MatBennett.com

 OK, admittedly I’m only 2 days in to re-assessing Wordpress (plus a painful week of porting - thank the bigbang that I never posted more in the past), but I am seriously struggling to stay open minded.  Wordpress is undoubtedly the industry leader in blogging packages, and I am determined to work out why, but boy to they do their best to hide the reasoning.

“Issues” that are already making themselves painfully obvious even at this early stage:

1. Speed

Wordpress is slow. Really damn slow. If word press were a car then the I’d wholeheartedly recommend that someone check that some joker hadn’t switched the wheels for breese blocks.  I’m not being deliberately belligerent here, but I really cannot understand how software doing such a simple job can be so damn slow.

Before the WP Evangelist brigade jump on me and blame my server, this is a  quad core AMD processor server with 2GB or RAM and running a lot less traffic than most commercial hosting would.  Neither server nor load is the problem.

2. Plugins just don’t work

I’ve tried about a dozen plug-ins so far and am chuffed to say that I now have three working (although one took 30 minutes of re-writes to get working).  Not exactly a great hit-rate there.  I understand that the latest version of Wordpress that I am using is quite young, which might explain this.  It does though hint at poor communications between core and plugin developers, as it is quite evident that the plugin developers had no clue that everything was about to change.  Fingers crossed these issues will be resolved before too long.

3. WP doesn’t seem to function well under a standard PHP5 set-up

Not 100% sure about this, but I am suspecting that the current version of WP doesn’t actually work on a standard PHP5 set-up.  I was seeing a lot of memory shortage errors on a standard set-up until I change the memory available (to 32mb - most shared hosts provide 8!).  Not an issue if, like me, you are on a dedicated server, but I would imagine that most of the WP target audience isn’t.  Luckily most cheap/free hosting is still running PHP4 so the impact of this will be delayed, but it strikes me as a potential time bomb.

 4. Firefox fanaticism

This is a major issue for me.  I understand that a lot of people prefer Firefox as a browser.  Many of those even consider it to be a superior browser.  In fact, security aside, those people were bang on until the release of IE7.  (just in case, but some freak of nature someone from MS reads this, then here’s a hint: Sort out the shite security and you are on a total winner). But… and this is a but bigger than J-Lo’s, MOST OF THE WORLD USES IE. 

My stats put IE usage at around 80% across the sites we look after.  I am sure that technical sites see very different figures, but that is approximately the cross section we are currently getting. Oddly then, the admin pages of the current version of WP don’t appear to have actually been tested under the world’s most popular browser.  They seem to work fine under firefox, but I’ve already had frequent occurrences of little glitches under IE that make the pages unusable.

I understand that WordPress are trying to support Firefox (incidentally, something I wholeheartedly agree with), but does this really need to extend to breaking the system for the majority of users?

Lack of basic functionality

I still find it hard to believe that there is a blogging system that has been around as long as Wordpress that still does not support tagging.  Think about it for a moment… it’s like buying a car that doesn’t have a gear box.

In previous versions of WP, this has not been a major issue as you could just grab a plug-in - usually ultimate tag warrior.  Unfortunately the current version of WP has manages to even fuck this up the arse in a royal way.  Not only does the new version not support tagging (still), but they have a half-finished tagging system included in the releast that even buggers up using UTW.  Yeah - way to go.

Tagging is a pretty good example, but not the only one.  Email (/mobile) blogging is piss poor, and weirdly WP have still managed to get as far as they have without even bothering to implement proper image handling. 

 Conclusion

Maybe the above is just me getting used to things.  Maybe it is just teething problems with the new WP version. Let’s hope so.  Some of these just make WP unusable in my eyes.  The query times in particular are just ridiculous and not something I will live with for long.  Shame really… some of the WP gimmicks are very nice.

I’m probably coming across as an anti-WP arsehole. Maybe I am.  I am though seriously trying to give it a fair go. My hunch is that people use it because so many other people use it, but if anyone can provide a better reasoning below I’d be more than glad to hear it.