@Andrew Nacin - Hello Nacin mate,

Sorry my earlier reply to Jeff and Dave got caught in the comment spam queue so it appears after you, but doesn't address your kind reply. Sorry about that bro.

=== The Reply ===

First off, I agree with the premise that no Open Source eco-system should be judged independently of it’s addons, and that both Drupal and Joomla are as reliant as WordPress is on these.

1. Ben’s plug-in is great. Truly, it replaced a custom one of mine that did similar, and I love it. But it’s somewhat simplistic in nature. I truly don’t mean to be disrespectful of it when I say that, as it nails everything it set out to do, but in comparison to the equivalents in Drupal or Joomla or EZpublish or Umbraco or even Squiz (all open source) it’s not quite there.

From a practical example, it also suffers from the security model for a large number of clients, as it brilliantly combines with Active Directory Integration plugin and Simple LDAP login plugin – both of which don’t work with WordPress 3.1, 3.2, 3.3...
It also stores documents in an MD5 hash, which means we can’t use it on Government websites in certain countries (namely America, Canada, Germany, France etc) as well as many fussy clients.

Additionally using it on websites/intranets for the type of clients who need this sort of thing, means that we can’t upgrade WordPress, and we all know what the community thinks of people making their own mind up on when to upgrade (they don’t like it).

2. EditFlow. A truly awesome bit of functionality, but again, it’s not really complete. It works brilliantly if you’re handling a single post type: posts. For the newsrooms (and equivalents) that I’ve seen using it, it’s a game changer. If you’re not talking about a website that’s focused on a single continuous post type differentiated by taxonomies, then EditFlow’s not there yet. Will it be a silver bullet in 2012? I have no doubt. Is it 2012 yet? Nope.

6. ESI Caching / CDN ability W3 Total Cache (and Donnacha’s new 1.0 of WP Super Cache) both handle CDN type stuff very well, but ESI isn’t on the radar. Both effectively work on the idea that is someone is signed in that they want “live” content, which is rarely the truth, other than maybe their name (e.g. welcome Nacin), the removal of the login option, and their details pre-populated on the comment form. I’m all for dynamic content over static HTML, but with the other OSS solutions out there starting to support solutions like ESI and “enterprise level CDNs” (e.g. Akami) WordPress is really starting to fall behind. The premise from Matt that “servers are cheaper now than ever before” isn’t a great one, though true, in that we’re proposing hardware to cover for a software failing. At some stage the RoI on that plummets. (I’ve some real world war stories on this I’m happy to share offline mate, just e-mail)

7. This one is my bad, sorry. Tiny MCE is grand (bad rep and all, I think it does what it says on the tin) apart from one thing. It’s not What You See Is What You Get. It’s not. It’s a plain representative of text on your website. That’s not what I meant. I meant editing content with the actual page template styles so that What you See Is ACTUALLY What You Get. In the WordPress WYSIWYG editor H5 and H6 are smaller than normal Paragraph text, yet loading any default WordPress theme for the last 3 years and the opposite is true.

I’m not being obtuse here, this is what more and more of my clients are after. Because so many proprietary systems have it. In the UK we have a crap hosting company called 1&1 who sell a SaaS to make your website for $200, and on the TV advert it shows people dragging and dropping content, and editing inline with real styles – this is what the “man on the street” thinks a CMS can do now.

Look at this: http://www.day.com/day/en/resources/video/webcontent-incontext-editing.html

I know it’s an enterprise level CMS, so it’s unfair to think WordPress can match it, but THAT is WYSIWYG. A plain box with bold and italic text that has no correlation between the content and the chosen template isn’t WYSIWYG. In that regard, we’re Cavemen bro. Look at Carrington Build (http://crowdfavorite.com/wordpress/carrington-build/), which is on the right lines in terms of dynamic templates that are self service, but it’s still not actually WYSIWYG.

8. Single Sign-on — With what? There’s plugins to do this with social networks, specialized authentication systems, and the like, and building a plugin for a system that isn’t covered is easy.

We’ve not had a working LDAP plugin for months. We’ve not had a working Active Directory plugin for months. These are not small systems no-ones ever heard of. I was one of the idiots who tried to make bbPress work with WordPress for 2 years – even with the help of Sam, Matt and MDwaffe we couldn’t make that work for months with bbPress0.9 and WP2.6-2.9. MediaWiki can’t interact with it. We don’t have a single-sign-on API that doesn’t change on a per release basis. 2.7 was a rewrite, 3.0 caused problem, 3.2 causedproblems. The other OSS software I mentioned doesn’t have these issues as they have a defined API.

9. I’m happy to agree to strongly disagree on this, and discuss it another time :)

10. I kind of think that proves my point. Take 2 separate plugins, developed independently years apart, add some development of custom code, pray any WordPress upgrade doesn’t break any of the 3, and you have something close to what the alternatives have out of the box. /facepalm

More and more my clients want to show different PARTS of content on pages to people with different criteria. Given that WordPress treats a page/post of content as a single entity (1-to-1 issue), this isn’t possible from a UI perspective. It also makes previewing based on user, role, country, hair-colour etc almost impossible.

Could I architect a way to do with between two established plugins and a large chunk of custom code? I think so yeah. Would I be confident that I wouldn’t need to rebuild it every WP release? Nope. Would I be confident of debugging based on dependencies of 2 separate software projects, especially as Members has had 1 upgrade in 2.3 years? Nope.

With the meteoric rise in sensitive and insanely accurate Analytics and A/B testing these days, the inability to do this is a large issue, that’s often overlooked (its not needed on a blog).

13. Multi-lingual
— This is definitely a sore spot. Most of the plugins that try to do this, do it really poorly. Not much different than the e-commerce offerings, currently.

I love that you said this. Because I think THIS is something that should be lead by the Core. It needs to be thought through, well architected and aligned, and deep down has to have the blessing of the Core Team or whoever builds this system is going to run into constant upgrade / custom build issues.

If you don’t mind me saying Andrew, people like me respect the heck out of the work the Core Team does, even if people think we have a weird way of showing it. I also get that my clientele are not the norm for most WordPress agencies.

But maybe we should stop making AdminUI changes every release, stop focussing on blogging for just one release, and have a good long look at our architecture. I’m no-longer qualified to say anything unpleasant about it give all the hard work that so many have put into it; but to me no good multi-lingual support, no good e-commerce solution, no good forum solution, no link management, no good/real hierarchal support, and no n-to-n content support suggests that something isn’t right.

436 days with a paid developer to convert bbPress1.0 (which was already running on BackPress/WP3.0) into the bbPress2.0 plugin, that’s slower out of the box than any of its predecessors (even with full WP integration) that only works with 3 of the top 20 themes on the WP repository without custom coding screams “something’s not right there”.

I mean, We’re still in a position where someone with the capability to Moderate a comment is REQUIRED to be able to edit any piece of content on the entire website or network??? WTFudge!

moderate_comments
Since 2.0
Allows users to moderate comments from the Comments SubPanel (although a user needs the edit_posts Capability in order to access this)

I promise that it’s not sarcastic when I say that maybe we should all chat more about that sort of thing than make full-screen editing, or Clippy style hover menus, or revamp the Admin UI every other release or...

As always, I'm very appreciative of the time you give up to read and reply to the communities thoughts.

Yours,
Kevinjohn