*boo* *hiss* My first WordPress post was about how I decided not to continue work on my own blog software, because it's duplicating work. However, I write this post today, because somebody needs to write a competing piece of software. Working with WordPress has been educational to me, but it definitely is not something that I can use and implement on my site. Below are my list of grievances.

The Code Base

This is not actually a gripe against WordPress, but PHP's general userbase. I've tried, on many occasions, to modify source in WordPress, and I've found it to be messy. Some PHP developers may disagree, but that's because most PHP developers suck. The language has made programming so easy that monkeys have hopped on th bandwagon, and everyone's a developer now. I strongly believe that unless you're a active maintainer of WordPress, is close to impossible to deal with. I've worked with some LARGE PHP code bases, and there is a way to write PHP code so that it is maintainable for years, and there is a way to make it maintainable for months. I don't expect to see much from WordPress in a few years.

Templates

Are you joking me? Have you ever tried to make your own templates from scratch with WordPress?!?! No thank you. HTML mixed with PHP functions that echo Thor knows what and all in the name of simplicity?! Dear WordPress, PHP has great templating capabilities already, if you would pull your head out of your butt and check out Smarty. It seems silly to me that any web based PHP software would not use a templating engine at all. I can only think of a few very minor python web frameworks that don't use templates, and ruby on rails? Yup, they have templates as well. Seriously, I tried for weeks to get my head around the bass-ackwardness of WordPress templates, to no avail. In about an hour, I had wrote a php web framework that was not only easy to use (read: written for my wife), object oriented, and quick. It's not that hard, but WordPress seems to be splitting logs with a pancake in that regard.

Jack of All Spades, But Just Can't Juggle

Although I hated the guy, I knew someone who used a very good analogy. He used the analogy of juggling to point out that juggling three balls is good, four is even better, but it's incredibly difficult to juggle 9, and requires more skill than most people have. The end result is that your mother is asking you to replace all the eggs you ruined while trying to juggle so many. WordPress's stock capabilities are so massive that I don't really feel that it really excels at any one thing. Sure, there are extensions, but most of them are more noodlish (read: spaghetti) as WordPress itself is. However, extensions should add to an already good base of features, and I feel like, for the most part, there aren't great features, just a lot of features.

So, to sum it all up, WordPress is intended for the blogging mother of three from Suburbia, but once it tries to handle everything I throw it, I'm the one who gets egg on my face. All in all, I didn't mind WordPress. I don't think I would have tried it if it weren't in the auto-installer on Dreamhost, but now I have an opportunity to write a blog software in Django, and implement it. I'll even write some migration code from WordPress to my new Neptune blog software, so I won't lose my posts this time. And the nature of Django means I'll be able to add features to a stable site, which is where I would have liked to have been three months ago.