Allow me to explain.

I did not want to hate WordPress. I wanted to love it. I wanted it to make my life easy. I wanted to be able to set it and forget it and go about my business of writing content for my site. Alas, this was not meant to be.

After getting my site up, configuring my themes, tweaking the CSS, writing a few simple extensions, I added a few posts, tweaked some more, and began the process of going live. This should be the easy part.

My biggest problem with WordPress is that when something goes wrong there’s often little or no indication of what caused the problem. Case in point: I was happily going about my business of preparing to deploy my site on my domain: duplicate the VM for staging, add SSL/TLS support, add IPv6 support, test everything, and test some more. Cool, everything appeared to be working fine. I started to write a sticky post about my recent C++ releases and BAM! It wouldn’t save. The only message was Cannot Update. No reason. No suggestions. No debug info.

I Googled the problem and found that this ridiculously generic error message can have many, many, many causes. Most of the suggestions were of the throw your hands in the air type like “uninstall all plugins”, “re-install the site from scratch”, or specific problems with specific plugins. Fercryinoutloud why not build in some decent error reporting!?

It took me about 10 hours of experimenting to find out that WordPress requires changes to its main configuration PHP file (!!!) (wp-config.php) in order to support HTTPS. WTF?! That’s right! WordPress comes out-of-the-box without support for HTTPS. You need to modify a root-directory PHP file to make it support HTTPS. In the year 2018.

Someone even wrote a plugin to do this for you. In fact there’s a bunch of them. 🤦‍♂️

I could go on. And I may at a later date. In the mean time, just know this: If you’re thinking about writing a modern blogging platform, there’s room in the marketplace. WordPress sucks.