There has been a bit of a delay with the pending launch of WordPress 2.7, but the updated content management system should be ready for primetime shortly. As we look forward to the official release, a question that some people may have is whether WordPress has become too bloated in its greater maturity.
WordPress started out as a simple and straightforward blog platform. People liked it because it was so clean and easy-to-use, but as the platform has matured, so has its functionality. Each progressive release has come with even more features, not to mention all the countless plug-ins and tweaks that further expand on this functionality. WordPress is incredibly robust, yes, but it has also become a little too crowded for some tastes.
This progression is far from unique. As you recall, Facebook started out as a very simple and straightforward social networking site as well. Early adopters adored how the interface was so much cleaner and less cluttered than MySpace, but with the arrival of so many different applications and other add-ons, Facebook is as crowded and convoluted as ever. The same can almost be said about Twitter as well, seeing how so many apps and customizations have been released for that as well.
With this, I turn back to the BlueFur community to ask: Do you think WordPress has become too bloated for its own good, possibly turning off new bloggers from adopting the platform? Or is just getting more robust and more powerful with each successive update?
Will
December 10, 2008 8:47 pm
Yeah definitely I agree, WordPress is too bloated, drupal is way better even though it’s not strictly for blogs it can be used for it, and I love the admin control panel it has.
Chris
December 10, 2008 8:51 pm
I’d say yes, WordPress is definitely starting to suffer from bloat and feature creep.
It’s one thing to keep a lean, mean core and expand the heck out of it via plugins (much like the lean core of Firefox with all the extensions available). It another to keep adding things that would be best left as plugins to the core package.
This week I was asked to look into blog software to integrate with an existing site, and I’ve gotta say, WordPress didn’t make the cut. Neither did Moveable Type, Serendipity, or Nucleus.
The leanest ‘platform’ I found that was still quite customizable and robust was Textpattern. Extracted from the zip, the whole thing was 1.2MB on the server. Serendipity clocked in at over 75MB on my hard drive, so I didn’t even try uploading it to the server. My WordPress 2.6 installation is over 13MB. Nucleus … I don’t remember exactly. I think it was a bit over 2MB? I didn’t get past Textpattern after seeing the size of Serendipity.
And Textpattern impresses me. Clean, pretty straight forward, an very flexible. You can integrate it with an existing website (at least if you use sitewide header/footer include files as in my case) in a manner of minutes, or you can build a site around it with some time spent learning how it ticks.
The other thing that’s starting to turn me off of WordPress is just how annoying upgrades are. Replace all these files … but only some of the ones in this directory … and then re-integrate any customizations you made manually. Yada yada.
Oh, the OTHER thing I like about Textpattern (which I suppose could also be seen as a negative by some) is that all of your page templates are stored in your mysql database. Means a few things – layouts get backed up with data, and when upgrading the software, you just overwrite EVERYTHING without worrying about nuking your custom stuff. Downside is you pretty much have to use the online editor (aka textarea) to edit/change/customize them. Although I suppose since they’re basically just xhtml docs, you could create/save them as local files in your editor and just copy and paste the text into the online editor.
Kulpreet Singh
December 10, 2008 11:08 pm
In comparison to many other CMS’ out there, I don’t think WordPress is bloated. In my understand a bloated application is one where there are so many features out of the box that it becomes hard to run with a functional website without doing a lot of customization. Whereas with WordPress, you can still launch a WordPress blog within 10 minutes on practically any host and the administration remains very user friendly. Also a bloated application may be one that takes quite a while to setup or install because of all the included files – but there are more included files with Joomla or Drupal or other CMS’.
heri
December 11, 2008 10:20 am
wordpress is not too bloated, it’s leading in usability, design, and functionality. wordpress is doing a hell lot of usability tests and consider user experience whenever they introduce new features. as a matter of fact, matt mullenweg said at the last wp conference that the key work for 2.7 was started by 2 usability sessions, and the new dashboard reflects that
Chris
December 12, 2008 3:01 pm
Compared to a full blown CMS, no, WordPress isn’t bloated. But is WP supposed to be a full blown CMS, or a blogging platform? I am of the opinion that is is a blogging platform (that people twist into a CMS as often as not).
For straight out blogging, yeah, it is getting a bit big. As a CMS for a site, no, there are much more bloated apps out there.
That said, I do believe that the usability improvements to the admin side are HUGE in this release. The layout is far better, the ability to customize it _easily_ is far FAR better, the overall look and feel of it is immensely better.
But to just run a blog, there are much lighter options out there. As a CMS, it’s great.
Tony Chung
December 14, 2008 7:46 pm
I agree with Chris above
Lynne
December 16, 2008 6:10 pm
WordPress is, IMO anyway, straying too far from its roots. It is still essentially a blogging platform and the feature creep is making it less useful as a blog but not as useful as a purpose-built CMS. There are hundreds of free open source CMS for people to chose from but not so many good blogging platforms. WordPress needs to be careful that it doesn’t move too far from the blogging market or it will get lost amongst CMS that are far better for more extensive content management.
At the moment, WordPress feels like an application that just doesn’t know what it is. Its getting too bloated and slow to compete with some of the other blogging platforms and is too rigid in its posts-pages structure to really be called a content management system. Still great, but I am increasingly finding that other apps are handling blogging better.
Also, as a long-time user and developer, I have to say I am getting really fed up with frequent upgrades. When users start longing for a solid, stable release they can just sit on for some time there is a risk that people will sit on vulnerable sites due to a reluctance to keep up with upgrades. Or they will just get annoyed enough to find something else to use. I would love a few dollars for every time I have been working on a site, almost ready for launch, when another necessary upgrade/security fix/bug fix has been released!
Robert Ballantyne
December 29, 2008 3:21 pm
So far, I think the wordpress team know exactly what their clients and users want and need.
First, it is the premier blog platform. That it is available for free is a wonderful gift to the world.
Second, it has evolved into the CMS system that most people need. I’ve set up 2 web sites for people who have no interest in learning HTML, but find back-stage at WP as comfortable as Facebook. So, once the site is set up these people can easily add content themselves. In both cases, the ‘blog’ is not the home page, but a very useful page for news. I have fiddled with Drupal and set up 3 Joomla! sites. These are great open-source CMS systems, but I am finding that many of the people using them don’t need or really understand how to take advantage of the software. WP = blog + web pages. It’s simple to understand. For the other CMS platforms, there can be lots of data (content) available, but the users seem to have problems presenting it in a reasonable manner for the visiting browsers.
Third, Google (and I guess the other search engines too – but who cares?) loves WordPress. As long as the WP site is a bit busy, and the content is real, the site will quickly achieve a wonderfully high ranking. If the people responsible for the site both post regularly (especially to the blog) and are generous in providing links to other similar sites, Google will have the postings available for searching in only minutes.
The hard part about WP is messing around with setting up the site in the first place. There is lots of excellent help for that. You can find folks to help through Bluefur, Tazzu, and elsewhere. While I said it is hard, I meant that it takes a bit of study. The answers for do-it-yourselfers (like me) are available at WP and elsewhere online.
Nope: not bloated. WP is functional, and still getting better.