I’ve been using WordPress for over 4 years now. I also have developed some plugins like Twitter Badge, WP-RIR, WP-PageScroll and I wrote few more thinks about it.
We can say that I’m not the average user but neither I’m a PRO developer for WP. The point is that as user I Love WordPress but from other side as technician sometimes I HATE IT.
I had a few discussions with people about the good and the bad things of WP, of course at the end for me it’s positive, but it bothers me that there’s few known issues that they should take care of and they don’t.
Anyway here’s my list with a short description.
The Love
- Easy, yep WP it’s easy and everybody knows how to use it. Great work on it.
- Community, there’s a huge community of developers and designers that releases their work for free making this software good.
- GPL, free software license, what else do you want?
- Custom, it’s pretty easy for any normal user to install plugins, themes…even change them.
- Upgrades and updates, they are automatically making your life easier, same as 1st point.
- WordCamps, this is a great idea I may say and I love it!
The Hate
- Slow, it maybe fast to you, but for me it’s a really heavy application to be a blog software. Without plugins to cache content you can’t run an instance of WP in a shared hosting….
- Database, this is terrible, still uses MySam, now many people will say this is an advantage, come on we are in 2010! relational databases it’s a must have, and what about normalization? UPDATE: Ok, its cool works faster, and you keep the relation in the code xD
- Download size, now a days this is no trouble, but how can be over 2MB size?
- Bugs, there’s so many WP installations that some people is trying really hard to hack this software and for instance finding bugs. Thankfully we have a great community that seems to work 24/7.
- Plugins, I love the plugins and the work from the community, but you need to be aware what you install in your WP, I know it’s not the fault of WP, but some how as they do with the themes being picky, should be with plugins testing them even just a little bit.
As conclusion I will say that they should focus to improve performance instead of adding features and more and more features….And as I said before WP it’s my favorite blogging and even CMS tool.
Last words: Thanks to the WP team and the community for the work they have done, this is just a constructive opinion meaning the best intentions.