Congrats!

congratulations, this really nice redesign.

The WordPress code is an absolute disgrace. There is no real structure or continuity to it. Its just a load of botched, mangled and mixed PHP, HTML, CSS, JS and XML.

I have worked with PHP programmers as young as 20 and their code and standards of programming absolutely put you to shame. WordPress looks like it was built 10 years ago and whenever a security bug (of which there have been so many) or any other bug has come up you have just forced in a disgusting fix.

Come on Matthew, if you are going to be ‘the guy that made blogging’ get rid of the current disgusting WP code and start again. DO NOT mix HTML, PHP, CSS, XML or JS in the same file. These should always be in separate files. Get some architecture. People don’t want to have to look through 20 files in a ridiculous loop of functions to find one line of your botched code, cut your queries down – 30 queries to load a single page is an absolute disgrace, use a templating engine – preferably XSLT – having PHP templates is not acceptable in this day and age, get rid of your disgusting XML concatenations and replace them with PHP’s DOM class, stop putting “powered by wordpress” and other discernible markings on WP. I can type in “powered by wordpress” on Google and I will have 1000 blogs I can get access to because of your security flaws, make EVERYTHING object oriented and either make your own database layer or use PDO – don’t just steal someone else’s insecure db class and rename it wpdb.

PS – stop using the phrase ‘Code is poetry’ until your code is actually anywhere near half decent. Right now its only place for any expert PHP programmers is the bin.

Anyways I was quite suprised to see the similarities between your designs. I understand that you did actually design this yourself…but I have a feeling that guy who did, has seen the web designer wall and at least drew some inspiration from it.

The first thing I did when I saw this site was look under the hood, I mean you have a lot going on and it was difficult to understand how it could be done with today’s techniques, But then I saw this image – bg_container_2col.jpg that pretty much explained it all – a CSS Zen Gardens-esque background image. That’s clocking in at 135k! Anyways your site looks awesome although I loved your previous look just as much.

They make talavera here in Puebla, too, ya know. You should come buy some.

Still, its a lovely design, and is going to be of a style that we will see a lot of over the next 12 months.

But still awesome..