

Why I Hate Your Web App - cisforcody
http://www.drawar.com/articles/why-i-hate-your-web-app/85/

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Vindexus
"What Is It You Do Again?"

This one is always a big pet peeve of mine. Taglines need to describe what you
do, not how awesome you are. I hate seeing ones like "Together. Create.
Share." or whatever. I'd much prefer "Create slideshows with a group." or
something similar.

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blasdel
I've had this theory for a while that successful consumer-to-consumer webapps
(Blogs, Forums, SNSes, etc.) are almost never well-engineered.

I came up with it on the cuff at a MetaFilter 10th anniversary party where
Matt Haughey was mocking me back for having commented online about how
shittily written his site was -- I realized that I probably wouldn't be
standing there drinking his beer if he were a better programmer, the site just
wouldn't have taken off when it did.

On the one hand you have both LiveJournal and Facebook as examples of big
successful apps that were technically terrific very early -- everything else I
can think of never got used.

On the other hand you have everything else: Frontier, Movable Type, Blogger,
Wordpress, Twitter, PHPbb, vBulletin, Friendster, Myspace, MediaWiki, etc. --
all heaping piles of shit code, some of which had the grace to either be
completely rewritten or abandoned en-masse for the next heaping pile.

It's extraordinarily difficult to execute well with users socially _and_
execute well on the engineering.

~~~
litewulf
I'm not sure about the others, but one of the interesting things is that
wordpress grew out of b2. The code quality in b2 was about what you'd expect
given wordpress' initial security reputation.

I find it particularly interesting because you'd expect OSS that will be
picked up by others to have good code quality though. Add to that the fact
that at the time your typical PHP user probably had more technical competence
than most (webhosting, particularly supporting PHP was rarer then)

~~~
IgorPartola
The problem with OSS is that you have to contend with some sort of a
community. With WordPress you will open up the source code, throw up in your
mouth a little, get the urge to patch things up and realize that your changes
will never make it upstream. WordPress works. That's why it's so popular. It's
easy to install, much easier to use than a lot of web publishing platforms out
there and there are lots of "useful" plugins. Most of all, it's got the
ubiquitous support: LAMP is the de facto standard for cheap hosting out there.

However, it does some things that keep me up at night. It stores serialized
PHP arrays to define what users have access to (the MU branch). It strips away
magic quotes based on runtime configuration, only to add them right back using
a PHP loop. It does not use any form of output buffering. It's themes are PHP
files that often times contain core business logic (somewhat of a PHP problem
really, but still). WordPress is bad code and there is nothing anybody can do
about it.

This of course is not true of all OSS projects: far from it. Just so happens
that when a small community controls core development and the initial codebase
is not great, which is the case with many early PHP projects, the outcome is
that the code will stay bad.

~~~
ido
OT: what would you recommend instead of WordPress? I will be migrating away
from blogger soon, since they will stop supporting ftp uploading.

~~~
vorador
I would suggest using a static blog, like jekyll
(<http://wiki.github.com/mojombo/jekyll/>) or, if you would like something
more user-friendly, dotclear (<http://dotclear.org/> \- a blog engine quite
popular in france but it never really took off anywhere else).

