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10 Things I Hate About WordPress

I thought I’d write a short article to explore my own personal bug bears with WordPress. Why do I hate it so much, and why… do I love it so much… It really is the Marmite of the CMS World.

So here’s my “top 10” things that I hate…

  1. The way that, if I want to do any sort of single post customisation, perhaps change my links pink, or have double columns, that it’s such a pain on most themes. Sure, I can add some <style>…</style> tags to the top of the text editor, but soon as I flick to visual, they get trimmed… ARGGHH I put them there for a reason, don’t trim me…
  2. Plugin notifications / Theme notifications “An update is available” yes.. I know, BUT I already worked with your plugin, tweaked it to do what I want it to do, changed the CSS….  stop bugging me about an update… Let me dismiss them… PLEASEEE
  3. Only one text editor….  yup. That’s a killer. It would be cool if you could ADD a text editor on the fly, resize them, and position them (50/50%) in rows etc and then when you publish the page, your blog content would follow the way you’ve layed out your text editors….  (probably related to 1.)
  4. All the clutter in the text editor… man that’s annoying, but… what IS cool, is the latest “distraction free editor” that just lets your draft nice content, in a full screen window. Just like working in MS Word…  (but it still suffers from not being able to insert content into blocks of text)…. see 1 and 3…  hmmm.
  5. Badly written themes or plugins. There’s SO MANY themes and plugins out there, and an easy way to update the plugins. I hate when a new plugin comes along with completely destroys everything on my site (NextGen and the update to 2.0 did this massively across the interweb… thousands of unhappy users due to conflicts from a new update)..  but a new version often means people expect things to work with the new version.
  6. I also really hate, people touting themselves as “WordPress Experts” when they’re grown up working with standard HTML, PHP and CSS…. (you know who you are) just because you’ve worked with the core stack WP is written on doesn’t make you an expert. What about hooks, filters, XMLRPC, actions, and all the other cool things in the Codex….
  7. Those “popular” themes that have been written by people from the camp in 6…  which removes the use of any filters or hooks which have generally been designed to make cross development easier. So workarounds have to be done (Genesis and its featured image functions are a prime example, which resulted in an additional filter needed to be developed for link 2 featured image plugin)
  8. Trying to blog about using shortcodes (and giving the example of a shortcode) just to have the shortcode parse and turn into an instance of whatever it is I’m trying to write the example about. (update: thanks Woody for pointing out the [[shortcode]] method which prevents parsing #needtotest)
  9. A minor thing, but something which I myself have been a culprit of in the past, calling it WordPress (small p)… and not WordPress (capital P) get it right people…. hmmm wow, WordPress seems to have changed my incorrect use of WordPress…. sneaky… and then some!
  10. Finally, this is a love hate…  I hate how it makes me love it! You can read the 10 things I love about WordPress here.

Comments

9 responses to “10 Things I Hate About WordPress”

  1. cybervang Avatar
    cybervang

    Start:
    I hate the most about word press is the default settings. I hate the fact that I spend more time making it HACK proof and SPAM proof. I really hate WP for this and I am considering writing my own version of WP. This is ridiculous.

    Top WP off with a BuddyPress that has some of the craziest padding and horrifying themes in existence.

    Now what I love about WP is the heavy lifting is done. All I do is —-> goto Start:

    Reply
    1. Mike Avatar
      Mike

      Definitely agree with the SPAM proofing, it can really stifle comments and the amount of SPAM is ridiculous, your own version of WP though, you could always fork the core – what would you see differently?

      Reply
  2. adrian Avatar
    adrian

    What I hate about wordpress is, when you get to transferring from your local xampp localhost to the server hosting, unlike joomla where you have one standard path you have to change in the config file in wordpress there all over some even in the database so you have to use a text editor or open tables in phpmyadmin find and replace ! This is just ridiculous !

    Reply
    1. Mike Avatar
      Mike

      I agree – it’s not ideal at all, especially if you’ve spent time setting up lots of different plugins!

      Reply
  3. Bryce Avatar
    Bryce

    There are a lot of things that I both like and dislike about WordPress. I wrote a blog post a little bit ago, and I figured it might be able to help someone: http://blog.mathesondigital.com/love-hate-relationship-wordpress/

    Reply
    1. Mike Avatar
      Mike

      nice post bryce 🙂

      Reply
  4. Konnie Avatar
    Konnie

    I absolutely loathe wordpress, but for all different reasons.

    My #1 reason is – I hate it for becoming the most popular CMS. Because it is sooo not suited for it. Its a blog engine and should be used as one. When people start creating anything but a blog in it – its always crap.
    By the way, popular does not mean good. There are tons of popular things that suck and are very popular (any fans of Internet Explorer around here?)

    Reason #2 – the API is a mess. If you think it is good – that only means you haven’t seen anything else.

    #3 – page loop. The existence of `wp_reset_query()` is a great proof of wordpress’ page loop suckage.

    #4 – 99% of plugins suck. I mean they may seem “cool”, but their codebase almost always suck. Whenever you need anything slightly different from default blog building functionality – you’re gonna need lots of plugins and its gonna suck.

    #5 – it is slow and hack friendly. (refer to #4)

    I could go on but I think its too much for one comment already.

    Reply
  5. Gee Lewis Avatar
    Gee Lewis

    I used to use WordPress for many years. I finally had to stop because each new version added more and more features which really, in my opinion, started to making blogging complicated. Blogging and publishing content on a website should be a quick and easy process. And then with all the third-party developers developing amateur coded plugins that have the potential to conflict with each other poses security issues. I finally wrote my own script. Granted it’s not as rich in features as WordPress but for me it gets the job done.

    Reply
    1. Mike Avatar
      Mike

      Thanks Gee.

      This is reflective of how much WordPress has evolved to much more than just a blogging platform. For blogging things like Ghost is good or our newest theme which focussing on the writing experience.

      The morphing of WordPress has opened the door to a lot of new websites using WordPress, for example our latest theme, plugin hunt (http://epicplugins.com/pluginhunt/) lets you use WordPress to create a website like Product Hunt in just a few clicks

      Reply

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