Is WordPress the Venice of blogging software?

All I wanted to do was change the title of one of the RSS feeds for this blog. Sounds simple enough and, to be honest it wasn’t rocket science, but it did involve digging around among the foundations of my WordPress blog. And this made me think: WordPress is a bit like Venice. What you see (gliding towards the Lido on a water taxi or arriving at the home page of a WordPress blog) is usually attractive. There are things that are not so great (crumbling masonry or a cumbersome list of categories in a side panel), but on the whole it’s a good experience.

However, WordPress, like Venice, is not built on strong foundations. It’s built on the software version of rotting wood.

WordPress is a great example of a software application that has grown organically and has ended up one great big mess. Granted it’s a mess that people (millions of them) manage to do wonderful things with. But if you sat down to design a highly configurable, mass market blogging application you would not build it like WordPress. For starters (sorry PHP lovers out there), you would not use PHP. WordPress’s collection of PHP on PHP on PHP, distributed through a collection of files that is only loosely architected (I’m trying to be kind here), is the equivalent of Venice’s wooden posts driven into the mud of a lagoon, long, long ago. It seemed like a good way to build a town at the time. It made perfect sense back then. But the years went by and Venice grew: outwards and upwards. And down the ages the architects of Venice have wished they had something better to support their beautiful, lovingly designed constructions than lots and lots of rotting posts.

But to answer my own question: Is WordPress the Venice of blogging software? No, it’s not. And the reason it’s not is that, unlike WordPress, Venice will outlive us all. It’s too important and we love it too much. The posts are being replaced. Huge amounts of effort and money have gone into solving the problem of sinking buildings. Venice’s future is secure (except maybe for the effects of climate change – but that’s another story).

WordPress on the other hand, I believe, has trouble ahead. It’s massively popular right now. But because of the mess at its core, there’s an opportunity for someone to come along with something that provides everything WordPress does but is much easier to use, is easier to configure into a wider variety of looks and styles, and is easier to create plugins for. And because all your data is in a MySQL database, it wouldn’t be difficult to make it very easy to migrate blogs over to a new system.

At the moment WordPress is king of the hill. I, like millions of others, enjoy using it from day to day to write up our thoughts (like these) and inflict them on the world (or some small part of it). Mind you, I think the things I like most about posting to my WordPress blog are mostly features of Microsoft’s Live Writer application, which I use for writing posts, rather than features of WordPress itself.

So this king better watch out. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, before too long, WordPress ends up the ruler of a small and crumbling city state whose days of influence are long behind it.