I’m so sick of WordPress. 🙁 Seriously, I couldn’t be more annoyed with this platform. I mean I have dealt with some terrible software and software providers over the years, enough that I am actively building everything I use so I don’t have to put up with it (only a few things left). But WordPress just can’t stop being dumb.
When I heard that WordPress was going to introduce collaborative writing using polling against the servers hosting the site, I was pretty sure I was going to leave WP for good. Yeah, what a great idea. Lets break everyone’s servers by rolling out an updated on a platform which encourages auto updates. How could I possible build things on or encourage my clients to use a platform which willfully nukes every website because they want a feature that no one else wants.
Well, then some relief. The community made enough noise against introducing server destroying juggernauts. 7.0 was released with this feature removed. Even better the release got delay a little bit give us a little more time to work on things other than triaging WP updates.
A new feature I was actually looking forward to native PHP access to the WP icons. Since the WP icons have never been exposed in WP core before even though Gutenberg uses them everywhere, this was great to see. Admittedly, I was pretty excited. I wrote an Enum and unit tests around the implementation so I would be ready when it landed. Whoops, another tease. Before the release the majority of the icons got pulled leaving only a small number of icons. 🙁 Still a cool idea, but limited to the point of barely useful. Easier just to use @lucide.
Lets not forget the spacing was removed from all the Gutenberg form components so now all the block settings and editor sidebars have fields mashed together for basically every plugin or theme we are using. It turns out filling the browser console full of warnings did not actually get all the alienated developers to update all the code with __next flags before WP 7. Maybe if you’re going to break backward compatibility in a way that only developers can fix perhaps you should support, I don’t know, you’re communities developers.
Ok the 2 IMO features worth paying attention to got pulled or sliced up so now what did we get? Well, I’ll tell you in case you haven’t already tried 7.0. Its pretty obvious….. The admin pages flash. Or it is fade? I can’t tell. So yeah, navigation works the same but now you get flashy screen when it happens. Throws me off every time. Feels like my sites are broken or something.
Great job team! Thank you so much for adding strobe effects to my admin panel. Warms my heart all over again for WordPress.
If you disagree with me, no worries. The web is filled with “WordPress 7 – Massive Update” articles filled with, “The 5 things to know about WordPress 7”. You won’t want to miss it. Bonus: Learning everything you need to know won’t be time consuming.
P.S. Did you happen to catch the PHPverse conference? As usually, it was really well done with knowledgeable and professional presenters. Well, except for one session…. “WordPress is dead. Long live WordPress”. This session was presented by Automattic :-(. An entire session listing all the issues we all have with WordPress and how we are all wrong. A poorly planned advertisement to encourage users to give WordPress another try. Seriously, read the room. The conference if for PHP experts, not CMS customers. We have all gone very deep on WordPress and are the ones with the problems you are talking about.
P.P.S. I was contacted by an employee at Automattic to discuss a position for me as a “Customer Success Engineer”. I politely declined. 😉