Wordpress For Dummies
Warning if the following offends you in any way, sorry but I have no choice. I’ve heard a lot about this blog tool called WordPress but never checked it out before. My oh my, what a concoction we have in front of us. Let me start off by saying I have not extensively used this and the following critique is purely from a code standpoint.
First off, I’m no database genius but does anyone smell something tangy? Serious normalization needs to find its way to the WP landscape. Categories, passwords, user id’s hardwired to posts? What’s the difference between a post name and a post title? We can do better we have the tools, we can rebuild him. Moving on…
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” That’s a quote by Alen Kay, the inventor of Object Oriented Programming. Anyone else smell a hint? Procedural code is history. Did “case” statements suddenly come back into fashion? It’s so hard to tell these days, what’s in what’s out.
I really don’t mean to be rude but when the installer asks me to change my root directory permissions to read/write I just couldn’t resist. This is 2005, we can do better, I hope.
Remarks
Michael Heilemann
My concerns with WordPress lie a bit nearer the surface (the lack of a proper search function for instance), but I think most of us acknowledge that it isn’t quite perfect yet.
But hey, as the saying goes: “It’s Open Source, clap the yapper and start coding” :)
Justin Perkins
I’m really holding my breathe for a Rails CMS, which would surely run normalized and pleasingly object-oriented.
Nathan, really though, what do you expect with: 1) Open-source freeware; 2) PHP
Have you done a similar comparison to MovableType’ My guess is you won’t find too much normalization there either.
Nathan Borror http://www.playgroundblues.com/
Lets not use “open source” as a cop out. Ever heard of Ruby on Rails or, oh I dunno, Linux?
I’m just saying if your going to throw something into the wild that could potentially be used by a lot of people, raise the bar a little and get it done right. WordPress has been around for a while and its still blasted procedural.
Justin Perkins
I said “open-source freeware”, which I don’t consider the same thing as open-source. Also, when I said ?Rails CMS? I was talking about Ruby on Rails, so yes I have heard of it.
My experience with open-source freeware apps (I use the term application loosely here) has been spotty at best, but whenever I look under the hood (of something like phpAdsNew), I just cringe. They tend to be written in such a way that nobody cares what the code looks like as long as it works to some degree.
Last time I checked, people do sell Linux, it is not always freeware.
Doing it right does not mean OO to a lot of people, especially not in the web app world.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for OO design. I’m just saying it doesn’t really suprise me that WP is a hodge-podge of code.
Jeff Yamada
I agree entirely. I heard all the buzz about WP and eventually had to check it out. I was dissapointed, it seems pretty chaotic to me. I guess when I think RMS I tend to think it should be simble? if it wasn’t I’d just code my own wouldn’t I?
Chad
Great point. Is there a recommended Open Source alternitive? What do you think of Moveable Type?
MySchizoBuddy
Chad give serendipity a try www.s9y.org
pip
Having a normalized database is NOT ‘coding purity’! It really burns me up that people can be so fanatical about clean CSS but then crap all over the backend.
Matt
Could you point out where the database isn’t normalized? Posts, categories, custom fields, options are all in first or second normal form. In 1.6 we’ve even moved all non-core information out of the user table and into a separate table.
We’ve considered de-normalizing things like comment counts, taking a note from Cal at Flickr.
Nathan Borror http://www.playgroundblues.com/
Matt: Best of luck to you. I recommend using a framework or MVC. Maybe even Rails.
Matt
I would encourage you work with the codebase a bit more before declaring judgement. WordPress is a set of comprimises evolved over several years and hundreds of thousands of users.
Categories are NOT hardwired in the posts table. User IDs are, there is one author per post. The simple per-post password protection is an incredibly simple but popular feature.
We’re slowly transitioning code over to be better formed while still maintaining total backward compatibility and adding features. Every release of WordPress has been smaller than the last. That said, our core focus is always going to be on the end-user experience, not on any sort of coding purity.
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