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.