Weblog Tools Collection: Darn You WordPress!!

WordPress rocks! (Most of the time…)   Sometimes though it can make you want to pull your hair out. Today I want to talk about that. Those times when you wish you could take a machete to it. I’ve had my share of such situations several times in the past.

Now, I don’t mean plugins, or themes, or anything external like that. I mean the core of WordPress itself. Sometimes it seems WordPress just comes up short. It can be anything from a simple little inconvenience to a total show-stopper.

I think hearing peoples gripes about WordPress would be a nice contrast to the almost constant good things you hear about it. It might also help to get more attention on the issues. Don’t forget that someone may come across this post, read a gripe, and possibly provide a solution. We can all help each other!

So, lets get it started…

One of the issues I always seem to run into has to do with the way some core functions output their code. A lot of the functions in WordPress provide a method for either outputting the code (echo) or returning it for you to handle and probably eventually echo yourself.

Unfortunately not all functions currently in WordPress are like this. Some only allow for echoing the code. This can be quite the inconvenience for some of us. The only way to usually get around this is to capture the output with a buffering function (ick!) or to copy what the function does into a function of our own to do what we need. However, this is less than ideal. What if the core version of that function changes some time in the future? That leaves us in a situation where we have to also update our version of the function. That’s not very nice…

An easy fix? Probably… Will it be addressed in future versions of WordPress? I hope so! Is it a critical issue? No. But, not all WordPress gripes are. This is just one of those things that has bugged me for some time.

So, how about you? What bugs you about WordPress?