Lately I’ve become more and more frustrated with WordPress for various reasons. One major reason is plugin spam: plugins that basically are mostly useless and require a paid version to actually work, or to actually work well. There’s no easy way to filter out genuine free plugins vs. ones that are not, but the ratio of bad to good is simply way to high and I’m just sick of trying plugins and hoping each one is not a sham, that it actually works, and that it is actively maintained.
It turns out that not many of the thousands of plugins available meet that criteria, and I just find that model that WordPress represents is a fucked model and not the way I want to work with information technology.
For example, I want a gallery on some sites and I have spent hours trying different supposed solutions for the exact type of slideshow plugin I want, and basically after wasting all that time I still have not found anything that really is what I need. This, after having tried so many and eventually realizing they were just spam plugins (i.e. companies trying to get money), or else had major bugs, or else were very old and not actively maintained.
Considering the fact that there exists a plethora of Open Source code there’s no excuse for this. For example, for galleries there’s the excellent OSS project fancyBox. Getting fancyBox is as easy as getting it from the git repository and putting the code where you want. That is how its supposed to be to search, acquire, and deploy software. Not this BS with WordPress (which, incidentally, is very similar to the severe BS of apps for Android which are the same kind of spam as many WordPress plugins and even worse.). When I want to find a tool, app, or technology to help me out I want to be using sites like github and sourceforge, not WordPress plugins.
As soon as I decided I want to start using a different, healthier model I felt a lot better. I’m now learning about using Adobe Dreamweaver to create Fluid Grid Layouts which are responsive websites with fluid elements that will work with mobile phones, tablets, and computers. Instead of creating multiple separate site templates for each type of device, with Dreamweaver you can create one site that will work with all three types of devices.
Because there is less spoon-feeding than WordPress it means a steeper learning curve. But that steeper learning curve is sooo worth it! It is so much better to use a healthy model, and it is way more powerful I think. Instead of getting involved in brain-dead BS-level crap from companies proffering all kinds of spamware and sifting through the spoonfeed-level advice and commentary on forums, when I’m designing something I want to be thinking about what I’m actually designing. When I do need to investigate things with WordPress, I find that most of the support forums are full of useless or worse comments. Its aggravating trying to navigate through that while trying to find answers to things. Again, it represents a bad model that I want to transcend.
Beyond that, I’m not really interested in creating sites which are heavy on the actual features that WordPress is built around – sites with user comments, tags, etc. I don’t really need all the overhead that WordPress requires to run the sites that I want to run. Also, I simply would rather build my sites from scratch and have complete control over everything than have it made easy for me but be more limiting.
I understand that the initial intention of WordPress is good, but what it actually has become seems more like a nexus of bad models to me.
Going beyond
Because I have put a lot of time in setting up certain design elements for sites with WordPress, I found that its in fact very easy to use the web page Inspector feature of Firefox to just copy all my CSS and import it into Dreamweaver. Since I’m already familiar with most web design elements and with concepts like div containers with variable percentage widths, the jump to the next level is not too far.
Now I am in the process of actually learning Dreamweaver and being able to integrate my existing styles into the new system.
Am looking forward to the day when I can actually pull the plug on WordPress and start using my own custom-designed sites.
I think WordPress definitely has its uses. If I were to set up a basic site for someone with a small business so that they could easily manage and edit it, I would probably set WordPress up for them. But for what I now want to do it’s become too limiting and also a bad model to work with.
Further info
Here’s a good article on what are media queries which lie behind the magic of responsive layouts
In addition to the above-linked tutorial video, here is another one
Here’s a cool meta site where you can see screenshots of other other sites using fluid layouts at various screen dimensions
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