7 sins about WordPress

2011-03-06 @ 13:06

I’ve been using WordPress almost every day since 2007 and here are my biggest kvetch. You might be a programmer to understand everything.

Everything is a post?

When using WordPress functions we can sometimes call ”post” to get the page. No, this is not a bug. WordPress refer to the ”post type”. There are posts, but it got nothing to do with post types, really. A post type can be a post, page, attachment, revision or even a menu.

It’s called ”post type” because a post was the first thing created in WordPress. Nowdays it can be just confusing to not be sure if it calls an actual post or a post type.

wp-admin got bloated

Custom post types and other new stuff are nice BUT it makes WordPress admin look like a junk yard. Some things have been taken care of in version 3.1 like hide some fields that not everyone use that often.

The left sidebar is still a mess. To solve it, make a top menu (like WordPress 2.3) and split things up in a nice way. We don’t need to see the settings all the time, do we?

Image uploader was better in previous versions of WordPress

Why the heck is a lightbox used for uploading images? There was a time when the image uploading was right there. No need to flip between a lightbox and the content.

File gallery plugin looks a little bit of how WordPress looked before the lightbox time.

I want to create my stuff on the frontpage, not in wp-admin

I want to see my blog when I create a new post and I want to write it right there to se what it gets. Why force me to log in to wp-admin?

I even want the ability to drag and drop my widgets on the front page. It’s not impossible, just check if super admin is logged in and in that case load some fancy jQuery.

In WordPress 3.1 there is a panel on the top at the front page to add post and so on, but that is just a shortcut to wp-admin. A little lame to me.

Impossible to use Ajax WITH WordPress functions (a nice way)

A theme issue.

When ever you include a PHP-file (on Ajax-calls for example) your WordPress functions are not there anymore. Yes, you could include wp-load.php but that is not good if the file structure has changed.

The best way today is way of doing it at Ottos Don’t include wp-load please. I prefer the one called ”The right way second”.

However it’s not a very nice way of doing it.

Multiple languages sucks

I’m not talking about translations of themes or wp-admin. I’m talking of creating sites with multiple languages. There is a plugin called qTranslate that should be one of the best plugin for this. Still it’s far from good enough. It destroys the core tables and don’t work well with new things like custom menus.

I don’t know the best way to solve this but I belive it can be done.

Tables can’t be added with the content editor

Sometimes you need a table to display table data. However TinyMCE editor is not very good at it. There are plugins to create tables but they are not good enough. They don’t really blend in.

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