Drawar

What's giving you trouble?

Just the workflow in general. I took a look at the theme I was developing a few weeks ago and my eyes were completely mind blown at how annoying it is to produce simple results. You'd think such a popular blog cms would be written a little better.

EDIT: I would be more than happy to write my own blog software, but I don't have time to encompass all the aspects (Pinging, Trackbacks, etc.). I barely have enough time to even attempt to try and develop a theme

Why not try Movable Type?

Bollocks, I had a large post typed up for here earlier and I must have forgotten to press the submit button.

The gist of it was try using sandbox... I don't use wordpress or make themes for it but I've heard that it's a lot easier to build themes for.

I was also going to suggest writing your own CMS but you've covered that in your edit.

I'd vote for sandbox also. Wordpress isn't that bad once you do one and it does make sense ish eventually. Personally, I find it one of the easier blogging systems to design for.

I've always found wordpress very easy to theme. There's just a handful of files unless you want to break it out and make it even more modular.

I find WordPress an absolute joy to design with.

I think its really easy to create good designs for wordpress...

Hey, it took me a while to figure it all out too, after you get used to it, everything makes more sense. I'd say don't give up, keep playing around you won't be disappointed.

Ive found wordpress to be the easiest blog/cms to skin so far

much much easier than phpWcms or ExpressionEngine or Joomla/Mambo

I personally think Joomla has to be one of the worst I've come across for the sheer 'hunt the code in the haystack'. Yeah they've got a wrapper design template but if you want to remove tables you simply have to hack to get that and it's into the actual php / pseudo html you have to go. Hardly easy or elegant. I've not experienced Express Engine but heard some good things about the ease of templating.

Wordpress continues to go further down the drain with every 2.x release.
Stick to an older version, thats what i used to do.

Or you could try Habari for your OOP needs

I have yet to see this "drain" people speak of when they talk about WordPress.

I've used everything under the sun from Joomla to B2Evolution etc... and I've never been happier than with WP2.

Sure there's a learning curve but show me anything WITHOUT one... hell, at least I don't need a dummies book like I would with Joomla/Mambo.

Wordpress is still awesome.

I don't think your issue is with Wordpress itself; I think you're more frustrated with your level of understanding on the loop. Once you get the loop, theming Wordpress is very straight forward, and flexible.

Yeah, what's this drain? More secure, simpler to use? I like that drain. Keep it coming.

ryanarrowsmith is right, once you "get" the loop the rest just falls into place.

Not to mention with the bundles available for TextMate... you don't have to memorize oddball code.

I love wordpress. I'm not a designer of course and do not have time to work on all that stuff but with a little help even someone like me can do something with it.

Yeah, you should check out sandbox and blueprint.

The WordPress loop is like the easiest thing in the history of development. It can get complicated, but it's usually a walk in the park.

Once you get into stupid multiple random results from plugins, transferring them over the WP loop correctly and then integrating it with the rest of your work... then it's frustrating. At least for my limited PHP.

What's the drain of WordPress? It's likely stuff you didn't even realize WordPress was doing for/to you.

For example, the system controls what posts you fetch by default. So even if you use a custom query to fetch posts for your Loop, the system is loading a complete separate set of posts even before you get that far. The only way to avoid this is to implement a hook that shorts out the built-in posts query.

Challenge: Display comments of a post (even just the most recent one) directly below the post when you're displaying more than one post on a page. Good luck. (Note that this is something that Movable Type can do with reasonable ease.)

Aren't there still template tags that need documenting? Can you look at the source alone and know what a function does? No source commenting, no locally installed manual, and functions spread over who-knows where?

You can create a good design with HTML in pretty much any system. It's the ease of use of the system beyond what HTML you can create that should be of concern.

I have been using WordPress in quite a while now. I dont see what is giving you so much trouble.

I dont believe in WP religously, but WP is doing great for me. As for the workflow is concerned, and to get simple changes, I feel that you will encounter the same issues with outher cms. Its generally our working habits that make our life better or worst.

If you can explain the details of your problems, I am sure I and others will be able to suggest something out of it. Lets hope.

Apart from a few glitches they encountered, WP seems to be pretty stable now and is the most widely used blogging plateform on the planet.

The only way to avoid this is to implement a hook that shorts out the built-in posts query.

Actually, you don't have to add anything to avoid the loop defaults. You can just delete the loop all together and simply query the DB directly. I stopped running the full loop on my homepage about 3 sites ago and just query what I want directly.

Uh oh Ryan... now their heads are gonna esssssplode.

Did you bring the Galagher Trash Bags?

For a true brain freeze try creating a theme for Joomla that doesn't have tables anywhere on the site - I recently had to do this - you'd better like diving deep if you want to achieve that. To me word press is a dream to code and yep the loop is about the hardest bit really. Yes there are limitations - there are with text pattern, expresison engine... joomla... and so on and so on.

I'm also scratching my head over this 'drain' - it seems when something has been about for a while certain people just jump train and proclaim 'abandon ship it's not fit anymore'. Personally, I'm sticking as I'm quite happy with my ship thanks.

@RightOn: I thought you had them? :)

I don't find WordPress particularly difficult to work with, but I've been fiddling with it for quite a while now. If I'd had any previous PHP experience no doubt it would have been easier, but speaking as a designer, WP generally makes my life easier when producing sites with more than a few pages which the owner wants to be able to change themselves, and obviously it's simple to add a blog or news facility.

Themes are pretty powerful---they have all the potential of a plugin, as well as the simple display stuff---and once you get your head round the way things work in WordPress (easier than you might imagine) you'll start to wonder what it was that seemed so hard in the first place.

I've always found WP to be easier to design with.....but I have spent more time on WP than other platforms.

The original "Frustrated with WordPress" note is the equivalent of going to a Christian forum and writing "Frustrated with Jesus Christ".

Every time I see it on the 9rules front page, I giggle. :-)

@ryanarrowsmith: I like your idea of just ditching the loop altogether, that's probably one of the most annoying things to deal with.

@matkem: I set up MovableType on my dev site and I would love to learn perl and all, but I'd love to stick with something written and based in a language I am more familiar with for the time being.

Thanks for the input everyone. I'll take a look at Sandbox. Maybe I should start with a base template and change minor things. This will be my first actual theme for WordPress so maybe I'm being too hard on myself by trying to design from scratch. I have PHP knowledge and am pretty good with XHTML standards given I haven't released anything out in the open (I fiddle around a lot locally).

A lot of my frustration comes from the smaller things in WordPress such as how most functions return data, functions not necessarily having a constant name base, etc. I got in a huge fuss before I figured out that most functions return data via 'echo()' and not 'return', which changes a lot of things when you try and grab data from a function and use it for another function.

Sometimes I just want to start all over again (and a lot of the time that happens, I do start over), sometimes I just sit back and smile at what I have done with little fuss. The wonderful world of design and programming, eh?

@ryanarrowsmith: Deleting the post loop does not prevent the query for those posts from executing, or the memory allocation used to store those post results. WordPress executes this most expensive set of queries before it even gets to your theme's code.

Basically what you accomplish by removing the default loop and implementing your own query is double the number of queries and memory required to fetch the posts for your home page for every request. And the only way to avoid that - as I said - is to provide a function for that particular plugin hook that shorts out that query so that it does nothing. The hook in question is 'pre_get_posts'.

From an exclusively aesthetic perspective, yes, this will achieve what you want, but it's not something I would recommend for a high-traffic client, or a low-budget shared server.

I've played around with TextPattern, ExpressionEngine, Joomla and Drupal. I even briefly looked at ModX. None of them were as easy to theme for (or just generally work with) as Wordpress. I don't think you'll find a simpler, more customizable CMS. You're already using the best one on the market. :)

Someone suggested Habari... I haven't looked it it yet, but I read somewhere along the line (maybe when the project began) that the code base was a branch-off from Wordpress. Some members of the Habari team were also once contributors to WP - so my guess is it wouldn't be that far removed from Wordpress when it comes to theming. Don't give up on WP just yet! I struggled a bit at first too, but if you keep at it things will starting clicking.

If you really want something OOP, take a look at Habari. But I think that if you really look at Wordpress in-depth, you'll find that it's the most flexible one available. And even if some things seem a bit backwards, that flexibility pays off in the end.