WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful.
Indeed what a mouthful, but what becomes of it when it becomes unusable? For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been floating around the support forums looking for answers to questions I have as well as trying to help others with things I may have already fixed, but it’s slowly becoming apparent to me that the problem is WordPress its self…
Now regardless of what the problem was, I’ve always been able to come up with a quick fix, sort of like a band-aid, to sort it out until I can seek “professional” help in the support forums, but now I have a problem that, as much as they think they are helping, is just down to fucked up coding by the developers. But wait, yes, I’m using 1.5 beta, and “beta releases shouldn’t be used by the general public,” OK, fine, so why do the general public have access to these nightly releases? If Joe Schmoe is running WP 1.2.2 and finds out that someone or other is running WP 1.5, of course he’s gonna want to upgrade, cause WP 1.5 comes with all these much better bells and whistles. Therein lies the problem, the average user (and I don’t mean to be condesending in this, simply because 18 months ago, I was the same) probably doesn’t have the knowledge needed to fix things when they fuck up, and they will fuck up…
The “company policy” when it comes to this is “back up your data via phpMyAdmin, change settings in phpMyAdmin, yadda yadda yadda” which for advanced users is all fine and dandy, but me, and I consider myself an advanced user, I absolutely HATE going into phpMyAdmin, it’s far, far to easy to screw around with something and end up with everything in your database flushed down the proverbial toilet.
Anyways, back to the problem at hand, I can’t login to my WordPress install, the only reason I’m posting this is because when I upgraded to WP 1.5, Firefox kept the login cookie and lets me in, if anything, god forbid, should happen to that cookie, then I’m up shit creek without a paddle… And I’m not the only one… In fact this is described as a major bug in the system and it’s been around for a while, and with almost a month of nightly releases under WP1.5’s belt, it’s still not fixed, let me repeat that… IT’S STILL NOT FIXED! What kind of system that advertises it’s self as, and let me repeat:
WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.
And it won’t even let you do the “simple” thing as logging in to the admin section… And the support forum is bursting with people to tell you how to fix it, except it’s not fixing it, and someone even said, I wish I could find the post now, that it “wasn’t such a big deal and the developers probably have more important things to worry about.” How off putting is that when you’re trying to fix this kind of error?
Which brings me back to my original point, the problem with WordPress is WordPress it’s self… Due to it’s open source nature, it will be impossible to have any kind of “official” technical support, so instead we have to rely on one another, but when you’re asking important questions and the responses are generally unhelpful, and sometimes insulting, what can you do?
EDIT (20/01/05 6:01pm): A particularly inflamatory statement has been removed, in the cold light of day it probably wasn’t the best thing to say and for those it offended I can only apologise profusely.
EDIT (17/02/05 11:58am): Toby Simmons has a great fix for login issue if you’re using Windows IIS
Comments
18 responses to “A WordPress Rant”
use MT?
I’ve already tried that in the past and the less said of it the better…
I mean, I just want to be able to login under IE or on my laptop, is that really too much to ask?
Are you using any kind of a firewall? what version of PHP/Mysql?
Have you tried resetting your password (via the “lost password” link on the login screen), or are you too afraid of messing things up?
If the latter, have you tried creating a new user account, and seeing if you can login to that, reset its password, etc? If you can verify that the password reset works properly for a non-essential account, then you might try it on your main admin account with a little less fear.
A recent problem I had with the login form not displaying was related to an extra space at the end of a plugin file.
What I did to correct the issue: Temporarily renaming the plugins directory disables ALL plugins. Then I created a new plugins directory and moved each plugin individually into it, testing the login page after each. When I found the offender, I noticed the extra space (not even a CR, but a space) and when I deleted it – Eureka!
Ah.. the power and the pain of open source.
Let me get this straight. You’re using a public, yet unsupported, beta of a FREE piece of software. You have a problem and thus you decide to post a rant, on your WordPress powered blog.
Now, there’s talk on yet another blog about a paid support forum.
There’s a tradeoff with open source. If you need support, you need to buy your software. If you can figure things out yourself and understand the programming, you can run open source software.
Get MovableType. You buy it, they support it. You’ll lose a few hundred thousand geek points by using the evil ‘Type, but again, that’s another tradeoff.
Greg, let me make one thing clear. The following quote is true and will always be upheld:
“WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.”
This statement references all STABLE builds of WordPress, ex: 1.2.2. In no way, shape, or form does it ever guarantee that beta releases are held to the same standards. An application’s development has to start somewhere, and with WordPress, it starts in the beta stage. By your standards Microsoft should have stopped after the first beta release of Windows. Why? Because it had bugs. Apple should have stopped after the first release of Mac OS. Why? Because it had bugs. SixApart should have stopped after the first release of MovableType. Why? Because it had bugs.
Get over yourself. The login bug is an issue, a big one. But unfortunately, it’s only affecting a few people, which makes it very hard to fix. Perhaps you’d like to contribute to the development rather than flame it?
FYI, here’s a nice troubleshooting resource that features a work-around for your problem:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Login_Trouble
By your own standards, you should be grateful and praising a higher power that we were generous enough to post such a thing. But, I suppose you won’t care either way.
At the very least, the WordPress Support Forums are there to help, but sometimes we get very busy with things like our personal lives. Yes, we volunteer our time.
“the support forum is failing, and failing big time”
Am I taking this statement personally? Yes, I am. It would have been nice if you had either searched the forums for solutions (yes, they are there) or asked a second time.
I’ll copy and paste what I said at Nuclear Moose’s site
It was just born out of extreme frustration and if this any other kind of situation, the post would be heavily edited or even deleted the following day, but by that point the damage had been done. Not that I didn’t mean what I said, it just wasn’t the place or time for it or so it seems.
Now if I offended anyone then I apologise, it wasn’t meant to sound as bad as it came out, I do find WordPress Support helpful 99/100, just that 1 time can lead a man to crazy things…
I understand that your rant may have been born out of frustration, but you could have edited your post. As of now, your horribly misguided statement of “the support forum is failing, and failing big time” remains and is still nothing but a slap in the face to those who volunteer their time in the WordPress Support community. Until you go back and viciously edit or retract your post, we (the WP support community) will all remain offended.
Thank you for removing that statement. I feel a bit better now.
No hard feelings, dude…sometimes frustration gets the better of all of us. The bottom line is that we all want to have a better product. That we can all agree upon, I’m sure.
Greg, the login issue-in-question has apparently been fixed.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic.php?id=21378
you know there’s an IRC channel dedicated to wordpress, its in their homepage.
Try checking there next time you feel like pulling your hair out over something wp related :)
You consider yourself an advanced user, yet you admit that you have no interest in going into PHPMyAdmin to back up your data before performing surgery on it.
The login issue about which you bitterly complain has been covered, time and time again, in the WP Support Forum. If you cannot find an answer using the Search box at WP, which admittedly can be dodgy, then for the love of all that is holy, try Googling for your answer. Believe me, you’ll find it.
And next time, try out that handy, dandy “Draft” radio button right there on the New Post (Write) page. Those wacky WordPress devs. What will they think of next?
I as well think wordpress leaves much to be desired. Their insistence on xhtml+css to the detriment of compatibility with IE — still the major browser, leaves me to believe that wordpress is and always will be a plaything for geeks, made for and by people who don’t understand the concept of support or product quality.
ro, I don’t really see what the issue is with IE compatibility – I use WP for a club website, and while I use Firefox myself, the majority of my users use IE. I therefore design the CSS so that it works with either (well, maybe not some early IE versions!).
Are you saying that we should abandon the W3C standards for XHTML and CSS, simply because IE doesn’t follow it properly? By using XHTML and CSS, web developers can create new themes for their websites without having to rewrite any code. Try that using plain HTML.
It’s not hard to design a CSS which will work for Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera, etc.,etc. I’ve done it, and 9 months ago I didn’t even know what XHTML was. I didn’t go on any training courses, or read expensive books – I found all the information I needed on the web.
Forgot to say – I know my website isn’t 100% XHTML-compliant at present, thanks to Carp, which only produces HTML – I’m working on a script to convert it to XHTML. Guess what – WordPress doesn’t care anyway – so it doesn’t “Insist” on XHTML.
Nice site!