Wedge

I... do not think it's for the best.
The only thing that will make a difference to me when it comes to avatars, is finally getting rid of any possibility of loading them through PHP. (Yikes...)

Yeah, we need to do that, soon.

I just noticed it and thought I'd share. I didn't expect it to be greeted with mass enthusiasm, because it doesn't really work in our case, but I figured I'd share just in case.

The WordPress community being the size it is, it's bound to have countless good ideas which we might be inspired to use on our side (adapted to our specific needs of course.) No problem :)

That's the thing I'm most surprised at, actually. I took a cruise through their anti-spam plugins, and I find very few actually new ideas, many of which I'd already thought of and either implemented or rejected because they aren't viable for widespread use.

I'm also slightly surprised to note that there's only 16,000 plugins; given the relative dominance of WP over SMF, you'd think there would be more than 10x the plugins...

Possibly because most blogs don't require a lot of plugins...?

Neither do most forums, but the argument stands. And remember, WP is The Platform You Can Do Anything With, so various magazines and sites tell me (the rabidity of fanboyism about WP as a CMS is why I won't subscribe to .net magazine)

It does its core job reasonably well, but not a lot else, which means you need to weigh it down with stuff to do anything more interesting.

Technically it is... But so are many others.Oh, this strikes a chord.
Yes, there is a great amount of WP fanboyism in .net, but it's not particularly because of a secret organization or something.
The .net team is also biased towards: Jeffrey Zeldman (everything he says is The Future -- I have to admit the issue he supervised last year was excellent though, a great introduction to HTML5), jQuery, PHP, Ruby (they're trying to, at least...), and HTML5. But that's because a majority of web design agencies use these technologies in priority, and they simply discuss what people use -- because they need to sell. Web Design Magazine has the exact same scope, it talks mostly about WordPress, jQuery and PHP.
Heck, I'd say they're pretty transparent about it all. They published many a reader's letter about .net being biased, and they simply replied that they're trying to stay current. WP is what most web designers use to make websites, so they talk about it.
I'm more concerned about their biased towards ExpressionEngine. It's a paid-for CMS, not exactly cheap ($99 for the basic version), and half of their articles about CMSes discuss it. I don't see the point... I actually prefer seeing WP-related articles because at least it doesn't feel like they were paid to talk about it.

It is... because there's only a pure foundation there, and little *real* functionality. So you can do anything with it if you can build on top of it - but that's true of anything.I'm not fussed as to why, I find the fact they're fawning over it like it is the Next Big Thing, Right Here Right Now so problematic.

I get that WP is extensible and can be shaped to whim. It doesn't change the fact that under the hood it's a steaming pile of shit. On my travels today I saw some guy talking about how badly it performs on Windows/IIS. Now, while PHP+IIS isn't my platform of choice, there is no arguing that Zend and MS have put some serious effort in to making it run better on Server 2k8, and it isn't the bear it used to be to run. That said, you can only imagine the rabid Windows Is Crap, Use Linux fanboyism - but most of those didn't notice the undertone of 'it's running 20 queries on the front page'. Doesn't matter what under-core you have, 20 queries is still 20 queries.

Then I heard about people who run with 100+ (or even 500 queries) per page, and apparently that doesn't matter provided the page is fast. I call BS; there's no need for 20 queries on such a minimalist front page. And staring at the code, it frightens me that it's so popular because it really is that bad under the hood.I accept that they need to sell. But at the same time, there are other things out there that can perform as well as, or better than, those things for certain kinds of jobs. It'd be like a Search Engines Monthly magazine that only ever mentioned Google and couldn't praise them enough. Sure, it's the dominant one, but it's far from the only one, and spending a few pages talking about niche items would make it more balanced and less rabid-fanboy.Over the summer my local store didn't have any .net magazines, but it did have Web Design Magazine. I wasn't sure if .net hadn't rebranded, so similar did they feel.Then they're a long way behind. They only talked about node.js recently except that it's a couple of years old by now. 'Trying to stay current' is an excuse, it's not a reason. Fawning over jQuery and WP is not staying current, it's playing it safe.Haven't seen much in the way of EE coverage, so no comment.