How WordPress Destroyed the Internet

January 10, 2012 - Reading time: 3 minutes

WordPress is so popular that it is taking over — it’s behind 22% of all new sites on the internet, but this sets a dangerously poor coding standard. Our infrastructure is crumbling!

Yes, this is a rant. My beef today is this: the WordPress manager might be easy to use, but under the hood, it sucks. There, I said it. It’s awful architecture and it has taught thousands of web developers that it’s Ok to write piss-poor code. This has single-handedly dumbed-down a whole generation of developers by setting a bad example. WordPress is the junk food of coding standards: ubiquitous, tastes good, but lacking any nutritional value.

I’ve ranted about WordPress before but what put me over the top today was the Suffusion Theme. It looks like a clean layout, so I thought I’d give it a try. Holy flaming monkey balls, was I in for a shock!

This theme not only has a metric-crap-ton of options, it also does the unthinkable: it allows you to register custom post-types and custom taxonomies. Does that sound like something else? Why, yes, it does: THAT, my friends, is A PLUGIN. Now, no offense to the theme’s author — it’s a clean interface and he obviously takes a lot of pride in his work — but this type of thing should never occur. A theme should never introduce extra functionality. What happens when you change the theme? Your whole site could collapse.

The conclusions that I have to draw about about the architecture here are pretty negative: WordPress allows (or even encourages) the polluting of application layers in very unhealthy ways. It’s a very serious black mark for an application to allow a theme to get away with that. The view layer should be static: no logic, no functionality, it should merely determine how data is displayed.

This is hardly the end of the architectural infractions WordPress is guilty of, but it is perhaps one of the most obvious. I’d better leave it at that: the way WordPress is built allows for severe architectural flaws that make development difficult or impossible. Buyer beware.

-- Everett Griffiths