[throw5345346]

One of the things that strikes me about WordPress is the way that web nerds expect to find it easy and are angered when it is not.

Like everything, it takes learning. It has opinions.

It has some crazy history (I really wish media items were not handled the way they are), but it also has methodology to it.

If I said I know Go and JS and Perl and Java and Ruby and C, and I was enraged that Rust is so hard to learn, I'd be shot down for it, rightly.

WordPress looks like it does a simple job, but actually it's a whole, quite broad platform. You might have to read some documentation for a bit.

And if you've inherited a site using Elementor, ask the people who made it how to change the simple stuff, because they will be able to help.

If you've inherited a site using Visual Composer or Divi... shoot the people who made it.

If you think Gutenberg is bad (it is very much not, now!)... oh man, Divi was a time.

[easyThrowaway]

I've "inherited" a website using Divi for all of its styling.

It's absolutely one of the worst pieces of commercial software I've ever seen. Just saving a blog post is capable of putting the entire website in an unrecoverable condition if there's even the slightest timeout in the execution of the terrifying javascript UI they wrote on top of Wordpress. The italian and french localization is genuinely abysmal, on par with some japanese games from the '90s. Responsive options are absolutely non-working, unless by responsive you mean "hide and show content on specific breakpoints". And even then, everything is absolutely brittle given that the front-end "theme" is basically an unreadable dump of jquery-era javascript.

I'm 100% sure nobody would use that if Elegant Themes (Divi authors) weren't massively spending on advertising.

[orf]

What’s the crazy history?

[throw5345346]

Well, maybe not crazy. Just heavily legacy.

There are a few deeply frustrating things, if you ask me:

All the media files are stored in a single uploads/year/month (maybe year/month/day) directory, which can mean some very big directories of file variations

There's code that cannot be fun to support anymore, like the Pluggable functions (that still let you get Wordpress to check some external login system)

There's still really not enough of a sense of a "model" anywhere.

It still (AFAIK) stores some things in the database using PHP serialization (which is unambiguously the most annoying serialization format on earth, and means that search and replace tasks must be done in PHP)

I mean... it's hard to blame them for not wanting to break stuff, and the commitment to backwards-compatibility is very nearly unprecedented.

I think WordPress is great, and I am not judging. I'm just saying, there are decisions that might have gone better with a little more foresight. But some of them are literally twenty years old and hard to change now.

Not that WP is alone in that -- FreeCAD is just getting through its "fix a two decade legacy problem" as we speak!

Matt is right about zip uploads. I mean it's better than explaining to random users how to upload nested hierarchies over FTP, but still.