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.