… to WordPress?
Yep. I had written my blog from scratch, partially because I wanted to use it as a testing ground for various ideas and such. However, part of the problem of maintaining your own blog software is maintaining your own blog software. I think that I’ve pretty much milked the code for all it’s worth. So now I’ll stop maintaining my own code and start using someone else’s.
But… WordPress?
Yep. Let’s face it; the code base is a horrible stinking mess. The API is not intuitive in any way, shape or form. WordPress pretty much gets everything wrong…
… except that it gets the job done. Way too many programmers are way too proud of their code. Well, not really. They’re proud of their ability and they like any opportunity to talk about how great their abilities are. PHP was never about that (though we have our share of egotists). PHP was about getting the job done. Do I wish that the WordPress engine had a better architecture? Absolutely. Do I wish that the API was remotely intuitive? Yep. But the long and the short of it is that I don’t have the time to maintain the code base for a blogging application. So I use one that already exists, has plenty of templates available (I’m the world’s second worst designer) and has a large community around it.
So, yes, WordPress.
Comments
joeyadms
I feel the pain, the codebase and security risk of wordpress is enough to keep you up at night, but like you said the feature set, community and functionality is too great to pass up. Let someone else do the heavy lifting and jail the heck out of it, let yourself focus on more important code.
Can Aydoğan
Can you share old blog application?
Torben Lundsgaard
I agree that architecture could be better but WP is the best blog software available. In fact Microsoft is moving all Live-Space accounts to WordPress.com.
By the way I highly reccomend the plugin W3 Total Cache by Frederick Townes who is CTO at Mashable.com. It is a rock solid plugin and the best performance booster available.
admin
I would have to disagree with you on the best blog software available. It’s the best choice, but by no means the best software. I would argue that it’s the totality of the WordPress community that makes WordPress compelling. You have more options, more themes, more plugins than anywhere else. THAT is what makes WordPress the best choice.
Slawek Lukasiewicz
The main power of WordPress are extensions – almost every basic feature is actually done. The problems start when we need to test our code and add new (extraordinary) stuff.
I decided to write object oriented abstraction for wordpress api (http://www.leftjoin.net/2011/03/creating-object-oriented-interface-for-wordpress-api-for-unit-testing/). After that I can cover everything with unit tests.
I was also trying to add new features (like gallery or profile connected things) to wordpress by creating plugins and custom pages (working on some social website based on wordpress..), but this is not very convenient way, and code was really hard to maintain. After that experience I wrote small framework (MVC, Controller plugins, own View using wordpress OO abstraction, Service container, abstraction for dealing with wordpress – for instance for routing etc) – as plugin – that can be used inside custom pages. Framework is really small, performance lost can be accepted – comparing to gains in code readability and maintainability. I also wrote plugin integrating Zend Framework into it, so ZF classes can be used too.
Some examples how it works you can find here – http://pastebin.com/grh8qg2v . When it will be production ready, I will publish it on my blog.