Annoyed

Little by little I am getting frustrated by Wordpress. There is no doubt that overall it is one hell of a system, but those little things are the ones that eventually drive one up a god damn wall.

The newest offense: it is very hard to embed things like flash movies without having WP automatically rewrite the HTML, which usually ends breaking the theme. It is lame to have to post a Youtube video as a URL because WP won't leave the damn embed code alone.

I am writing this from Ecto, a program that I used for many years without issues. Suddenly after WP 2.0.x came out, Ecto stopped working. Not cool.

Another source of irritation is that it is still a pain in the ass to update WP. Because every person runs it different, it is almost impossible to put together a safe update utility. Notice I say safe, not simple.

Here's how you update Wordpress:

1. Backup the database, in my case I have a wizard available through cpanel.

2. Backup the plugins folder.

3. Backup the themes folder.

4. Backup the wp configuration file.

5. Take a screen capture of the plugins menu, which is the easiest way to note which ones are enabled. Disable ALL plugins.

6. Backup .htaccess.

7. Delete EVERYTHING except the wp configuration file.

8. Download the new Wordpress release.

9. Copy your wp configuration file into the new release.

10. Copy your plugins and themes into the new release.

11. Copy everything to your web server.

12. Execute the update script.

13. Make sure you did not kill the site.

14. Enable your plugins.

Now imagine having to do this every time a new security hole is found and the WP folks fix it. It is a lot of work.

And what if you are running more than one WP blogs? You are screwed. Even if you use WP MU, you are screwed because they'll lag behind the main WP releases.

Well, what about using Wordpress.com?

I tried, but I noticed an undercurrent of smugness that reminded me of Live Journal. I don't want to be part of a community, I just want to write my blogs. It is almost the same argument of trying to pick between Flickr and Picasa. Flickr is obviously an online community, while Picasa is a photo dump. If you want to upload people and brag about them, compare them to others in the same subject, etc. then Flickr is for you. If all you want is to upload pictures to use them in your web site, or to share them with friends, send them to a print service, etc., then Picasa works fine.

After messing with Wordpress.com I decided I did not like having other members dictating or complaining about my content. As long as the content doesn't break US law, I should be feel to do whatever the hell I damn please within the terms of service. What these people were doing was creating artificial political systems, sort of what happens when you get a homeowners association telling you that you can't paint your fence in a specific color.