Some annoying things about WordPress

By | July 20, 2008

WordPress is that blog CMS that powers millions of blogs in the blogosphere. As a WordPress user, I can understand why many consider WordPress the best thing since sliced bread. But, there are some things about WordPress which annoy me. Of course, nothing is perfect, but at least we can keep working on them to make things better? For some, life is not the same without WordPress. The Web has been transformed by WordPress. Those are big shoes to fill. Despite that, WordPress does get on my nerves at times. So without further adieu, here are some of the top things about WordPress which I find annoying. Do you do too?

WordPress

1) WordPress is not very secure – OK, we have many good reasons why we must always update WordPress; the top reason being that WordPress is quite simply, NOT the most secure CMS around. The past several months have seen a number of complaints by people who had their blogs hacked. The good (and bad news) is that WordPress has so many developers and users that no problem goes unheeded for long, but that also makes it a more open target.

2) The WordPress updates are too frequent – Although necessary, it still annoys me to no end. The only way it wouldn’t annoy is if there was a one button push to update the entire blog, just like the plugins. As long as that feature is not a reality, upgrading WordPress will always be annoying. Especially for those that have dozens or more blogs. Quite disturbing is the fact that older WordPress versions will NOT be supported at all, including WordPress 2.5.

3) WordPress is relatively resource intensive – This is one of the fundamental weaknesses of WordPress. On shared hosting, it is not very noticeable, but if you run a dedicated or VPS server, you will soon realize how much memory it actually takes up. A common problem encountered is the “Memory Exhaustion Problem” which indicates your WordPress has exceeded its memory limit threshold, and you need to allocate more memory to it, and also deactivate some plugins. Chief plugin culprits that suck memory are Popularity contest, and Global Translator plugin, Also, if your blog is heavy on pics, Google XML sitemaps plugin may cause problems.

4) The WordPress Tiny MCE wysiwyg editor won’t behave – This is another annoying thing stemming back from the earliest days, so much so that people had to resort to using the bare HTML editor to write (and still do). For example, if you want to center a picture in WordPress, you need to switch to the basic HTML editor, because the wysiwyg editor keeps interfering with the HTML code. Either that or editing the CSS file.

I need emphasize a bit more on WordPress security. A good plugin that helps to scan a WordPress site is WordPress Exploit Scanner. Only does basic trouble shooting, but it’s better than nothing. A good idea is to submit your blog in Google Webmaster Tools because if your blog has been hacked by spammers, it tends to show itself up in Webmaster Tools, rather clearly.

Even though WordPress is still one of the best blogging scripts out there, it is far from perfect. Let’s hope its development is progressing in the right direction, both for its sake and the millions of bloggers who rely on it everyday.

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