Wordpress frustrates the hell out of me

UPDATE: I AM NOT ON WORDPRESS ANYMORE. IN THE FUTURE, IF WORDPRESS STOPS BEING SO DERPY (TOO DERPY FOR TECHDERP) I MAY SWITCH BACK

Wordpress is the most popular CMS(that's content management system, for y'all regular humans(and cats, I know you're on the internet too)) on the planet.



As of 5/9/2013, this blog is being hosted on inmotionhosting.com. They're a fantastic company, with good coupon codes making their prices cheap. Currently, it's 3.49 a month, and the performance has been completely unbelievably outstanding. Their customer service is great. Sadly, it looks like I'm going to be taking advantage of their very generous 90 day refund policy.

My host has been great. I wanted to try out wordpress, and they have an install process that takes about 5 seconds of your life.

The problem is wordpress itself.
People always talk about how easy it is to use.
People always talk about it's great plugin support.

I have to say, I can't quite give it a glowing review.
My first complaint. The image system. Whoever designed the image resize tool in wordpress had no idea what they were doing.

It works, but the interface is horrifically wonky, and convoluted. It's almost as if several different design teams worked on separate elements of it, without speaking to eachother.

Featured images are a complete mess. If I have a featured image, often parts of the image are cutoff on my homepage, while they're perfectly fine in the post itself.

Sometimes google+ and facebook thinks my featured image isn't my featured image, and shows a random ad-banner as the image by default.

The next concerns. Wordpress is a slow dog.
I made it faster, using wp-supercache, wp-minify and asynchronous javascript.

Oh wait, WP-supercache, even with it's preload feature turned on, won't actually cache my site properly unless someone accesses it recently. That means the more traffic my site gets, the faster it becomes. Unfortunately, traffic has been slow lately, so the few people I do get, actually have a bad experience.

Security issues have been a problem. The wordpress botnet came around recently. I wrote an article on the subject, which has been a major source of views lately.

Inmotion handled it like a boss, and had mod_sec custom rules kick in, to not shut down my site, but only disable admin login capability during the attack.

Here's the thing... why didn't wordpress take care of it? Oh right, you need plugins for that.

I currently have 18 plugins, plus several external widgets on this site, and it still doesn't have the functionality I want.

I was a little horrified that wordpress, by default, doesn't really have any quality social network features. Jetpack adds a few, but they're limited, and a bit broken.

Plugin configuration locations have no standardized location.
Sometimes it's under settings, sometimes you have to hover over settings to get to it, and sometimes you have to go to the plugin page, to find settings.
One of my plugins, EWWW image optimizer, has settings under both media, AND settings-hover over.

Catagories are handled nicely I guess.



I just generally find wordpress clunky, and this is coming from someone who doesn't even find windows 8 hard to handle.


So, I'm looking at my alternative options.

I used blogger for a bit, it was a pain in the ass.
I used tumblr for a bit, was annoyed by the lack of comment system, switched away, and then later found out disqus can actually do comments.
Joomla and Drupal seem like they'd be frustrating to deal with.

I might actually switch back to tumblr.

Yep, I find tumblr easier to deal with.
Yes, it has some restrictions. All site changes have to be made in code.(that just means learning). It doesn't host images (I'll probably use picasa).

All in all, these are things I can deal with, happily.

What are all of your thoughts out there?