I am so frustrated with WordPress today – and – that saddens me because I have been a staunch WordPress advocate since May 2004. Almost 6 full years of advocating for what I believed was a revolutionary online tool!
Today…not so much. I have been fighting with WordPress for THREE hours over the formatting of one of my pages. WordPress keeps adding <div> statements and removing my <div id =”nameIused”> statements. It keeps relocating the ending </div> statements so that the style definitions apply to a huge section that WordPress has decided belongs together instead of the section that I want the styling to apply to. Everytime I fix the formatting to what I want, WordPress changes it!!!!!!!!!
Give me a break WordPress developers! I know better than you what my intention is. I have already created the page in Dreamweaver and passed it by W3C validation – so – everything is in balance. WHY can’t WordPress just accept the HTML I enter and leave it at that? STOP TRYING TO SAVE ME FROM MYSELF! I know how to code.
When a tool starts presuming that it knows better than you and changes your work in a way that you did not intend it to be – don’t you think that it is time to look for another tool? I’m thinking so!
This frustration brings up other concerns about WordPress and I am wondering if I will be able to promote it in the future.
Over the last year and a half WordPress has evolved into a resource-hogging application that is out of step with worldwide trends. It uses database resources to such an extent that I call it “abusing” database resources. In these newer versions of WordPress, every time you save a post or page, the previous version is saved as well. In fact, if YOU don’t save a post or page within a time period that WordPress has defined, WordPress saves a version for you – because of course – it knows better than you.
Take a minute to think about that. How many authors write in your blog? How many times does each author save his/her work? How many times does WordPress save the work for him/her? Maybe you are writing and the phone rings so you save your work. Maybe the group is heading out to lunch, so, you save your work. Maybe you need to give more thought to the wording of the next paragraph, so, you save your work. Time to get more coffee, and you save your work. You can easily end up with 20 versions of a simple post or page.
If WordPress gave us the option to NOT do “versioning”, then I wouldn’t have a problem; I could just shut the hoarding off. Unfortunately, it doesn’t give us the option.
Also WordPress creates three versions of the images that you upload via “Add New Image”. Most people do not have visibility to this because they do not look at their hosting account. If you are one who does, you know that now there are FOUR versions of every image you upload; the one that you originally uploaded and the three that WordPress made.
Again, there is no toggle switch in the dashboard where a user can select to NOT make the other copies… This quadrupuling of images is another example of the WordPress developers’ disregard for the computer resources it is using.
This trend of using unnecessary resources is so counterintuitive to 2010 thinking! In this day and age when everyone else is going “green” and making efforts to conserve, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to “authentically” recommend to my customers that they convert their websites to run on the WordPress platform. I’ve got some seious re-thinking and research to do… sigh…
Click on the title of this post to bring your to Comments so that you can give me some guidance. Which content management package are you using and why?