Before I begin with this, I would like to make two points, briefly and once once, because they distracts from the overall message. First, comments are disabled on these posts because I think that this issue is very personal. Yes, you deserve a say, especially if you’re a blogger, and I encourage you to do so. But please do it on your own blog, back-link or not.
Second, WordPress has been a fun ride. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve met a lot of fantastic people, some of whom I consider great friends. Without WordPress, I would not be in the place I am today, and for that I am thankful. But life progresses and people mature, and so does software - at least, it’s supposed to - and that’s the point of this 5-part essay.
Three years ago I was using a home-grown PHP blog package called PageCat that I was certain would make me rich. Obviously, that didn’t pan out exactly as I expected, or you would all be using it right now. I caught onto the idea that I would not be able to make my software profitable much later than I really should have and at that time, I made the decision to concentrate on writing more than coding blog software. To facilitate this, I chose to let go of my home-grown application and search for something to take its place.
You may remember seeing a chart that showed the features of each blog package and how they compared to the others. I put that together and published it (in raw HTML, ironically) for anyone to see and use. It was slashdotted, etc, and such was my vault into the D-list of bloggerdom.
Shortly after I completed the list, I used the data I had collected to come to a decision on what software I would use for my own blogging. I chose WordPress primarily because when I was soliciting information for my chart, the support I received was on a different level than that of the other packages. And for an open source application, that was pretty profound.
Since my decision to stop coding and focus on my writing, I have fallen back into old habits. WordPress didn’t do some of the things that my old system did, and so I started to write plugins and contribute source code to the core product. Not too much longer passed before I was putting in as much work on the WordPress project as I was on my original self-authored software. I became a fixture around the WordPress community, and you can even see my name in the official list of contributing developers, which had been a pretty tight group.
I’m not sure what happened since the heyday of my WordPress development. I can point to a few specific events that I think are major contributing causes, but I don’t really believe that any single, specific event is the cause of my growing distaste for the WordPress project. I’ve just seen too many small things - decisions made based on politics or money rather than what is best for the software - that have led me to think that I no longer want to be a part of this; that my efforts are better spent actually contributing to a project that values (or at least considers) my contributions, rather than spinning my wheels.
It will be my effort now to enumerate a few of these major points and hopefully illustrate why you, too, should not be using WordPress.
Ironically, the first point I will make about why you shouldn’t use WordPress
