Chapter 7 - Wordpress: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Wordpress revolutionized blogging. It brought blogging to the masses. Sure, there are other platforms like blogger and livejournal, but what Wordpress did was put out in the public domain a large, popular system written PHP.

With the advent of Wordpress, anybody could hack the PHP scripts to make the blogging platform do what they wanted it do it.

“With great power comes great responsibility.” – Uncle Ben (from Spiderman)

Unfortunately, the power Wordpress availed was not met with great responsibility. Scripts were hacked with no thought toward overall design or usability. To make matters worse, Wordpress started in the days of PHP 4, when the language didn’t allow the constructs that allowed true programmers to create maintainable systems.

Wordpress was the best thing that happened to PHP, but it also was the worst thing that happened to the language.

It’s a case of too much success in the hands of too few artisans.

This attached a stigma to PHP.

Softwarati¹

Self absorbed programming intellectuals who comment on languages.

For your consideration … a commonly heard quote by the Softwarati:

“Oh. PHP’s a ghetto language. Ugly, hardly maintainable, but it works … most of the time”

Thank goodness Laravel came along to kick those Softwarati in their upturned noses.