[jakejake]

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.

[jacques_chester]

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!

[namwen]

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.

[pbogdan]

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?

[jacques_chester]

Well I am happy to eat my hat on this one, with a side of crow.

[jakejake]

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.