May 22, 2013 by Matt | Posted in WordPress
It’s no secret that the WordPress codebase is a mess. It seems that not a week goes by without some blogger publishing a post criticizing it. Unfortunately, fixing it is no simple matter.
One of the goals the WordPress project holds is to maintain compatibility with older plugins and themes that may not have been updated to work with the latest version, which means, well, not changing things that would break old plugins. Or adding new functions and leaving the older, redundant ones behind to maintain compatibility. It’s that methodology that led the developers to bake the infamous Magic Quotes functionality into WordPress itself, when it has been deprecated and removed from newer versions of PHP, so as to not break plugins expecting that behavior. (Which means plugin developers have to unescape strings before passing them to prepared statements, like they should be doing.)
That’s just one example of something I find vexing about WordPress, and not really indicative of the deeper structural issues that others complain about.
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