[wp-hackers] This was painful to read...

[Mike Schinkel]

On Nov 28, 2009, at 8:27 AM, Thomas Belknap wrote:
> Not criticizing at all. Drupal rocks at what it does. But it's not the kind
> of thing that a person just wanting to publish their words on the Internet
> would necessarily want to toy with. And what makes Drupal good - and I
> personally think what makes WordPress good - is that Drupal is pure
> abstraction and WordPress isn't. Drupal can be used to do any number of
> different types of websites, with the caveat that it doesn't easily lend
> itself to any specific type of website.

Well, I'll criticize Drupal then.  It's far too abstract; it's architecture is highly coupled and that makes if very difficult to get simple things done if those simple things were not envisioned by the people who wrote Drupal core.  Moderation in all things yet their abstraction is not moderate. In addition, it runs an incredible amount of code to load even the simplest page which adds server load on a high volume site and makes debugging a chore. Worse, the admin console is incredibly sluggish compared to Wordpress making admin tasks tedious at best, and the theming is so coupled with the core that it's very hard to theme.

The irony for me is that abstraction is what originally attracted me to Drupal over Wordpress. After living with it for 2 years I realized that it was a nightmare and not a blessing and switched to Wordpress instead.

> It's for pros who have a decent understanding of the core database
> concepts that drive web applications.

I disagree.  I taught database programming as early as 1987 and have seen the pendulum swing many times. Drupal on the surface appears to be well architected; once you use it you realize it is far too coupled for it's own good.

> WordPress is superlative at publishing, but if you want to create a Torrent
> site, you're probably not going to have much success. But you can get a
> publishing house setup in fifteen minutes. Why mess with that?


If "messing" is adding a thin layer to support custom post types and custom URLs then why not?

Besides, how many business people want to create Torrent sites?  Most want to build business-related sites.  Wordpress would be all 80% would need if it had custom post types and URLs to support.

> Anything that increases WP's flexibility without compromising its ease of
> use for the average pedestrian I would be fine with.

That's all I'm suggesting.

-Mike