WordPress and Yahoo! Hosting Gripes

Having spent time installing and customising WordPress recently, I think it’s safely the best blogging platform for geeks and semi-geeks at the moment. You get just the right level of features, it’s really easy to install, and is supported by a huge range of plugins.

However, the templating system is embarrassingly bad, with seemingly no coherent thought put into designing something robust and simple; its ham-fisted attempts at simplicity merely result in extra functions, extra parameters, and bits of markup lurking within functions and the admin interface. If you’re a web developer completely restyling a WordPress-based blog then allow a little extra time for dealing with the hackiness.

This leads me onto a problem with Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting’s integrated WordPress. Even though there’s an option to make the blog your home page, it still forces you to install it to a subfolder. So you get a blog home page, but it’s a duplicate of the one in the subfolder, all your other pages are within the subfolder, and it’s the subfolder address that goes into your feed, Home links in standard templates, etc.

With a bit of PHP a permanent redirect can limit the effects of the duplicate home page, but it’s still bad news for perfectionists.

Sat 24th Jun 2006, 2:00pm GMT

Filed under: Client-side Coding, Rants and Grumbles, Server-side Coding, Software, Web, Weblogs