Wordpresses Letdown

Wordpress quickly became the blogging software of choice for bloggers everywhere, unseating MoveableType the previous title holder. It did this much because MT was too difficult for most to use. It’s templating system and class structure was much more elaborate and thus complicated. It didn’t help too that it was written in Perl, a programming language with very concise sytanx like $foo =~ /[Ff]uck[!].Off?/ able to scare off all but the most bold programmers. Wordpress on the other hand, can be picked up by anyone with limited programming experience in an afternoon’s time. The problem is, however, that the developers of Wordpress are unfortunately amatures themselves, with little or no concept of object oriented (”OO”) design. Wordpress 2 is technically OO, but the class structure is a joke and essentially one big container. There are a handful of mega-classes like WP and WP_Query, which drive the entire application. All do a fine line of bluring the difference between function and object oriented code. Everything else is functional and relies on a global variables such as $wp, $wpdb, and $wp_query, which if anything should be a singleton instances, local in scope. Trying to extend anything is impossible without modifying their code. Their idea of templating is doing “includes” on different php files with formatting and additional logic. There’s no seperation between the presentation layer and the data layer.

Bluring the line b/w OO and functional programming, look at WP::query_posts

function query_posts() {

$this->build_query_string();
query_posts($this->query_string);

}

and the global function query_posts

function &query_posts($query) {

global $wp_query;
return $wp_query->query($query);

}

I don’t mean to lambast the Wordpress developers personally, but this is just humorous. It doesn’t utilize any constructs of PHP designed to handle this kind of thing (E.g. statics and singletons) — and that’s only if you support their overall flow/execution. Granted static methods were introduced in PHP5, but static variables have been around since PHP4.

add to del.icio.us    add to technorati favs    email this

Posted in commentary |