired to write your critical plug-in. By the time "more specialised blogging engines" have the flexibility and pervasiveness of Wordpress, I bet they'll resemble. . . Wordpress.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    > I bet they'll resemble. . . Wordpress. Are we still talking about actual code here? Because if so, I'll take that bet.
  - OGC 13y ago
    That isn't even the 80-20 rule..
- ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
  Can you give some examples please? I use wordpress a lot and just want to know what my other options are.
- bigiain 13y ago
  I'm not fan of the codebase, but until something else comes along that's as easy for my clients to learn/use - I'm going to keep on recommending and installing WordPress for them. Anybody who's used a word processor can pick up most of what they need to know to work as an author or editor in WordPress in a afternoon. I'm not about to recreate all the widely available documentation and tutorials WordPress has available - or explain to my clients "all you need to do is write all your website content in MarkDown, then run this Ruby script from the command line to publish it to S3/CloudFront!"
  - ceol 13y ago
    I imagine the reason most people use WordPress isn't because of the authoring or editing — most of which can be replicated easily using things like TinyMCE — but the ecosystem of themes and plugins. Your technologically-inept client has access to a vast number of free, cheap, and easily installable themes to style their website whatever gaudy way they want. There are plenty of better publishing solutions in terms of codebase, and there are plenty of solutions that offer equal or better user interfaces, but none that bring the ability to choose from hundreds of thousands of themes to style a website, which is the main focus of your average blog publisher.
jacques_chester 13y ago
I've been managing a series of wordpress sites for about 9 years now. Since 1.2 or 1.3, I think. In terms of keeping the thing running, it has not been a pleasant experience.
jasey 13y ago
>But the current wordpress code base is a nightmare to work with I agree >and doesn't scale well. Wordpress scales fine, but it dosent do it magically its self out of the box (but what hobbyist web project written 10 years ago did?) Smashing magazine talked to some of the bigger wp installs to see how they did it (Hot air is doing 45mil /page view a month) http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2012/09/12/secrets-high-traffic-wordpress-blogs/ http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2012/09/12/secrets-high-traff... I have scaled Wordpress to multiple front end servers with not to much work (because Wordpress is stateless and doesn't have sessions you dont even have to worry bout sharing sessions). The only thing you need to worry about is having a shared storage for the uploads. You can do this through a NAS or I just upload to s3 then use a CDN. If you get to the size that you need to have multiple databases (which you shouldn't if your using a page cache plugin like the official Batcache plugin) wordpress offers HyperDB as a solution. I am actually going to be working on a Wordpress-a-a-Service type hosting solution where speed and scalability will never be a problem for the customer. Where Wordpress does not scale is the default install on shared hosting or a VPS with little resources. Finally I just wanted to thank Matt and the whole team at automatic for all their hard work into a maybe in-prefect but much used work-horse of the internet.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  > Wordpress scales fine, but it dosent do it magically its self out of the box 10 years, still no file cache shipping with the mainline. That solves 90% of the problem for 90% of sites.
  - jasey 13y ago
    Yes It would be nice, but there is just to many options on how to do the caching and this all depends on the hosting environment. http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Object_Cache#Persistent_Caching http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Object_Cache#P... On the other hand, as of my understanding Drupal does page caching to DB by default (straight out of the box?) and seems super quick.
    - jacques_chester 13y ago
adrianhoward 13y ago
> But the current wordpress code base is a nightmare to work with, Agreed. But it's also considerably less of a nightmare than it was five years back. Which gives me some kind of hope for the product ;-)
- john-n 13y ago
  Thats a scary thought.. :) But also yes, some hope.

by john-n 13y ago

khet 13y ago

I get the feeling that those who "like" wordpress are either heavily invested in the platform or can't read code. Simpler, more specialised blogging engines are so beautifully designed, I don't see myself ever wanting to work with Wordpress again.

icelancer 13y ago
If other specialized blogging engines had one-tenth the extensibility that WP has, then I could see myself switching. But when you have hundreds of thousands of people willing to write plugins for free or very little money that integrate with the most complex payment systems and third-party APIs, you tend to deal with the crappy core code of the main module.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
jseliger 13y ago
Simpler, more specialised blogging engines are so beautifully designed, I don't see myself ever wanting to work with Wordpress again. This reminds me of Joel Spolsky's "Bloatware and the 80/20 myth": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html , in which he says: A lot of software developers are seduced by the old "80/20" rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release "lite" word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses," and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can't use this damn thing 'cause it won't count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy. When you start marketing your "lite" product, and you tell people, "hey, it's lite, only 1MB," they tend to be very happy, then they ask you if it has their crucial feature, and it doesn't, so they don't buy your product. Wordpress seems to have everyone's critical feature, or critical plug-in, or a developer intimately familiar with the platform who can be hired to write your critical plug-in. By the time "more specialised blogging engines" have the flexibility and pervasiveness of Wordpress, I bet they'll resemble. . . Wordpress.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  > I bet they'll resemble. . . Wordpress. Are we still talking about actual code here? Because if so, I'll take that bet.
- OGC 13y ago
  That isn't even the 80-20 rule..
ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
Can you give some examples please? I use wordpress a lot and just want to know what my other options are.
bigiain 13y ago
I'm not fan of the codebase, but until something else comes along that's as easy for my clients to learn/use - I'm going to keep on recommending and installing WordPress for them. Anybody who's used a word processor can pick up most of what they need to know to work as an author or editor in WordPress in a afternoon. I'm not about to recreate all the widely available documentation and tutorials WordPress has available - or explain to my clients "all you need to do is write all your website content in MarkDown, then run this Ruby script from the command line to publish it to S3/CloudFront!"
- ceol 13y ago
  I imagine the reason most people use WordPress isn't because of the authoring or editing — most of which can be replicated easily using things like TinyMCE — but the ecosystem of themes and plugins. Your technologically-inept client has access to a vast number of free, cheap, and easily installable themes to style their website whatever gaudy way they want. There are plenty of better publishing solutions in terms of codebase, and there are plenty of solutions that offer equal or better user interfaces, but none that bring the ability to choose from hundreds of thousands of themes to style a website, which is the main focus of your average blog publisher.

jacques_chester 13y ago

I've been managing a series of wordpress sites for about 9 years now. Since 1.2 or 1.3, I think. In terms of keeping the thing running, it has not been a pleasant experience.

jasey 13y ago

>But the current wordpress code base is a nightmare to work with I agree >and doesn't scale well. Wordpress scales fine, but it dosent do it magically its self out of the box (but what hobbyist web project written 10 years ago did?) Smashing magazine talked to some of the bigger wp installs to see how they did it (Hot air is doing 45mil /page view a month) http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2012/09/12/secrets-high-traffic-wordpress-blogs/ http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2012/09/12/secrets-high-traff... I have scaled Wordpress to multiple front end servers with not to much work (because Wordpress is stateless and doesn't have sessions you dont even have to worry bout sharing sessions). The only thing you need to worry about is having a shared storage for the uploads. You can do this through a NAS or I just upload to s3 then use a CDN. If you get to the size that you need to have multiple databases (which you shouldn't if your using a page cache plugin like the official Batcache plugin) wordpress offers HyperDB as a solution. I am actually going to be working on a Wordpress-a-a-Service type hosting solution where speed and scalability will never be a problem for the customer. Where Wordpress does not scale is the default install on shared hosting or a VPS with little resources. Finally I just wanted to thank Matt and the whole team at automatic for all their hard work into a maybe in-prefect but much used work-horse of the internet.

jacques_chester 13y ago
> Wordpress scales fine, but it dosent do it magically its self out of the box 10 years, still no file cache shipping with the mainline. That solves 90% of the problem for 90% of sites.
- jasey 13y ago
  Yes It would be nice, but there is just to many options on how to do the caching and this all depends on the hosting environment. http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Object_Cache#Persistent_Caching http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Object_Cache#P... On the other hand, as of my understanding Drupal does page caching to DB by default (straight out of the box?) and seems super quick.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago

adrianhoward 13y ago

> But the current wordpress code base is a nightmare to work with, Agreed. But it's also considerably less of a nightmare than it was five years back. Which gives me some kind of hope for the product ;-)

john-n 13y ago
Thats a scary thought.. :) But also yes, some hope.