What I Hate About Wordpress

What I Hate About WordPress

(and how you can help!)

by Mark Jaquith (JAY-kwith)

markjaquith.com@markjaquith

Sunday, December 6, 2009

WordPressSucks*


*All software sucks.



Wuh?! MECHANICAL PRESET BUTTONS!






The good news:

We know that WordPress sucks


Good software sucks less with each release.



The road to less suckage:

•Knowledge

•Skills

•Orchestration

•Time


Knowledge"You don't know what

you don't know."


Admin Menus



FAIL



Cross-taxonomy queries


register_taxonomy( 'Director', 'post' );

http://example.com/director/stanley-kubrick/


http://example.com/director/david-fincher/

http://example.com/director/david-fincher/

category = 'reviews'AND

director = 'Stanley Kubrick'

Combo FAIL


Search


Search for "24"

No... twenty FOUR


GOOD NEWS!http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search/

• Google Summer of Code project by Justin Shreeve

• Plugin that implements powerful, pluggable search API

• Supports multiple backends: Google, MySQL fulltext, Sphinx, etc

• Much more relevant results!


http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search/

Upgrades


• Could cause plugins to break

• Forced to upgrade to latest WordPress version — no security updates for old versions

• No idea what is in plugin upgrades — is it a security fix or a complete rewrite?


• We collect plugin compatibility info — maybe we could work active installs into that.

• We're considering offering security-only upgrades to the previous branch until the new version is in beta: e.g. 4.5 would be supported until 4.7 is in beta.

• Plugin authors will be able to convey an upgrade message, "Security update, everyone upgrade!"


WYSIWYG


• Markup isn't always perfectly clean.

• Paste from a website, get their <font style="Arial"> ?!

• Tempts you with the promise of desktop editor control, falls short.

• Bizarrely complicated pop-ups.




Page Navigation


• Blog

• About

• Flickr Photostream

• Contact

• Thanks for contacting me!


•Menu creator tool

•Pick the pages, posts, URLs, etc you want to link to

•Rearrange

•call with the_menu( 'main' );

Solutions?


How you can help


• http://trac.wordpress.org/Open a new ticket, comment on existing one. Test. Patch. Advocate.

• Run the gauntlet: wp-hackers mailing list

• Weekly IRC meetings in #wordpress-dev on Freenode

• Reach out to core devs and Jane Wells — we'll get someone to mentor you and point you at a problem that you can help solve.


http://trac.wordpress.org

http://trac.wordpress.org

"Together, we can make WordPress suck less."

— me

:-)


markjaquith.comcoveredwebservices.com

@markjaquith


Technology

What I Hate About Wordpress