andrew.pilsch.com

I’ve been working on the design of this blog for the last few days (I probably should have been working on writing content, instead, but that’s beside the point). While I’ve finally gotten Wordpress working the way I want, it hasn’t been a fun process. I realize that I ask a lot of software, but sometimes I really wonder: is trying to use the fullest possible set of features so much to ask?

I’ve been trying to get posting via email to work, for quite a while. Well, actually I’m trying to get it working again. I migrated my domain tools to Google Apps and suddenly couldn’t post via email anymore. Why, you ask? Well, it turns out that Wordpress’s out of the box post via email doesn’t work with the SSL used on Gmail’s servers. Does it say this anywhere in the documentation? No. No it doesn’t. The only hint I had was this mention: “Postie supports posting to categories, automatic removal of email signatures, POP3/IMAL (sic) (+SSL) and more.” What does that mean?

I assumed it meant that Postie was better at handling email than Wordpress’s bare bones implementation. What it actually means is that Wordpress doesn’t support SSL (also that Wordpress doesn’t proofread things). I suppose I could log in and fix it (it is a wiki after all), but it seems sort of embarrassing that this software has such poor documentation.
Additionally, the Wordpress plugin that does work with SSL servers, like Gmail’s, Postie, ships with syntax errors (someone didn’t close all their parentheses). Additionally, the configuration menu is an over-designed nightmare that contains a number of spelling errors.

Further, I’m having trouble finding wordpress plugins to do things that Wordpress’s hosting service has by default. How do I include delicious updates in my sidebar (like most wordpress.com blogs)? Well, I installed del.icio.us cached++, but it drops a ““ tag at the bottom of its sidebar widget. Again, being open source, I could fix it myself, but I’m not your f***ing bug checker.

Adding on to this: iWPhone doesn’t work at all. I’m so sick of fighting with Wordpress’s crappy documentation, lack of good plugins, and non-working software. I’d say that this was like using Linux back in the good old 2.0-kernel days, but even then most of the stuff worked.

Part of my problem, I think is how hard it is to find things about Wordpress widgets and plugins. Searching their plugin repository is a vague description filled crap shot, at best. Admittedly, there are some really good plugins out there: croppr, for instance, is great.

I think the issue I’m having with Wordpress lies in a lack of focus on the part of Wordpress w/r/t their audience. Most Wordpress users, I’m guessing, are not people like me. They want a blog and they want it now. Cool, fine. For those people, the template writing documentation (which treats like a child) is probably okay. I would imagine that I would have trouble writing a Wordpress theme if I didn’t already know PHP. Let’s assume, though, that I do know PHP and have been using it for years. Also, let’s assume that I want to try to do something novel with Wordpress. Why shouldn’t I have access to all the constants that Wordpress defines? Why shouldn’t I have a list of global variables? Why can’t I access post information without printing it to the screen by default? I realize that I could find all of this stuff out (and have via much Google usage), but as it is, it’s easier for me to start an output buffering every time I want to get the post’s title loaded into memory.

My point is this: Wordpress is a really amazing blogging system (esp. given that it’s free), but due to the assumption that most power user’s are not going to be extending it (or that power user’s aren’t lazy), doing anything with Wordpress outside of posting in the default theme is a frustrating nightmare. I wonder, though, if I’m the only person with this problem, as I’ve had a lot of trouble just finding information in Google. Hmmm.

Update: Posting this item, Postie decided, first, not to work because I didn’t configure a feature that I wasn’t using (but can’t turn off). The error message was wonderfully vague, so I ended up going into the source code, again, via vim and commenting out a bunch of crap.

Image Credit: “RANT, This Way” by Nesster