Lukas' Weblog

My blog runs WordPress. WordPress is actually – without any doubt – the best known blogsoftware. In reality, I hate it. I mean hatred like democracy, capitalism or Linux. It sucks, but it’s the best of all alternatives. Ok… I have to point out, that I did not look for other blogsoftware very much. Maybe in future I will spend more time in that topic. However… a few things about WordPress are really annoying:

• PHP’s print. When building a theme, you have/want to use WordPress’ internal PHP functions. For example

  <?php wp_list_cats(‘sort_column=name&optioncount=0&hierarchical=1′); ?>

  does what it’s name say: list all categories. But now I want to catch the output and replace all <li with <li title="category" (perform a simple str_replace to the output of the function). PHP-Geeks would start to put the output into a variable, perform str_replace and print it, but this is not possible.

  <?php $a = wp_list_cats(‘sort_column=name&optioncount=0&hierarchical=1′); $a = str_replace(‘<li’, ‘<li title=”category”‘, $a); print $a; ?>

  Why is it impossible? All functions of PHP do a direct output (with print) and do not return any code. So $a contains NULL. A post-modification of function’s output is not possible. Some WP-Geeks might state, that you can build filters, include them into the WordPress-Framework and use them at the specific point, but this is too stupid for me. Whenever working on such things, I like hacky* solutions I understand and building them without reading tons of manuals. Maybe I’m just lazy, but WordPress: please replace print with return

• Memory intensive. On my old computer, WordPress is very difficult to display. A lot of javascript-effects, images and option selections. In “Visual” mode (when writing a new entry) letters are displayed with a latency of 1 second. Very annoying. I’m always writing in “HTML” mode.
• Python Preference. PHP sucks. I would like to prefer a python solution. Personal note: Without so much OOP, like it is standard in python
• Craving for a beautiful Web. I would like to send a beautiful HTML source code to the client. A newline after each outline HTML element, text-indentation… and so on. Useless stuff, but I tried to do that. WordPress is way too complex and see issue #1
• Content modifications. Sometimes I update to new version or just switch to “Visual” mode (without editing something)… a simple is not converted to a smiley. In the next post, the completely equal letters are converted to a smiley.
  In general, double quotes appear as HTML entity in blog entries. This is quite a problem, because there are some difficulties with HTML entities in the RSS standard.
• Searching for Features. I would like to see some features in WordPress like Wir speichern nicht! (IP-Address auto-deletion) and HowTo protect your wordpress blog with a password (Encrypt all blog entries / protect the whole weblog with a password).
• Deleting competitors. In previous versions some drafts were deleted without any warning. This affected blog entries containing a link to Google’s Offical blog at blogspot.com

* hacky as in unix philosophy: tiny code snippets which solve a specific problem.

There might be some other things, but I got solutions for that issues and I forgot about them.

It’s just like always: I would like to code my own blog software. With my current skills, convictions and knowledge, I would code it in PHP. A little bit OOP and lots of functions. A self-coded blog like Fefe uses (he coded in C). And at the end… the software would suck like all the other ones. Just like democracy, capitalism and Linux.

based on Dirk and Robert Lender (sorry, not in German, but this also a tiny just-imho-blog-entry)