Ways the WordPress website shoots itself in the foot

Even though I genuinely love WordPress, and have literally built the last decade of my career around it, there are plenty of things that bother me.

Two things that really bother me: page builder plugins/themes, and mediocre hosting providers.

Why page builder plugins/themes? Because they do not do things “the WordPress way.” Yes, they were originally designed to address woeful limitations in the default WordPress editing interface, but 1) they are typically so loaded up with their own interface conventions that they don’t “feel” like WordPress at all, 2) they’re often so convoluted that they don’t really make WordPress easier to use, they just make it easier for people who don’t know how to code to still get paid to build websites, and 3) they are rapidly being made redundant by the built-in Block Editor (Gutenberg) that has now been part of WordPress core for four years, and is actually starting to get pretty good.

Why mediocre hosting providers? Because they’re mediocre. But seriously, “low-rent” commodity hosting providers are the absolute worst way to host a WordPress website. Their tools and performance are inadequate. If you know sysadmin stuff, you’re better off with a VPN from the likes of Linode. And if you don’t, then you really should spend a bit extra for a premium, WordPress-optimized managed hosting service like WP Engine.

Why then is it, when you go to the WordPress Themes page, the first non-stock theme you are presented with is, of all things, Hello Elementor, built around the dreadful Elementor page builder? Why are they promoting this? I’m not saying page builders shouldn’t exist. I’m just saying people shouldn’t use them. And I definitely do not think that WordPress should be heavily promoting one of them as a preferred way for new users to get a WordPress site up and running! Why still is it the first third-party theme on the page?

I do see Astra, a very well-designed, Block Editor-friendly third-party theme — one I have even used on a client site! — is the second third-party theme featured. But it absolutely deserves to come long before anyone even thinks of Elementor.

As for hosting, this is another place where I think WordPress is making a major stumble, mainly because this is a third-level page in the site hierarchy, but it is very prominently linked from a page for people who are just getting started and looking for a place to host their new (first!) WordPress site. But this page has not been updated in years, and its recommendations desperately need revisions.

I have worked with all three of the “recommended” providers — BlueHost, Dreamhost and SiteGround — only because clients came to me who were already using them. I emphatically do not recommend any of the three, although Dreamhost is… acceptable. But in this modern era when there are some really excellent, WordPress-focused, managed hosting companies like WP Engine, how is it that WordPress is still officially recommending these three dinosaurs of the early 2000s?

Artifacts of an error

A little over a week ago I did something really stupid. Today I took the final step in making amends for that error, which was ultimately the consequence of a questionable decision I made many years ago, to create an ad hoc WordPress multisite setup. That lowercase “m” is significant, and I hinted at it in the post I linked to above.

This was not a proper WordPress Multisite setup. I think that feature probably already existed at the time, although it may not have. This was my own concoction, created by adding a PHP switch to the wp-config.php file, telling it to use a different database and uploads directory depending on the domain name in the HTTP request. It allowed me to manage a number of my own and Sara’s websites with a single WordPress installation, but it was dangerous.

None of the sites “knew” about each other. That wasn’t really a problem, except when it came to managing themes and plugins. I always had to be careful to remember that just because my site wasn’t using a particular theme or plugin, didn’t mean one of Sara’s sites wasn’t… or even one of my own other sites in the setup.

I forgot about that little detail when I did my stupid thing a couple weeks ago. I deleted all of the themes my blog wasn’t using, forgetting that Sara was using many of them. In a panic to quickly restore the themes, I made matters worse by accidentally restoring the entire server from a 6-day-old backup, erasing all of the work Sara and I had done on our respective sites over the preceding week.

My “final step” in making amends was to at least remove my own sites from that setup, so it is now just running Sara’s sites. If you’re reading this, it means you’re seeing my blog in its new home. (Coincidentally, this is also facilitating my gradual transition away from Digital Ocean in favor of Linode for my hosting needs.) I also moved my John Coltrane and Adelia Haight McCormick sites, which were part of the same cockamamie arrangement.

One last thing that I didn’t think I’d be able to recover: I wrote two fairly substantial blog posts in that week, and I was pretty sure those were gone forever. But last night I discovered that the Feedly app on my iPhone still had them cached! I quickly snapped a series of screenshots so they wouldn’t be lost forever.

I had originally intended to retype them here, back dating them to their original post dates, to make it seem like they’d never been lost. But somehow it seems more fitting to just post those phone screenshots instead.

One of the posts hinged on a composite Mac screenshot I had taken from Safari, demonstrating its absurd Experimental Features menu, and that’s an image I still had on my Mac, so I’m including it below as well.

Enjoy.

Also worth noting here… this is my first post on this blog using the Block Editor, a.k.a. Gutenberg. I’ve finally accepted its inevitability. I’ll probably update the site to a new theme in 2023 as well… this one is a custom hack of Twenty Eleven, for cryin’ out loud!

Why are major WordPress plugins not bothering to fix their numerous PHP 8.1 deprecation notices?

I’m an early adopter for a lot of things, but new versions of PHP are generally not one of them. PHP 8.1 wasn’t really on my radar until I set up a new server running Ubuntu Linux 22.04, where PHP 8.1 is the default version.

Yeah, I’m a commercial WordPress plugin developer too, but my business is small. It’s easy to understand me not being 100% on top of this.

What I do not understand is how huge WordPress plugins like Jetpack, WooCommerce and Wordfence can get away with not being on top of it.

The general response these developers are giving when questioned on this is, “they’re only deprecation notices, everything should still be working.” Which is true.

But.

Are you a developer? Do you ever need to turn debugging on? Have you seen what happens when you have multiple plugins active, each of which generates 5-10 PHP deprecation notices on every page when debugging is turned on?

Aside from making the site, and especially the WordPress backend, borderline-to-entirely unusable (which, honestly, is a bigger problem than what I’m about to say), it also makes normal debugging impossible. It’s hard to find real issues when you have to wade through more than a screen’s worth of irrelevant deprecation notices. And the sheer volume of the notices breaks page layouts to a point where it’s impossible even to know what is or isn’t broken.

I actually blame PHP for this. I don’t know what they were thinking with some of these changes that are triggering all of the deprecation notices. I know “real” programming languages aren’t as loosely typed and lenient with sloppy coding as PHP is, but… well, it’s kind of too late to put that genie back in the bottle. I haven’t bothered to investigate exactly what the rationale is for no longer allowing null input to string handling functions. What I do know is that there’s a ton of code out there, written by competent, experienced developers, that is now triggering these warnings, because until now it was always fine to equate null and an empty string.

Anyway, principled arguments aside, I have a more practical frustration to deal with right now… I’m finding it hard to do my work, because other people haven’t done theirs.

Dolby Atmos through MacBook Pro speakers: DO NOT WANT

What are your thoughts on Dolby Atmos?

More specifically: what are your thoughts on Apple Music automatically playing songs in Dolby Atmos through laptop speakers?

My MacBook Pro has pretty great speakers (for built-in laptop speakers). I’m sitting here listening to Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, and I could tell immediately that there was some kind of surround effect going on. It was very disorienting — it created a physical sensation in my ears and almost started to give me a headache. Then I realized I could turn it off and instantly everything went back to normal.

I’m not entirely sure what kind of dark magic Dolby is employing with this (I’m sure it has something to do with reversing the polarity of the stereo channels or something nerdy like that), but I don’t understand why it’s being foisted upon us. It reminds me of the trend about a decade ago of every movie being made in 3-D, and even 3-D TVs that no one wanted. Eventually they caught on to the “no one wanted” part and now it’s not much of a thing. I hope Dolby Atmos on streaming services follows in short order!

Related: Why Your Atmos Mix Will Sound Different On Apple Music