A blog on blogging, computers and such

Overall, I am very satisfied with WordPress as a blogging platform. The platform itself is relatively strict and stiff, even awkward to use, but all the plugins, widgets and improvements from the user community makes it great.

However, my relationship to WordPress is not unproblematic. Our relationship is not one of peaceful coexistence. In some regards, I am very dissatisfied. I have written before about lacking quality control with templates and plugins that are downloadable even from WordPress’ own site. Templates where columns drop down, widgets don’t work properly, and so forth, translates into grief and dissatisfaction with WordPress itself. I suspect I am not alone in feeling this way when I lose time and get annoyed because something is not working properly.

Lack of proper support for foreign languages is probably the one thing about WordPress that annoys me the most. I have a Norwegian language blog. Here is what happens: I publish a new post entitled “Nye bøker våren 2008″ (translated: New books spring 2008). Now, when this is saved using the title as URL, WordPress saves it as “Nye bker vren 2008″. In other words, it drops the Norwegian characters “ø” and “å”.

This may seem like a small thing. But then there is Google. Google supports foreign characters. Thus, when somebody searches for “bøker våren 2008″, they will not find my post, because my post (as far as Google is concerned) is about “bker vren 2008″.

Now, this really is annoying. How would American or English bloggers feel if their “books reviews” got listed as “bk rviws” or something similar? For a guy that takes search engine optimization seriously, this is so bad I can hardly even begin to describe it!

I really don’t know where the problem lies - in the code for the WordPress platform, the widgets, the plugins, the templates, or PHP itself. I am not enough of a programmer to know. But I do know that if WordPress wants to capture a part of the growing blog market, something needs to be done. WordPress ought to commit to supporting foreign languages, as well as doing something rapidly with respect to quality control.

– Peter

I am a big fan of WordPress. I like its versatility and power. Also, I love the fact that there is a big and lively community of people using it, with great discussion sites. Furthermore, there is a huge number of people that develops templates (or “themes”), plugins, and widgets. A lot of the stuff people produce is marvelous!

What I don’t like is the near total lack of quality control on the WordPress site. There’s a lot of stuff being published that simply does not work they way it should. Plugins that don’t work, themes that may look alright, but have severe flaws. I run several blogs, and have tested out a number of themes. I have encountered a number of different types of bugs and problems. Sometimes I report these, sometimes not. When I do, they are usually not fixed anyway, so it doesn’t much matter one way or the other.

The most annoying to me is themes where columns simply drop down. This happens with a lot of the templates. I’ve tested them using IE 6, IE 7, Opera, and Firefox. Some produce the same errors in all of these, so it simply isn’t possible for the authors and WordPress to not know about the errors. The only guy that I have found so far, that seems to be able to shore those columns properly up in his designs, is Brian Gardner.

So, that leaves me - grumpily, I admit - wondering why? To me it would seem that a little bit of quality control would benefit all of us. For developers, it can’t be all that good for their reputations to publish flawed designs. For WordPress it can’t be advantageous to be competing for users with stuff that doesn’t work right. And for users, a little quality control would save a lot of time. Finally, for readers of the blogs, columns that drop down look annoying and displeasing.

Does anybody else know of stable, reliable and good WordPress themes? And have links?