Monthly Archives: October 2004

Typo

Asides

I had a small typo in my new random photo SQL code so on every page load it was selecting all 9,000+ photos in random order instead of just one. Fixed now, so page loads should be a lot faster. (Everything is cached except for the random photo.)

1.3 Cleanup

WordPress

A few comments about some of the code changes in 1.3. Very nice to see people appreciating some of the hard work we’ve put into this iteration. In a perfect world we could stop the clock and rewrite large portions of the code from scratch, but that would take a long time and break a lot of things in the process. All programmers want to do this, it’s our weakness, but every time I get this urge I think of Netscape and how devastating their rewrite downtime was. We’re making some substantial changes but doing it gradually while introducing new features and responding to users needs.

For example, in 1.3 “the loop” is called very differently but it’s completely backward compatible with everyone’s 1.2 loop code. We deprecate things over time so any structural changes that need to be made come gradually for people upgrading, there’s nothing to drastic every time. This also saves a huge amount of time in support. (Regular users don’t want to have to redo their templates, hackers don’t want to relearn code they already knew.) Same for the new theme system we’re introducing, it adds a lot of flexibility, radically changing how the front end of WordPress operates (like plugins for templates and styles) but all the new stuff is completely optional. I’ve transitioned most of my custom code into a personal “theme” that makse upgrading a lot easier for me (which is good because I do it almost daily).

Next time you get the urge to rewrite from scratch think about the testing your code has gone through, all the edge cases that have already been addressed, the existing installed base, and how many new bugs you’ll introduce with the from-scratch code.

Squarespace

Asides

Squarespace has a fantastic site but the software is underwhelming, as are their “featured” sites. Searching around shows about 500 sites visibly powered by them. Anyone know anyone actually using it? I think there are some good ideas there WordPress could learn from.