growing dissatisfaction with wordpress
So, the irritating Wordpress database/admin flakeout has come back. It was about … maybe 10 clicks of the “save” button.
I’m trying to track down what could be causing this, and looking into wordpress’s guts. Which is probably not a great idea, because I don’t know php for squat. But anyway …
I’m sort of dissatisfied with it, these days. I guess it’s just this creeping malaise. Like, all wordpress deployments are approximately the same. There’s not a whole lot of character or style to one, these days. There’s also some moderate annoyances with it…
Like, for one, the fact that 2/3 of the plugins for it seem to be in some state of broken. Which is understandable, because wordpress’s apis are moving targets, and people don’t really care to maintain them across random api changes and major rewrites.
Then there’s the whole admin interface thing. The wp2 admin scheme as a whole annoys me. There’s entirely too much given to ajax, making it just that much harder to do anything with.
Really, what I’ve been looking for in a blog is pretty straightforward. Persistent comments, stability, reasonable speed, a simple, clean and reliable editing interface that includes the ability to save partial posts and resume them later.
I think what frustrates me more than that is the community though. The “support” channel on irc is useless for support. The devs don’t seem to hang out there, and the people that do hang out there are too into random chit-chat to actually help people with their problems. And the online support forum is sorta craptastic, because there’s like one knowledgable person who uses it, apparently. Which is understandable, considering it, too, is in something like wordpress, and has a hideous all-white theme and incredibly poor usability.
*sigh*
I guess I’m really generally ok with everything about wordpress. I can put up with the annoyances — it’s better than what I’d produce in a couple hours of coding before I lost interest, anyway. So I guess that’s fine … whatever.
Is it bad that I’ve entertained the idea of dumping the blog into drupal?
hmm … I should make sure my backup scripts work …..
April 29th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
I understand your annoyance with Wordpress. Unfortunately, Typo seems to have many of its own annoyances, particularly with the admin portion, so I can’t really recommend that either. It does, however, look somewhat “fresh” in comparison, at least.
Unfortunately, the reason we use Wordpress or Typo is because despite its faults it is still easier than making our own blog software that has all of the expected features. Blogs used to just be simple posts, so it wasn’t that bothersome to create, but nowadays a feed, comments, trackback, search, and categories are standard and in free software blogs.
There’s always using a centralized service like Blogger or Typepad (or *shudder* LiveJournal).
April 30th, 2006 at 10:28 am
I’m pretty happy with PyBlosxom. It works on the one-entry-per-file principle, and creating a new entry is just a matter of editing it locally and uploading it to your server. There are a few on-the-fly text->html converters that you could install server-side if you don’t want to write in raw HTML. Also a multi-categories plugin, if that’s your cup of tea.