Until recently, I adored WordPress. I’ve been teaching groups of artists and photographers to make websites and blogs using the free and easy WordPress.com package, which are so much the best offering out there to get going quickly. Magically easy, most of the templates are rather beautiful, and there’s enough customisation to make every site look different.
Then the first WordCamp UK came along, and in with the planning came enough cartoony controlling behaviours to begin a slow turnaround. Where were we women? Other halves, someone to do today’s equivalent of making the tea. As experts in our own fields, as co-workers in the big open source adventure? No. Ideas and suggestions were ignored, forum posts were skipped, and then fell under a welter of geek-talk and micro-chat. In the end, it proved impossible to go to the actual event, and probably that was a good thing, on balance.
But apart from a newly burgeoning UK community that seems to want autocratic geek hierachies, obsess about ways to increase traffic and the dreaded and ghastly monetisation, is WordPress itself broken?
In a matter of weeks since a major overhaul resulting in 2.5, version 2.6 has come out, and it seems that 2.5 is no longer being supported. Version 2.5 is okay, it mostly works, but the back end isn’t better organised or clearer than 2.3, and the image uploader is much worse. It hardly ever uploads a photo to a post first time, and often usually the code has to be typed in by hand. The much touted Gallery function, which would be marvellous on this site, doesn’t work properly either, looks ugly when it’s typed in, and the default links are all wrong, again with no way to change them except by typing.
The one function that is better in 2.5 over 2.3 is the ability to upload more than one image at a time. Is there anything else that’s better, really? If you can think of anything the Romans did for us WordPress does better in 2.5 or in 2.6, than in 2.3, please post it in the comments here. I’d love to know.
It takes some time to upgrade: all the plugins need switching off, backups need making and then it all needs putting back together afterwards. And there is always a plugin or an add-on that doesn’t work afterwards, since WordPress isn’t giving its developer community enough time to catch up. I have two blogs or three still on 2.3 which unfortunately have been dropped because there just isn’t time to upgrade them all.
And people are complaining about the feeds sometimes not working, and the templates are just well, not being produced for 2.5 or 2.6. A clean 3 column with plenty of width in the main area is getting hard to find unless CSS faffing is in order, and that’s hardly the point of using a no-coding system.
But why Drupal?
Three years ago (a long time in blogland) me and one Mr Lunatic Fringe aka Phil Ackley from Anchorage, had a blog called Things That Moved. It documented visually and in writing, a host of broken down farm machinery, planes, and dead motor cars, interspersed with the occasional corpse. Beautiful rusting heaps and shiny disintegrating chrome, with smatterings of gore. Things That Moved was built on Drupal.
A long time ago WordPress was simpler, and Drupal was much more complicated. Daunting, even. Now, it just looks very beautiful so perhaps it’s time to give it another try.
And of course there’s Angie.
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5 Comments
I agree that the releases are coming too fast. Security aside it would be nice for all the changes to be rolled up into one annual update or, as I wrote about recently, for WordPress to be modularised so that features could be individually rolled back, replaced, or even removed.
As for what is better in 2.5:
I think the admin interface is vastly improved as far as ease of use is concerned. The people I introduce to 2.5 seem to pick it up quicker than they did previous versions.
I really like the fact that it pulls the EXIF data (some of it anyway) out of uploaded photos, but I think they should have included a shortcode to display it without me having to write a plugin to do that.
I think the shortcode API is an improvent as it really points plugin authors towards a standardised way of doing things which should make things more consistent for users in the long term.
2.6 was a fairly minor update really. There were some nice touches in there, the plugin page is better organised and the post revision feature is useful for selling sites based on WordPress, but I think they could have waited longer and put more things in before releasing it. Another six months perhaps.
The major problem I had with drupal when I tried it was that there wasn’t a clear enough division between the admin areas and customer facing areas. I want them clearly distinct using different themes and I do not want editing capability on customer facing pages. This may have been resolved by now.
An annual update where the previous versions wouldn’t be dropped from the support and codex, yes that would be a big improvement.
I don’t want exif on my photos, but agree the option would be good for some people. If 2.6 is a minor upgrade why have they stopped supporting 2.5? Seems crazy.
Yes, I remember that feature of Drupal. I’d check by logging out, and there were no front-facing admin features logged out. The admin side didn’t have a different theme though.
Good points.
I really, really tried to get Drupal working on some sites that I was running. And I ended up frustrated and angry, because it was just too fiddly, awkward, and biased towards PHP developers. So if you are thinking about moving away from Wordpress, I’d say avoid Drupal. There are other CMS’s around, like ExpressionEngine and Moveable Type, which might work better for you. I’ve not tried them, so I won’t go on about them.
As for releases, if you can get the hang of doing upgrades via the command line then I understand it’s very, very quick to upgrade your system. Supporting old versions of software releases doesn’t always make sense for a number of different reasons, and I think the post 2.5 Wordpress versions are all building towards something that is a lot more interesting in terms of free website software.
There seems to me to be a huge leap between the older versions of Wordpress and the current version. It’s not just the ‘group upload’ feature, and the pastel-coloured admin pages… it’s the way that the system holds together. And still remains absolutely usable.
Wordpress and Drupal are both free Open Source and use PHP: they can therefore run on any cheap shared hosting. ExpressionEngine is non-free (proprietary) and Movable Type requires Perl.
I’m quite concerned about your comment that women are marginalised in the wordpress community. I think it’s true in most open source communities I’ve come across if you don’t speak geek you’re likely to get ignored.
Anyway, I just switched from self hosted wordpress to wordpress.com because it now does everything I need it to. Self hosted wordpress was improving immensely too – didn’t automatic upgrade come in with 2.5? I have to admit it did take some searching to find out how to get it to work, in the end it was to do with read/write permissions. But I was really happy to be able to automatically upgrade wordpress, and any plugins I’d installed. 2.6 even puts a message on your dash to alert you that a plugin needs updating. From there it’s a couple of clicks to install the new version.
I tried a Drupal install, and though I got a basic site installed without problems, I couldn’t get any plugins to install without a fatal exception error. No documentation to help out either. So I uninstalled it and went back to wordpress.