Logical Chaos Theory

Developing An Easier World…

Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla. Sounds like spaghetti again.

I am overly tired of dealing with heavy site customizations that must take place within these “frameworks” such as Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla. It is very depressing for me because I have being forced to write bad code which is exactly what has to be done to make a “successful” module or reusable feature for any of these three frameworks. (and many others I’m sure)
My idea of what a good site development framework would be is one that is built on good programming practices and efficiently uses the appropriate design patterns. Using the MVC design pattern would be a must. It has proven it’s success in aiding in the organization of web application code. Needless to say, I have yet to see any of these content management systems properly implement that. I think that a framework that supported drop in module features is always useful for quick deployment and expansion but what happens when you need to customize one of those modules and its built with nothing but spaghetti code?
The majority of the cases that I have come up on thus far when needing to customize a Wordpress installation I usually have to turn to finding someone’s pre-built plugin and further customizing it how it is needed. What my findings have been on the majority of these customizations is that if I would have just built it from scratch from the start, I would have either spent the same amount of time or a little less and had a much higher quality product in the end. The reality is though, some of the things I have to do to make a plugin work in Wordpress is not what I would call quality work when all said and done so it’s really not that valuable to me in the end. I would much prefer that if I were going to write a custom module or plugin for an application, I would rather do it in a well structured development environment that follows good practices for enterprise level development. I don’t think any good programmer would argue that you can’t find that kind of structure in Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, or any other framework like thoses.

I am overly tired of dealing with heavy site customizations that must take place within these “frameworks” such as Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla. It is very depressing for me because I have being forced to write bad code which is exactly what has to be done to make a “successful” module or reusable feature for any of these three frameworks. (and many others I’m sure)

My idea of what a good site development framework would be is one that is built on good programming practices and efficiently uses the appropriate design patterns. Using the MVC design pattern would be a must. It has proven it’s success in aiding in the organization of web application code. Needless to say, I have yet to see any of these content management systems properly implement that. I think that a framework that supported drop in module features is always useful for quick deployment and expansion but what happens when you need to customize one of those modules and its built with nothing but spaghetti code?

The majority of the cases that I have come up on thus far when needing to customize a Wordpress installation I usually have to turn to finding someone’s pre-built plugin and further customizing it how it is needed. What my findings have been on the majority of these customizations is that if I would have just built it from scratch from the start, I would have either spent the same amount of time or a little less and had a much higher quality product in the end. The reality is though, some of the things I have to do to make a plugin work in Wordpress is not what I would call quality work when all said and done so it’s really not that valuable to me in the end. I would much prefer that if I were going to write a custom module or plugin for an application, I would rather do it in a well structured development environment that follows good practices for enterprise level development. I don’t think any good programmer would argue that you can’t find that kind of structure in Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, or any other framework like thoses.

</rant>



Tagged as , , , , , ,
Categorized as General, PHP

Leave a Reply