WordPress “sucks”
Please contact me for text I would also sign, not only acknowledge or if post got broken during one of many server upgrades. I will be most grateful.
I think our first talk was a success. It certainly exceeded my expectations and I hope that most of those who were there feel the same. I was happy to see that a lot of us didn’t just leave, but stayed to enjoy conversation with other visitors. I hope this will become even more common and expected.
I got a chance to talk to several people I wanted to meet or whom haven’t seen in a long time and I immensely enjoyed myself. Our conversations covered many topic, one of which was WordPress where I made some statements that on reflection probably deserve an explanation.
I said that Wordpress sucks.
This is not true and I don’t actually mean it, but it is as true as what wordpress.org has to say about its product:
WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.
I use WordPress, but I can’t say I enjoy the experience. It’s certainly not worse than most similar stuff out there, but I think best have moved on. I don’t find default installation particularly pleasant to look at, its usability is questionable and in an age of WYSIWYG editors and online spell checkers, it’s hardly state-of-the-art either.
It’s still a good software and I wouldn’t nag, if the page didn’t also say:
More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.
Now that is pure crap. It would take too long to list everything I believe they got wrong, so I’ll concentrate on a couple of issues to illustrate my frustrations.
There are things that are plain stupid. Theme editor tells me I could edit my template directly, if I made files writable. True, and I wouldn’t be the only person who could do that anymore. So you have a theme editor that is either useless or a security problem.
And then there are things like user levels. As an administrator of WordPress you have to decide what level a user should be, but there’s not even a word of explanation in user interface about what that means. No hint, nothing. Sure, it’s explained in wordpress documentation, but is there a link to contextual help available on that screen? To any help whatsoever? No.
It’s stuff like this that makes me think WordPress has a long way to go for an average user.
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Pingback by outbreak » WordPress hates developers (written on April 24th, 2006 by Marko Mrdjenovic) — April 24, 2006 @ 11:29 pm
I agree that wordpress is not that user friendly. i tried using wordpress and i find it a bit confusing when it comes to the ase of use and speed of the procedure. The password generation feature sucks! i think blogger may have some FEW downsides, but WordPress has some downsides too and i thin its worst that blogger.
Comment by Anonymous — October 28, 2006 @ 3:06 pm
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Pingback by ogeeBloggin’ » Blog Archive » Wordpress sucks? — January 29, 2007 @ 2:18 pm
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Comment by bearacid — April 19, 2008 @ 1:52 pm
That was four years ago. is typepad OK/better now? I use typed and it sucks, and I was thinking about changing to wordpress. Recommendations?
Comment by Anna — May 20, 2009 @ 3:21 pm
I still use WordPress, but that is mainly through inertia that comes from acute lack of time.
WordPress certainly got better although I still wouldn’t go as far as calling it friendly. Its code is still a mess, but it does have a lot of plugins so there is good chance you might never have to touch it (code that is).
I come in regular contact with most popular blogging platforms because of my work (I work for Zemanta, which builds a blogging helper), but that contact is somewhat limited. Typepad seems one of more sanely organized, but honestly, I find all of them lacking.
A blog on wordpress.com might give you a pretty good idea on what to expect from wordpress, although you can significantly upgrade a standalone version through plugins.
Blogger seems a bit friendlier, but taking care of comments and spam there is pure annoyance.
Then again it might be just me, so my advice would be to not listen to me much and just try few of them and see which is most tolerable to you.
Comment by markos — May 20, 2009 @ 8:20 pm