The longer I spend with WordPress, the more I loathe it. This site has been steadily chugging along since 2004 (16 years as of this writing!) with the Powered by WordPress brand stamped on each page. In that amount of time, WordPress has become an unwieldy behemoth of a platform. It's honestly feeling more and more like Microsoft FrontPage to me (remember FrontPage?). Everyone should apparently design websites in the WYSIWYG editing style. As hopefully everyone knows, however, that never seems to end well.
Apart from having to update the core software every few weeks to plug the latest security holes, I find the plugin support to be hit or miss. All the higher quality plugins tend to be paid pieces of software, some even requiring monthly subscription fees. Free plugins generally fall into two camps:
- They're outdated and unsupported
- They're poorly designed/documented
Lots of the functionality I'm interested in — image galleries, Markdown support, spam mitigation, bulk post management, the list goes on — isn't available natively. If it is, the implementation is generally half-baked. Keeping this site running has become a chore as WordPress has gotten larger.
Thankfully, this is where being a professional web developer pays off.
I'm in the process of designing a brand new, custom platform to power this site. It will be powered by Django, and will have every feature I care about baked in. I've been hacking on it solidly for the past two weeks, and I estimate another week or so before it's able to launch. Along with it will come a small visual refresh. I'm excited about these changes, and I look forward to sharing them soon.
