Wordpress Templating sucks…
Now don’t get me wrong. I really like the wordpress UI for posting and managing pages and posts and comments and spam. However they are sadly sadly lacking in the templating department. I have discovered this in the last few days after attempting to modify a template. I really dislike the way it all works. You aren’t templating your coding in PHP. and it’s a little obtuse that way. It’s probably just a matter of preference. Perhaps I should right a templating plugin. If that’s possible. I wonder…..?
August 20th, 2006 at 8:46 pm
OK, I’m a little slow on this, so… was this in Wordpress 2? While Wordpress 2 doesn’t have a templating engine (*ahem* Smarty), I’ve found customizing themes far easier than in other CMSes (notably Drupal).
With that said, I wish all PHP folks would just pick one or two templating engines and use them consistently. Right now I’m beating my head trying to customize Vanilla, in part because Vanilla’s separation of code and presentation isn’t so hot.
August 23rd, 2006 at 3:40 pm
I agree. The real power of any templating engine is that seperation of data, code, and presentation. That said Wordpress 2 may be easier than some CMS’s but It’s nowhere close to the ease of modifying Movable Type’s or even the stuff I write in bricklayer. Using smarty would make wordpress 2 template pages a whole world easier to do. They already coded the CMS why should I have to code some more just to display a page?
August 26th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
That’s interesting because one of the things I liked about WordPress was that it had templating tags, similar to Moveable Type. Compare and contrast with Drupal; WordPress comes out on top in terms of skinning. What was it about WordPress’ theming that you felt fell short of Moveable Type?
August 27th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
It doesn’t really have template tags like moveable type. You have to write PHP code for the front end.
Moveable type had tags that would act as placeholders for data if you put a tag one place the data appeared there put it someplace else it would appear there. Wordpress has spaghetti PHP code masquerading as a template tag. I’d much rather have the MT way. It’s cleaner, Its simpler, and results in less headaches at least for me. That’s probably a large part of the reason I coded bricklayer similarly. I don’t like templates that look like I’m still writing program code. The syntax gets harder. And the chance of errors creeping in while trying to get it to work is higher.