Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

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The problem with OSS is that you have to contend with some sort of a community. With WordPress you will open up the source code, throw up in your mouth a little, get the urge to patch things up and realize that your changes will never make it upstream. WordPress works. That's why it's so popular. It's easy to install, much easier to use than a lot of web publishing platforms out there and there are lots of "useful" plugins. Most of all, it's got the ubiquitous support: LAMP is the de facto standard for cheap hosting out there.

However, it does some things that keep me up at night. It stores serialized PHP arrays to define what users have access to (the MU branch). It strips away magic quotes based on runtime configuration, only to add them right back using a PHP loop. It does not use any form of output buffering. It's themes are PHP files that often times contain core business logic (somewhat of a PHP problem really, but still). WordPress is bad code and there is nothing anybody can do about it.

This of course is not true of all OSS projects: far from it. Just so happens that when a small community controls core development and the initial codebase is not great, which is the case with many early PHP projects, the outcome is that the code will stay bad.

Right, what I'm saying though is that people were willing to stick it out and fork instead of rewriting. I'm surprised a programmer would do that.

That is an interesting fact. Then again, those were dark times, so to speak. PHP code that I've seen from pre-PHP5 times does all sorts of funky things to get around the shortcomings of the language. I guess at that point what b2 had was considered pretty good. I think the most important thing that needs to happen with any software project is peer review. If a piece of code is even mildly important, it needs to be reviewed, modified and distilled until it is ready. That did not appear to happen with WP.

OT: what would you recommend instead of WordPress? I will be migrating away from blogger soon, since they will stop supporting ftp uploading.

No clue to be honest with you. WordPress is a fine platform to use for just blogging, publishing content, etc. There is big focus on it looking neat and clean. It is slow as all hell, but installing WP Supercache turns it into what I think of an cohesive, database backed, static site. It becomes a slow HTML editor that is a lot easier to use than the previous generation editors such as Dreamweaver et al.

When I say that the code inside of WP is awful, I mean that you should not look at it and you should not try to change it. Don't try to make WP into something it's not, like running custom applications on top of it, etc. When somebody tells you they want to integrate something with WordPress: run. However, I use it as a simple web publishing platform and it gets the job done.

I would suggest using a static blog, like jekyll (http://wiki.github.com/mojombo/jekyll/) or, if you would like something more user-friendly, dotclear (http://dotclear.org/ - a blog engine quite popular in france but it never really took off anywhere else).

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