Guess that, our beloved content management system has it’s flaws too. Let’s play devil’s advocate for today and see these deficiencies, who knows, WordPress developers might hear us out and correct these mistakes. Today i’ll be making a long article about the problems that this Content Management system has and we might be able, even to fix them ourselves.
We first have to take into account that, WordPress, started out as a blogging system, and not a CMS in itself. The popularity explosion that it suffered (or better, enjoyed) brought with itself thousands of new plugins, themes and modifications that didn’t follow a standard, adding the fact that the developers had no motivation to build it, except bringing good to people (we are not that altruistic deep inside ourselves anyway). Let’s enlist these problems and find workarounds for them ourselves. Sure, it works as expected at the time this article is being written, but soon it will suffer a degrade in popularity and credibility once users notice these distinct problems in WordPress.
1 – Thousands of bad plugins in the Community Repository
Not everybody can be an excellent developer, and not everybody writes software for fun. We have thousands of kids just out from their Computer Science University trying to get their tiny inexperienced hands on their choice of CMS (this mostly translated to the most profitable one). The thing is, they don’t really respect principles, standards, and plans. Cowboy coders are at heart, they just want to finish the project at the optimal functionality, which in turn creates problems like broken layout, missing parts, and a big lack of features. Fortunately, i came up with a solution for that and i would like to present it to you, my young Jedi’s.
Solution:
Don’t let developers post new plugins or themes without testing them well. Have them fill out the forms:
- What are some features that don’t exist on other themes?
- What are some bugs in this release of the theme? (Moderators should review, and if the bug isn’t small enough to ignore, the developer should be banned, say a week from posting other content)
- What is so special about your plugin?
Developers should be forced to test and review their code (or better yet, have it tested and reviewed by a more experienced developer) and THEN be able to post.
2 – No Software Patterns Respected
A good content management system should respect a software pattern such as MVC. Unfortunately, WordPress has an unmanageable plugin system (add_action everywhere, are you serious?). OOP not so much, everything has a procedural feeling on it. It needs a complete re-design. I really appreciated PyroCMS (based on CodeIgniter) everything was put in it’s place and structured.
Solution:
Either use a MVC implementation plugin from the community repository, or re-write the entire CMS.
3 – Badly structured Community Documentation
I can’t stress enough how much the community needs fresh, well-structured and put-in-place documentation. Everything is cluttered everywhere, and the community documentation writer’s need to stress unnecessary details simply pisses me off. They also have look like getting a kick out of pretending the readers are less intelligent than them. You can find something like:
“do_action() does an action”
Oh god! Thank you for telling me! I thought it just sat there, with a flier on his hand, wanting to take no action, until the world’s leaders solved global poverty and ecological problems!