One of the things that bothers me about WordPress is how bad the code base really is. I’ll be honest, WordPress has come a long way and its features are pretty fantastic. What they’ve done with the administration options, combined with all of the plugins that exist for this CMS, really make WordPress a great tool for a blog. However, from a developer’s point of view, WordPress can be tough to tackle to get one’s entire site to validate.
WordPress simply has too much code that does not conform to the strict XHTML 1.0 guidelines. I could go in and attempt to fix all of it, but I feel like I would break too much of the code for such a venture to be worth it. Furthermore, do I really want to look at all of the garbage that has been built as part of WordPress? No, and I most likely wont.
I’ve thought about rolling my own content management system, but I’ve decided against it. My reason is simply that I should be using the tools that exist for me and that I should not be reinventing the wheel. However, making my own would definitely serve as great web development practice, so maybe I’ll revisit the idea one day. Who knows.
I’ve made several additions to this site, the most significant of which are commenting. Now anyone can comment on the blog portion. I’ve also changed the right sidebar when looking at the blog so that you can navigate by topic or even search the blog for particular keywords.
I cleaned up a lot of my code to minimize redundancy. This means the blog now uses my site’s regular CSS styles instead of having its own folder with the same files modified slightly. It’s just going to be a huge time saver since I only need to modify one stylesheet to get both the blog and the rest of the site up to date. I’ve also made minor style modifications, although I still haven’t touched the header. It’s pretty bad, and I want to change it, and add a pic to it.
Other things I still want to do (in no particular order):
I’ll try to get some opinions about the header as I’m pretty terrible at graphics design. I’ll probably tackle the RSS feed and adding useful content to the right sidebar first, but we’ll see.
Tags: clean code, comments, Wordpress
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