Wordpress Can Suck It.
Listen guys, we need to have a serious chat about a very pressing matter.
Wordpress is a complete fucking nightmare.
Now, before I get a bunch of passive aggressive comments laced with disdain and superiority, let me preface this by saying that no point you make will change my mind about this, so it’s futile. This isn’t so much a discussion as it is an opinion-based rant, so I wouldn’t even bother finishing that mental list you’re making as you read this.
Now, there are a lot of reasons that contribute to my vehemently loathing Whorepress. First of all, I’m mainly a front-end developer/designer. I can whip up XHTML and CSS in a flash, validate it, run diagnostics on it and create some sexy graphics to go along with it before you finish installing Wordpress. But the main idea here is, is that I couldn’t PHP my way out of a paper bag. Which becomes troublesome when I have to deal with it, because it’s based completely in PHP. The template tags are in PHP, and for someone who can barely create a functional session login system, this is problematic.
I will concede that there’s something to be said about knowing the inner workings of things like PHP, and knowing exactly how shit works under the hood. I’m just not interested. I’ve been on the fence for a few years about learning PHP, because it’s something I could successfully learn and implement. But I’ve decided that I just don’t care enough about the boring backend bits to sit there for that long dealing with it. I get bored when I have to write an unordered list, so learning a completely new programming language just doesn’t interest me at this point. This might change, but that’s highly implausible.
I don’t want to spend two hours scanning the (horrible, by the way) documentation to find a simple solution to a problem. Now, granted, Wordpress does dominate the market as far as blogging platforms go, so it does have a pretty substantial user base, resulting in a lot of plugins, tutorials, and documentation regarding it. I still fucking hate it.
The templating system is utter bullshit. Perhaps I’m just spoiled with the ease in which I flow through Expression Engine. Want an archives page? All it takes is a few squiggly brackets and a few plain ole’ english template tags to accomplish this. The code is like five lines long, and takes all of 5 minutes to configure to your liking. With Whorepress on the other hand, learning a completely new templating language that’s specifically made for it mixed in with PHP with is involved. There is also the matter of having to sit there fucking around with not one, but THREE separate files in order to produce a page with basic archive functionality. And then I still have to customize it to have the output make some manner of aesthetic sense to the thing. Then I have to style the motherfucker. Die in a drive-by.
I could go on for hours about how much better EE suits my workflow, and how much more sensible it is, but I’ll spare you. My main point is that Wordpress, and it’s big bag of monopolizing, generic, homogenized bullshit can suck it.
Perhaps the most irritating thing about it is how hard it actually is to customize. I don’t mean downloading a premade theme, uploading it and calling it a day here, folks. I recently worked on a client project with which I had to deal with it exclusively through no choice of my own, and I barely left the experience with any hair left on my scalp. That said, I’d like to make it known that I am not an idiot. I have worked with so many content management systems and blogging platforms that I can’t even remember the vast majority of them, so it’s not like I’m just frustrated because “I DUN GEDDIT!”
When you’re dealing with any CMS or blogging platform, you have to get used to the way it works. There are always quirks and platform-specific things to take into consideration. With Expression Engine it just sort of clicked right away with me, as opposed to buggery bloated Wordpress which I still can’t wrap my brain around. But the way Wordpress is set up, it’s almost like the dev team posted a memo that said “Okay guys, we’re aiming to make this as user friendly as possible. But we want a complicated backend involving programming that the average Wordpress user wouldn’t know a thing about, and have them figure out seven hundred workarounds for a specific feature they’d like. Oh and also, we’d like them to have to use plugins to do EVERYTHING.” Get the fuck out, and release your death grip on the internet, please.
I feel much better. It’s a little disjointed, but if you guys had any idea what the emotional fucking blender that is the inside of my brain looks like right now, you too would concede that this was a better topic to write about.
That is all.
Comments
PLUGIIIINZ.
The only reason I prefer WordPress.
I’ve been working with a bunch of CMSs recently to try and find something that’s moving a bit faster in terms of development than Textpattern*. (So many pretty options, why anyone would go for Whorepress is beyond me.)
I’ve tried almost every CMS/blog on Open Source CMS in the past month or so and I’ve learned a few things. Namely:
1. There are options that aren’t Whorepress.
2. They are good options.
3. They are easy options.
4. You don’t have to sell your soul to set it up.
I’ve worked with Whorepress twice this year. Once for the now dead Shape of Reason and another time for my craft site that I moved to Tumblr. (Heh, Tumblr is better than Whorepress, who would’ve thought?) Both times I started out positive, used some awesome premade themes, inserted the content and sat back. Finished? LOL this is Whorepress:
The templates needed tweaking. Specific to the site tweaking. As in, oh hai I have to sit here for 8 ass-numbing hours trying to get it to output the information I want it to in the way that I want it to and styled how I want it to be styled.
Easier said than done.
After a few hours of fucking around with it I gave up and decided to pretend like I never wanted the stuff in my theme anyway. Then I discovered that the themes needed custom content inserted for it to look/function like the demo. Oh shit. So I have to add this widget, along with five plugins and a few lines of PHP to get it to look the way I wanted it to look. Yay. Over now?
Nope.
(Why would it be?)
Plugins.
At this point I’m going bald and breaking out in red stress dots. Why wasn’t it working? (Answer: Whorepress.) OH, that plugin is fucking the entire site up. Okay. Fine. I’ll google the error. Nothing. Really? Oh wait, here’s a three year old thread that I found after four hours of searching. Dude is having the same problem as me and asking for help. Except only three other people have replied and those replies ARE USELESS. I shouldn’t have to be a programmer to solve a simple problem with a plugin.
Did I ever have this much trouble with Textpattern? No. Its development might be a big behind the times, but none of the plugins ever broke my site the way that Whorepress did. And you can bet that there was an answer buried somewhere in the, much easier to seach, official forums or wiki. Even porting themes from Whorepress to Textpattern was easier than setting up a theme in Whorepress!
The big thing for me, though, is how Whorepress handles theme files and plugins. When you want to upload a plugin there’s a screen in the admin for it. To edit the plugin there is one “file” that you access via the admin. The plugins are comparable, if not very similar, and I’ve never seen one fuck my site up unless I had a hand in it. Theme files are all stored in the database, the template language looks like XHTML and their documentation is a dream. Want to know how to insert categories? Look up the tag. Their explanations were comprehensive enough for me to figure it out with minimal outside help.
I hate Wordpress.
* Granted, of course, they came out with admin-side themes and a few other things yesterday… but we’ve been clamoring for those things for years! There are so few changes or upgrades being made to a system that is starting to look a little dated next to more polished alternatives available that it’s becoming a pain.
Ouch, I’m sorry you’ve had so many problems with Wordpress. I know it’s not just you. A lot of my friends have also had lots of frustration with Wordpress in the past. Wordpress is just familiar to me so I’ll keep using it until I have the same problem. I’m easy to please and don’t use many plugins.
I spent years avoiding Wordpress in it’s early stages due to it’s lack of easy customization. I finally gave in during Wordpress 2. I’ve been using it since and it’s been okay for me to customize. As a front-end developer and designer, there’s not much more my clients want to use. I’ve been dipping into other CMS systems. I’ve never thought to use Expression Engine. Your site has always been admirable to me so I think I’ll look into using EE.
There are times when I wanted to make something in Wordpress and couldn’t do it because I find it was taking too much of my time; the documentation wasn’t helpful; I could have coded it by now with my CMS; and other reasons. Of course WordPress is nice for some things, I just personally don’t enjoy using it. You’re spoiled by EE and I am by my CMS. :P
That was really retarded how you got dragged into the contract like that, and had to work with what you were given. :\
I avoid Wordpress like the plague. Try Chyrp (http://chyrp.net). It has everything you need in the Modules and Feathers. And it is real eas to create Themes.
I hear there is a good article at http://fuelyourcoding.com/getting-started-with-chyrp ;p
Thank you so much for this rant! When I first returned to the blogging scene, all I wanted to use was WordPress, because I’d heard such great things about it. But once I downloaded and installed it, it was an entirely different manner. I was dexterous in HTML and I could work my way around CSS, but PHP just killed me. The furthest I could go with it was to download a K2 theme, and create different skins for it. Needless to say, it got pretty boring and limiting after a while.
I’ve been toying a lot with Chyrp lately, and it is awesome. It gives you a lot of freedom and space for your own coding. Once you understand the basic concepts for Feathers and Modules, it is a breeze to work through!
i like textpattern.
that is all.
I know EXACTLY what you mean. I discovered the beauty of EE through Veerle’s blog and after installing and getting the hang of it, I FELL IN LOVE! It’s so simple and full of awesome, which makes me curious as to why more bloggers aren’t using it.
I recently installed WP for my sketchblog just to see what the hullabaloo was all about, but all I got out of it was the realization that I really hate it.
Even just looking at the PHP made me cringe. While tinkering with my theme, I had a problem with the way my entries were showing up on the page and had to scour through the whole damn internet to get it to do what I wanted.
I’ll stick with my templates and squiggly brackets, thanks.
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