June 29, 2006 at 4:04AM I looked at the WordPress source code and something inside me died
Really.
I don’t know what to say.
I knew cafelog/b2--the engine WordPress is descended from--was hairy, but I thought part of the point behind WordPress was to untangle the godawful mess that it was.
Sure, it’s got a nicer interface. Sure, you don’t need to hack the crap out of it if you want to extend it or even just tweak the templates. But I thought it’d be better after all these years.
I was wrong.
Edit: Just so as nobody misunderstands me, I’m not saying that WordPress is rubbish, just that I’d expected the code quality to have improved much more than it has.
1 On July 4, 2006 at 15:36, Tom Raftery wrote:
Keith,
WordPress is an Open Source project. If you think the code quality is sooo poor, there’s nothing to stop you from submitting your quality code to the project and helping to make it better.
Surely that’d be better than simply sniping from the sidelines.
2 On July 4, 2006 at 15:55, Keith wrote:
Ah Tom, you’re taking far too much offence from what wrote. I never said the code was poor (actually, I explicitly stated that I didn’t think so in the addendum), I said he code was disappointing: there’s a paucity of comments, some of the functions are poorly named, and the coding style is inconsistent. The code to process the request cycle is also difficult to read.
There’s also the fact that I don’t use WordPress on a daily or even monthly basis, so there’s no metaphorical itch to scratch. In fact, the only reason I took a look at WordPress this time around is because I’m doing a new layout for Irish Election (here’s an early mockup of the frontpage).
Add to that the fact that though WordPress is Open Source, it’s harder to have a patch by somebody outside of the core development team (Matt and Ryan) accepted than it is to get a patch accepted for the Linux kernel. Heck, it’s even easier to get a patch accepted by the OpenBSD guys than Matt and co.
The things I’d like to patch would largely be things that wouldn’t add much value to the end user and instead make it easier for me for people like me to hack the code if need be without doing our nuts in. Even if I was to submit these patches, there’s little or no chance of them being accepted.
3 On July 4, 2006 at 17:23, Keith wrote:
One quick addendum: I’m coming at this as somebody who’s hacking stuff on top of WordPress. It matters to me that the interface between what I’m working on and the rest of WordPress should be clean, well-documented (so I don’t have to go searching for information in the Codex, which may or may not be working), and simple. This is where WordPress falls down badly for me. Sure, I’ve been able to work through it, but it was far more painful than it ought to have been.