Things I Love About WordPress

It's free. Not just free as in "freedom", but more importantly, free as in BEER. Just download and go. So, 'nuff said.

It can be used easily either as a traditional blogging platform or a full featured content management system, depending on how you set it up.

The wealth of plugins and themes available to customize your WordPress installation (especially ses5909's "Ask Me" plugin).

The community that developed around WordPress. Seriously. It wouldn't be anywhere near as popular as it is today without the people who use it also contributing to its development and adoption.

The Codex. Whenever you need to look something up, this should be the first place you go. If only I'd listen to my own advice more often. Oh well, as the old saying goes, "All Glory to the HypnoToad Codex."

Things I Hate About WordPress

I can't stand the search system. Come on, let me use "search" for the input filename instead of "s" for crying out loud! Not only does it have semantic meaning, but it's also easier to remember when typing in manually.

It messes with mod_rewrite too much for my tastes.

Code bloat. Everywhere from the PHP back-end that powers WordPress to the excessive use of classes and IDs where they don't belong in the HTML output. Really, it just makes the Web pages heavier, makes my HTML code look like garbage and even makes WordPress slower than molasses moving uphill during a blizzard for crying out loud!

I like my HTML code to be indented properly. WordPress doesn't do that. But then again, anyone who knows me will tell you that I'm a markup freak anyway.

The stupid wp- prefix being applied to everything. Look, somtimes I don't want people looking at my HTML source code to know that I'm using WordPress. Especially given the number of WordPress blogs/sites that were hacked over the past year. Franky, I'm starting to consider the prefix to be a security risk. (Update: SarahG over at "The Blog Experiment" wrote a tutorial post on how to "remove" the wp- prefix. Link: http://www.theblogexperiment.com/blo...4001#post14001)