Web development, scripts, source code and IT stuff
I Love and I Hate WordPress
I’ve been using WordPress for over 4 years now. I also have developed some plugins like Twitter Badge, WP-RIR, WP-PageScroll and I wrote few more thinks about it.
We can say that I’m not the average user but neither I’m a PRO developer for WP. The point is that as user I Love WordPress but from other side as technician sometimes I HATE IT.
I had a few discussions with people about the good and the bad things of WP, of course at the end for me it’s positive, but it bothers me that there’s few known issues that they should take care of and they don’t.
Anyway here’s my list with a short description.
The Love
- Easy, yep WP it’s easy and everybody knows how to use it. Great work on it.
- Community, there’s a huge community of developers and designers that releases their work for free making this software good.
- GPL, free software license, what else do you want?
- Custom, it’s pretty easy for any normal user to install plugins, themes…even change them.
- Upgrades and updates, they are automatically making your life easier, same as 1st point.
- WordCamps, this is a great idea I may say and I love it!
The Hate
- Slow, it maybe fast to you, but for me it’s a really heavy application to be a blog software. Without plugins to cache content you can’t run an instance of WP in a shared hosting….
- Data Base, this is terrible, still uses MySam, now many people will say this is an advantage, come on we are in 2010! relational data bases it’s a must have, and what about normalization?
- Download size, now a days this is no trouble, but how can be over 2MB size?
- Bugs, there’s so many WP installations that some people is trying really hard to hack this software and for instance finding bugs. Thankfully we have a great community that seems to work 24/7.
- Plugins, I love the plugins and the work from the community, but you need to be aware what you install in your WP, I know it’s not the fault of WP, but some how as they do with the themes being picky, should be with plugins testing them even just a little bit.
As conclusion I will say that they should focus to improve performance instead of adding features and more and more features….And as I said before WP it’s my favorite blogging and even CMS tool.
Last words: Thanks to the WP team and the community for the work they have done, this is just a constructive opinion meaning the best intentions.
Great Points! I love WP as well – been using it and developing for it since the very early days. But I have almost the exact same frustrations you’ve listed here. I agree that performance seems to deteriorate as the product has matured. The more features they add, the bulkier it becomes and with that comes degraded performance. But overall, I like WP and I don’t see myself switching to something else due to these issues.
Here are some ideas on improving performance:
Have you tried activating Google Gears? I’m not sure when they added Gears support, but this is supposed to speed up load time. It stores the scripts, css, and stuff locally so the performance improves (on the admin side anyway – which for me is where I get frustrated with the slowness of page loads). This feature is in the tools menu on the admin.
Also, the more plugins you use, the more your performance will suffer. And I find that a lot of people install unnecessary plugins for simple things they could add just as easily manually to their theme. I don’t add a plugin for something that doesn’t really need it. This improves performance and also makes it less stressful at upgrade time as I don’t have to worry about a badly programmed plugin crashing my WP installation.
Hi Chad welcome,
As you many others have the same feeling. I know about gears but currently is not working on linux.
To improve the speed the best I know is to follow this tips that you may be interested at: http://neo22s.com/speed-up-your-wordpress/
regards
Mostly, WordPress is a pain. There are so many things I could do in HTML – in a heartbeat. But every time we upgrade, use different themes or add plugins, I really am starting to hate all the inconsistencies and broken things in WP.
Since we develop websites for other companies, my biggest issue actually wondering why we’re using WP for customers. Over 80% of them will never log in to update their site or even check their web stats. (Yep, gave em a plug-in for that.)
Totally don’t see what the fuss is over using WP. Sorry, needed to vent. Been trying to be optimistic and open to the technology. But when I’m working late and things get ugly, forums are not helping at all.
Peace. Bless all you who are happy as larks using it.
there are some things i like about wp
I love WordPress, especially as a tool for non-technical minded people to get started online in a very professional looking way. I do, however, dislike the fact that it has attracted the attention of spammers and this can make the user-experience of some blog owners a nightmare through being hacked or moderating countless comment spam. That being said, there are some great plugins that do help combat this, and staying up-to-date can reduce the chances of being hacked.
I must say, my pet hate would have to be the fact that many sites seem to load slowly when running WordPress, but I wonder if this is down to the site owner not knowing the optimization options and tools that are available to them!
I’m totally with you on your desire for the ‘focus to improve performance instead of adding features’ would certainly be commended by the WP community and loyal fanbase.
Warmest regards,
Karl