Hey, so this is a thread where you can express your love or hate for WordPress.

 

For me, it's great to set people up with a website if they don't want/need anything too expensive.

 

No, WordPress is not the one-and-only solution to every website.

 

And there are some things that annoy me about plugins. No it's not the best to rely on a free plugin for every single thing.

 

It annoys me when I go into a dashboard, and find all these nag screens prompting me to upgrade or donate via Paypal, etc.

At my work we mainly develop the pages for small businesses using WP so I know the problems but I dont think it is fair to blame Wordpress for the plugins as no plugins are required for a Wordpress install.

 

What really irritates me is that Wordpress stores relative configuration settings in the database.

Example: In a WP multisite installation, multiple references to the server name and locations of folders are stored in the database which makes it a total pain to migrate the installation to another server.

 

Also I hear a lot of back-end coders complain that the architecture of WP is hard to understand as WP started out being non MVC and non OOP.

Though efforts has been made to change this, the deveopers of WP cannot really change the procedural code style of the core without affecting backwards compatibility.

Edited April 16, 201610 yr by Nillervision

Pros: Great online community, plenty of resources and support, relatively easy learning curve and well documented and regularly updated codex.

 

However...

 

Front and back end are completely mixed up. As @@Jack commented in another thread, lack of native templating language and non MVC architecture make it difficult to achieve separation of business and application logic.

Forcing markup decisions on developers - you have to write a ton of code and reference the built-in classes to achieve basic markup changes.

URL re-writing is a nightmare.

Forcing default scripts and structure on developers - bloated front-end.

Slow database queries.

Lack of basic functionality, which very CMS should support as default imo (might be wrong on this one) such as breadcrumbs, proper pagination, etc.

 

It's not impossible to have a great, fast, well working site bulit on WP, but, well, why spend time, when you can install WP, buy a theme, install 10 or so plugins and you have (as @@citypaul said) something that resembles a site in a few hours.

It's not impossible to have a great, fast, well working site bulit on WP, but, well, why spend time, when you can install WP, buy a theme, install 10 or so plugins and you have (as @@citypaul said) something that resembles a site in a few hours.

 

And this rant is not targeted at small business owners who don't have the budget or at people who need a quick MVP (although a lot can be said re. desired MVP quality). It's for agencies who charge many 1000s of pounds for the above mentioned type of pre-made built, essentially conning people and giving the industry a bad name.