Love Mike G

The No-Image Redesign

It’s a programmer thing. You designer-types wouldn’t understand.

I’ve actually been sitting on this layout for quite some time now but didn’t really want to have to deal with skinning WordPress. With the last layout, I just used the header and footer templates and didn’t bother with anything else. However, with this layout I decided to follow the WordPress rules.

That was a mistake.

First off, WordPress has got to be the most horrendous application I have ever had to work with. When you look at the code, you can really see just how bad it really is. For example:

<?php $post = $posts[0]; // Hack. Set $post so that the_date() works. ?> 
 

Yep. That’s not only a global variable just floating around in the ether, but it’s also a nasty looking hack.

Don’t think it stops there. Look at the code for the previous/next links:

<div class="navigation">
    <div class="alignleft"><?php next_posts_link('&laquo; Previous Entries') ?></div>
    <div class="alignright"><?php previous_posts_link('Next Entries &raquo;') ?></div>
</div>

Next goes to previous and previous goes to next? WTF.

I even found these beauties while editing the sidebar.php page.

<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=<h2>Pages</h2>' ); ?>
<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?>

So why are these function calls prefixed with wp_ and not the others? Sounds like an afterthought to me.

Don’t even get me started on how their implementation of named parameters.

One question: how in the world is this the most popular blogging platform?

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Code, News, Opinion, PHP. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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