smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

There is something about Tumblr that has me deeply involved in a love-hate tryst. Absolute hate and love with the strongest of passions.

It’s utter and total simplicity makes virtually every other blog platform I’ve ever looked at, or tried¹ feel like trying to work out the mathematics to form a wormhole in space-and-time by comparison.

Take the template system; it has a smarty inspired structure that makes designs ‘pop’ with a minimum of fuss. It separates content from template. Here’s an example section from part of my current template:

{block:Posts}
{block:SameDayDate}
  <div class=”samedate”>
    <a href=”{Permalink}” class=”date”>{ShortMonth} {DayOfMonth}, {Year}</a>
    {12Hour}{AmPm}
  </div>
{/block:SameDayDate}
{block:Regular}
  <div class=”regular”>
    {block:Title}<h3>{Title}</h3>{/block:Title}
    {Body}
  </div>
{/block:Regular}
As you can see, it’s ludicrously simple. The date is presented, then we (in this example) present a regular post. And it’s not exactly cryptic, either. The tags are quite descriptive and there is a certain logicality to the way things flow. You can present content in pretty much whatever order you want.

Even if you’ve never actually seen PHP code in the wild, ever, you can probably still make some sense of it.

The lads at davidville really have got something remarkable at play that is a joy to work with. It’s designed to be as simple to drive as possible, yet offers an incredible array of control by exposing the template system for those who like to pop the hood for a little tune-up time.

It really doesn’t take much effort at all to come up with all manner of surprisingly unique designs. There is a brief yet informative page on the current tags that has just about enough detail to help. And if you don’t really care, or have much design experience, there are a bunch of pre-built themes ready to select and there is a fast growing community that is pushing new designs out all the time.

Then there is Wordpress. Yes, I know they are (fundamentally) different systems and that Tumblr is designed to be a basic platform, whereas Wordpress comes with a few more bells-and-whistles but that doesn’t mandate that Wordpress should be complicated in return. Yet it is.

Here’s the Wordpress equivalent of a simple post block — taken directly from the codex:
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<div class=”post”>
<h2><a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<small><?php the_time(’F jS, Y’); ?></small>
<div class=”entry”>
   <?php the_content(); ?>
</div>
<p class=”postmetadata”>Posted in <?php the_category(’, ‘); ?></p>
</div> <!– closes the first div box –>
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
<p>Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.</p>
<?php endif; ?>

As we can see, it’s not a case of simple {tags} but rather a bunch of (often complex) functions that have been thrown together in a haphazard fashion. In Tumblr, if you forget to format a single {tag} correctly, then typically just that little slice of the pie fails to display, whereas in Wordpress it’s 50/50 as to whether the entire page fails to render, rather than just one block.

And if you want to start doing things that a fully functional blogging platform should be able to do, like aggregate content, or extend beyond basic post display, you have to load all manner of plugins and hack the hell out of the product in a sometimes brute force way. I’m too ashamed to present the RSS aggregator code that I re-purposed to drive del.icio.us importing.

Or the somewhat scary looking RSS and ATOM templates that I had to hack because some content I wanted displayed, wasn’t easily inserted anywhere else.

I’m tired of having to fight (hard) for even the simplest of queries. The Wordpress team have been (genuinely) hard at work prepping 2.3, that sports a raft of new features, for launch. I’m sure it will continue to be an awesome product for those after a basic blog or (very) entry level CMS.

But as of 2.3, Wordpress and I will be parting company. The recent re-design of SillyWalks has reminded me how wonderfully simple a proper tag based system is to develop for and how utterly time consuming Wordpress is in comparison. I could take a standing XHTML strict template, complete with CSS and drop it into Tumblr and have it fully operational in less than quarter-of-an-hour, with it handling all manner of videos, images and text.

The same thing is potentially a multi-hour marathon in Wordpress due to the complete lack of simple tags in the template engine.

I ♥ Wordpress. I’ve used it for a number of years now — but we’re not on the same page any more. Hell, were not even in the same book. It’s still fighting ghosts of the past, still trying to build on ever-more-complex and temperamental functions whilst users desperately continue to pour hours and hours of design and development into a theme engine that is simply not forgiving.

Then there are the core database schema changes that, whilst ’safe’ as far as using the inbuilt functions are concerned, will break absolutely anything that has had to take a more direct approach. A number of themes and plugins are going to die horrible and bloody deaths on the launch of Wordpress 2.3.

And so we will part company once I find a replacement platform to fall head-over-heals for, that doesn’t make me leap through hoops to do the simple stuff and can grow with me, rather than increasingly against me. And it’s going to be something that uses Smarty, or a like-minded tag system, that works hand-in-hand with design.

I’ve seen how easy it can be and the amazing results that can occur when the template engine doesn’t get in the way of the design. And I love that. Wordpress can’t do that for me and it’s driving me insane. I really want to continue the love affair, but there’s just nothing left worth fighting for.

1. and I’ve tested out quite a few now (↩)