Wordpress

A while ago, I was hired to extend a web site for a small company. The web site had been build by one of their graphics designers, who did not normally work with programming. As a result, this site had been built using Wordpress, because this was the easiest system for this non-programmer to start with, while he at the same time had to learn the basics of HTML, CSS and PHP. The custom work that he had done was not the best, but still quite impressive considering the time frame and the fact that he did not know anything about coding when he started. But this article is not about designers turning programmers. It is a small overview of Wordpress, and about some of the reasons why I would never build anything with in, unless I am forced to.

Starting on this site, I did not know anything about Wordpress. All that I knew was that it used to be a small blog system, which apparently had grown larger over time. I started reading some of the documentation, and it did seam like something worth looking into. I especially liked the idea of their action and filter callbacks. However, once I got started, I became less impressed.

First of all Wordpress is missing a lot of rules. Sure they have their Plugin.php file, but there is no rules as to what this file should contain. If you compare it to Drupal, which have a module file containing hooks with strict naming schemes, Wordpress introduces the same policy as PHP, where no standard for anything exist. Now I do like PHP, but it would be a lot better, if they implemented parts of Hack into it. Static Typing for one.

Their plugin system is also very minimal. If you need to add some additional tings to the existing blog system, then this is fine. But if you need to add some extensive work into Wordpress, you will need to integrate this directly into the "Theme" files. Also while talking about the Theme files, I think that the people behind Wordpress has misunderstood the word "Theme". These files actually makes up most of the system. They work as bootstrap of some sort, they contain a lot of the site logic as well as the Themes. All in all, they act much like MVC wrapped into one single "Theme" file.

The worst part of Wordpress, some of which was mentioned above, is their action and filers system. The idea is great, but it is extremely pure designed. This is the part that would have benefited the most by some stricter rules. One of the things that one should avoid when working with PHP, is their dynamic caller functions "call_user_func" and "call_user_func_array". Requests that normally takes nanoseconds to load, will take milliseconds and sometimes seconds, when introduced to the above functions. And this is only by a few calls pr. request. Wordpress has integrated this into the entire core of the system. Even before the initialization is done, these functions has been called numerous times. After that, even more calls is done by more of Wordpress's functions, by themes and by plugins. Depending on what you have installed and enabled, you can end up in 3 digit calls to these extremely slow functions. This is the worst design that I have ever seen in any framework for any language, and I cannot stop thinking about those poor CPU's that has to process all of this unnecessary code.

A better design would have been to implement either a strict procedural design, allowing only functions to be parsed, which can be executed without any additional resources. Or implement a strict OOP design by using interfaces, much like how callbacks works in Android.

If you just need a small blog site with few visitors and if you hate your server, then by all means, use Wordpress. But if you want a serious site with many visitors, if you love your server and if you'd like to have some nice coding standards, I would suggest using another CMS or build one using one of the many frameworks available. Wordpress is a mess, there is no standards of any kind, most of your work will have to be implemented using different hacks to work properly and it will rape your server daily.

Microsoft Windows? Why?

I have not been a Windows user since XP was the new big thing, and even before that time, I was not a big fan of Windows. Why? Well Windows have always had a thing where it was trying to push every single one of my buttons, which often resulted in hardware pieces (Mouse, Keyboard, Monitors, etc.) being thrown across a room. This ended up becoming to expensive, and I decided to give Linux a try instead, which have saved me a lot on hardware purchases.

But living in a Microsoft world while being the guy known to have IT knowledge, it is not so easy to get rid of Windows 100%, although you might not use it at home. Once in awhile, people you know will come to you with their Windows problems. Most of the time I tell them to use a system that I want to support, if they require me to do so. I did not switch away from my Windows problems just to take on every one else's.

But for some reason I did not say no when I friend of mine came to me to get help formatting he's laptop. I thought that since Windows is now at version 8, a lot must have changed since the old XP. A quick format and a few driver installs would properly not take up to much of my time, especially since all the drivers was stored on a USB pen drive. But just as I remember it, things are never that easy with Windows. The installation went fine, the newly installed Windows booted without issues, only a few driver installs remained. I plugged-in the USB pen drive and opened 'My Computer', just like I would do on my Linux machines, which takes about half a second to load USB devices. But Windows did not load it, instead it pops up with a small yellow driver install notification in the button right corner? Well okay. But then it fails to locate a driver? A simple UNIVERSAL Mass Storage device with a Microsoft msdos partition table containing a Microsoft Fat32 file system, fails to load on a brand new Microsoft Windows 8 operating system?

I plugged-in the USB pen drive into my own laptop, running on Fedora 20, and my file manager opened right away, displaying the content of the drive. Now which of these operating system is known for being so user friendly?

I cannot specify how I managed to get this drive working. I spent about an hour playing around in the control panel, unloading/loading drivers, plug/unplugging the USB pen drive, trouble shooting and much more. Finally at some point, for some reason, it started working. But I would really not call this user friendly, especially since this is just one small example of the many issues one will stumble upon, when working with Windows. This operating system takes to much of once time on ridicules tasks like this and it increases your blood pressure to a very dangerous level. Why people keep insisting on using it, I really don't know. I find *nix systems like Linux, OSX and such, much more friendly to work with. Use those and you might even live longer.

Android Resources

This is not a guide or an article. It is mainly an observation that I can no longer ignorer. The issue is that most Android developers have a habit of working out custom solutions using the few tools that they know, rather than looking to see if Android has a pee-built tool for that specific task.

In this case, the issue is regarding Android's Resources class. Let's say that we want to create a dynamic string using placeholders. If you try to google this, you will mostly find the same solution on each page that you visit. I have written this solution below.

<resources>
    <string name="dynamic_string">Let\'s insert the number %1$d</string>
</resources>

Integer numberToInsert = 1;
String dynamicString = String.format( getResources().getString(R.string.welcome_messages), numberToInsert );

The problem here is that there is no point in including String.format into this, because Resources.getString is already able to do this for you.

Integer numberToInsert = 1;
String dynamicString = getResources().getString(R.string.welcome_messages, numberToInsert );

If you took a look at the documentation for this method, you would see that it does not only take [String] as an argument. It actually takes [String, Object...], where each Object parsed will be used to replace the placeholders of the string.

Please have a look at the Resources Documentation. This class contains a lot of useful tools for when working with the resources in Android. Many of which is not seen being used very much, if even at all.