Wordpress Team Becoming Too Sure?
I use Wordpress, I really like Wordpress, but sometimes I doubt. Not because of the Wordpress platform (I have already decided that I will use other platforms in a near future), but because of what the WP core team publishes. Because of certain statements they make.
I will immediately counter you. I surely am not not controversial in times (I have been worse, lots worse), I have been there in my sector. I have reached the top in my area.
And when I was there, everyone had to listen to it, and to me.
Today I know better. I have learned my lesson.
More even, every time I have read or hear similar statements I automatically shake head. And reading the NeoSmart Files last night I thought this was the beginning of the end.
The most obvious impact WordPress has had – on everyone – is that there really isn’t much room for another blogging platform
In that sense, WordPress is hard or even impossible to beat.
In a nutshell, the blogging market is c.l.o.s.e.d. – as in no more room, and most importantly, no more competition; because let’s face it, whatever you’ve got, it’s just never going to be good enough.
Dangerous statements. Very dangerous statements.
There is no doubt that Wordpress a great platform is, but can someone please tell me why influential designers and coders other platform use? Veerle and Wolfgang Bartelme both using Expression Engine, Steve Smith who just switched from WP to Mephisto, Jonathan Snook who built his own blog based on CakePHP, Jeff Croft who uses Django.
Surely Wordpress is a magnificent platform, and probably the easiest to start with. But other platforms still are in their childhood. Mephisto has not reached 1.0 yet, but already has an active community and will certainly grow more and more as RoR continues to spread his wings and more and more hosters will also offer RoR packages. Probably coders will be more spoiled as soon as more people know RoR.
Expression Engine, a great platform, surely not harder than WP for coders. The team behind EE has taken another approach and deserves the honors of having a code with less security security patches/major release.
And the list goes on : Django is relatively new, CakePHP not that widespread yet.
Guys, remember one thing : only when you are at the Top you can crash. Ask Ferrari how fast this goes. Ask MT how hard it is to come back.
If I were the team behind EE, I would release the full package free for private use now. Not only the core pack. And open development to the EE community.
That could become interesting me think.
And the blog market surely isn’t saturated yet. There still is place for another player. Today, as the internet still reaches more and more people and blogging still isn’t 100% main stream yet Wordpress.com and Blogger.com are two of the ultimate starter platforms. But that can change fast.
We will have to wait and watch happens if AOL releases Blogsmith one day.
Maybe Google will one day even offer totally free hosting.
Update : I just read that Chris J Davis also switched and became core developer of a new blog platform. Habari.
Update 2 : Also Michael Heilemann joins the Habari team.
IMHO:
I totally agree with you. And I add that WP is great…but not exceptional. It’s quite spread due to its easy of installation and (to some extent) user friendliness but …its fundations are not so well thought. As an example: poor separation between content and appereance (I expected a good MVC aproach as a minimum…) Sure, they use CSS profusely, but it’s all mixed up with PHP code and even SQL (2.x series has improved but not enough yet) What about PosgtreSQL support (lack of)?
Textpattern is much better. It seems easier that masses will adopt a totally brand-new product. It’s a matter of time (1 year?) that some python (django?) based solution appears and kick WP’s arrogant dev’s asses.
xq said this on January 7, 2007 6:55 am
Interesting post! A good read, for sure. There’s no doubt that being over-confident when you’re on top is one of the surest ways to fall fast and hard.
For me personally, the reason I don’t use WordPress is mostly due to the fact that WordPress is too blog-centric for me. That’s fine, because WordPress is, according to their own website, a blogging tool. And from what I understand (I’ve never actually used it myself), it does blogging very, very well. But I want my personal site to be a lot more than a blog. I want it to aggregate my photos from flickr, my links from ma.gnolia, and so forth. I want to be able to make database-level relationships between different types of content (like, say, a photo I favorited on Flickr and my latest blog post). I want to be able to show off y portfolio without having to shoehorn it into a “blog,” when it’s not really a blog. I want to be able to quickly and easily add new features I dream up without having to wait for someone else to write a plug in. And so forth. In short, if you want to blog, WordPress might be the perfect tool for the job. If you want to do more with your personal site, WordPress will almost certainly be underpowered.
I also have a bit of an aversion to PHP these days. I used to use it, but having seen the beauty and elegance of object-oriented dynamically-typed languages like Python and Ruby, it would be very hard to go back to anything based on PHP.
Jeff Croft said this on January 8, 2007 4:01 am
xq, I have never played with TextPattern yet but read raving reviews about. Some blogs I read are build on TXP (Natalie Jost, drivl.com, SonSpring aso), but the reason I left TXP out was because I neverplayed with it.
As for WP, I think it is the weakest platform future orientated of all the ones I mentioned. And WP urgently needs to do something about MySQL queries.
Easy? Aren’t they all for the non-code-geek? Click write, type and publish.
Jeff, thanks for passing by
I totally understand your arguments. And WP is great as blogging tool, as long as your blog is your niche. But don’t expand that too much. Soon you’ll wish WP had sections, multi-blogs and more. More CMS based, and don’t we all one day want to organize our clutter a little more?
EE offers this IMHO, although the admin back-end overwhelming is at first.
All new Python, Django based and other options surely are interesting. But still hard for most people. First of all they need to offer automated web based install. Then they might get popular.
If I tell my grandmother she needs shell access, she goes to the gas station.
Franky said this on January 8, 2007 5:14 am
I agree completely that there is always room for someone new, if not WP wouldn’t exist in the first place. Sorry if my link was misinterpreted, WP is still far too small to get cocky.
Matt said this on January 8, 2007 7:06 am
Wordpress really became popular when MovableType starting charging license fees and it improved the admin side of things. There’s plenty of scope for other tools to come along and become serious competitors to Wordpress, in my opinion. Blogs are now almost a given on many types of websites and Wordpress is not yet built for that – by default. Expression Engine has its problems but also benefits – I gave up waiting for them to release the additional functionality which they were promising for so long because I needed it right then and there.
I love Drupal – it’s too powerful for just running a blog off of it but it’s so flexible and perfect for many other types of community sites.
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