Oh, how I hate WordPress

Yes, controversial to be posting that you hate WordPress on a site created in WordPress, but sometimes it’s really the only choice.

Before we get into that though, for the uninitiated, a quick summary of what WordPress is and the category of applications it falls into. And before that, a brief explanation of what a web page is. (If you know all this, you can skip ahead).

A Webpage

When you visit a webpage, behind all the pretty design, forms and buttons it is essentially a bunch of text markup. It is instructions to your browser on how to display the page. Back when Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, this markup (HTML) was things like ‘display this in bold text’; ‘display this in italics’; ‘put an underline under this text’. As the web has matured, this has gotten way more complicated, with the addition of javascript, cascading style sheets and countless other ways to manipulate the markup your browser uses to render a page. Add to that the fact a website is rarely a single page and somehow needs to be maintained without manually editing every line of HTML and the Content Management System (CMS) was born.

The Content Management System

Although CMSs where technically appearing with the first web scripting languages from 1995, the heavyweights of Content Management didn’t arrive until the early 2000’s. These were Open Source projects which meant anyone could use them from hobbyists to enterprise. The first was Drupal in 2000 followed by WordPress in 2003 and latterly Joomla. These remain the ‘big three’, although there are many others. The only practical way to avoid one of these Open Source CMSs was to roll-your-own – a task that comes with many benefits, but also a ridiculous amount of effort especially if you’re creating an eCommerce site for just a handful of products.

The Bespoke vs Open Source Smackdown

Custom code, tailored for your individual needs, is always going to win over an Open Source CMS. The code will be leaner, faster and more flexible than a one-size-fits-all codebase that requires plugin upon plugin to get even the basic functionality up and running. But – and it’s a big but – to get the functionality that the Open Source CMSs provide, that’s an awful lot of custom code. Fine if you have a large website and development budget to match, but if you’re just a cornershop bakery, getting a developer to build you a bespoke site with all the necessary integrations and security required to sell your bread rolls would not be cost effective. I’m a developer myself, and even I’m using WordPress for this project. It took about a week to get on its feet – if I had attempted to write it from scratch, I’d be lucky to have got it written in four months.

So why not use WordPress for everything? Because it’s slow; it eats server resources and it constantly needs updating. Open Source software by its very nature exposes every line of code on your site to potential hackers and spammers, who are constantly finding new ways to use your site for their nefarious purposes. And while WordPress itself is free (if you’re self-hosting), the line of plugin developers who are keen to charge you a monthly subscription for their just-out-of-reach pro features can quickly make your costs skyrocket.

WordPress (but this applies equally to Drupal & Joomla) is also such a beast now that the admin side of it is challenging to say the least. It seems the organic development has pulled it in so many different directions plus an array of multiple plugin vendors with their own thoughts on user interface, mean just figuring out where in the admin tool a setting is changed can resort to Googling an answer. Running a WordPress site – especially if you’re getting into eCommerce – is not for the feint hearted.