Wordpress has been a great friend for nearly four years. In that time it has been an amazing teacher, student, adversary and in some ways, confidant.
But of late it’s been getting a lot harder to do simple things. Like aggregate links1 as articles, handle categories and tags2 in a sane-and-useful manner, pull entries out of the database in a potentially arbitrary fashion and handle the content itself in a reasonably intelligent way.
The development team have done a great job and Wordpress is maturing well. But as this author has discovered, it simply doesn’t keep pace with those who chose to push a little past the boundaries.
Case in point — I’ve freshened the design to reflect a slightly simpler look3. Yet the work made to provide the resulting design took far less time than it did to dampen down all the template spot fires caused as a result.
And this is where Wordpress departs from many platforms. It doesn’t have a template engine. It may have a theme engine4 but it it’s mired down in all too many functions. One has to learn a great deal about the inner workings, even to produce a reasonably simple design, when a far simpler tag model should be used instead.
There is a genuine reason why many Wordpress designs have the cookie-cutter look — it is unnecessarily complex, risky5 and time-consuming to break the mould and develop something new. And if one deviates away from established functions then things can and will often break on any new release.
Template code should be abstracted away from design and design should be separate from content. It’s the basic fundamental reason for using CSS and structured well-formed code. Wordpress simply isn’t there yet and won’t be for some time to come.
Being faithful to standards, design philosophy and to resist compromising goals to achieve a faster result is often far more important than being faithful to a single given platform.
The changes made today will be the very last on this platform. I cannot upgrade without a fundamental rewrite given the scope of changes in the most recent release. And I’d rather invest energy on design and a new platform itself, than the mathematics of making it ‘fit’ in Wordpress.
- requires that I import them into the database, wholesale, via a rough hack (↩)
- categories form the structure, tags describe the content (↩)
- for those reading via RSS, please feel free to drop on by (↩)
- some might argue that that is better (↩)
- functions have a nasty habit of changing all too often (↩)
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of design, ethos, standards, wordpress.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
Feedback is encouraged. If you would like to read more, consider subscribing to the regularly updated RSS Feed.
