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by radio4fan 4813 days ago
Yep, I have to develop 'WordPress sites' sometimes and the only consistency is its awfulness. It's the PHP of PHP.

Having a default username in the first place is incredibly poor practice. So many users stick to 'admin', making it just a case of guessing the password.

And don't get me started on that bloody "the loop" finite state machine. I mean, really?
2 comments
jakejake 4813 days ago
I actually find Wordpress to be much lighter and cleaner than many other CMS systems. It's impressive to me that the code is relatively consistent despite going through years of iterations. I also find the plugin mechanics of Wordpress to be simple to understand. It's got plenty of room for improvement but I think it's got a lot of good qualities too.
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jacques_chester 4813 days ago
It has been consistent, all right. Consistently terrible. For years.

Every time I duck under the hood to debug something I always come away stunned and disturbed by the frequent use of globals, the frequent interleaving of different concerns and basically the all-round untraceability of the design as soon as themes or plugins are added. It's horrid.

Oh! And there are still no unit or functional tests. And no concept of release management (such as having security patches released independently of feature patches), which is why every Wordpress administrator gets to play their favourite game when there's a new release: continue with known-security-flaw code, or install code that might just blow away your data?

Place yer bets, place yer beeeets!

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namwen 4813 days ago
Yeah that hits home. I build Wordpress websites daily and also manage a number of them which are years old and I had no hand in making. Pressing that update button on some of these sites really is like russian roulette.
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pbogdan 4813 days ago
Not sure of the quality of it but Wordpress does have automated test suite: http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/automated-testing/ https://unit-tests.svn.wordpress.org/trunk. Do you have any experience with those?
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jacques_chester 4813 days ago
Well I am happy to eat my hat on this one, with a side of crow.
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jakejake 4812 days ago
Well the entire style of WordPress uses the global namespace for everything so you do have to get over that shock. But, once you do there's a kinda simplicity to the whole thing. That's my impression anyway.
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MattBearman 4813 days ago
"It's the PHP of PHP" - quote of the year.
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