Then I got a job as a software engineer and began using frameworks such as CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Symphony and more recently Laravel3/4. Since having worked in an engineering environment working to tight coding standards, having recently started developing a few small websites in WordPress feels somewhat archaic.

WordPress as a blogging platform is easy to use and pretty extendable however when you dig into the codebase it is amazingly spahgetified and would certainly benefit from a re-write. The reason why that hasn’t happened and is likely not to happen with WordPress is that the status-quo works, new features and bugfixes in a release are visible and thats what WordPress users are looking for – there would certainly be a degree of disapointment if after months of development the next version brought nothing to the table other than a rewrite of code that a large proportion of its users will see no benefit from.

In addition a whole re-write would take a long time, we are talking six months to a year and yet even with extensive testing it would likely still break a lot of peoples websites, owned by people who aren’t knowledgeable enough to know how to fix it.

With that said I have toyed with the idea of re-writing wordpress in a framework such as laravel(4) and on the surface it doesn’t “look” hard. I would use the sentry composer package as a foundation for the user authentication system and then build each distinct component of WordPress from the ground up such as taxonomy(tags/categories/etc), content(pages/posts), comments, feed, media, plugin, admin, multisite, etc. Given enough planning upfront you could map out each component and its requirements on the others and then begin building them in an order that would ensure you could finish one component and not have to touch it again until the project was complete (refactoring due to bad planning is horrible to go through.)

Once that was done you would have to write a tool to migrate a vanilla wordpress install into it as it would have a considerably different database structure and then an additional component to provide legacy support to all the wordpress functions currently in use mapped to the new systems methods so that legacy plugins and themes still work.

Once done you would have a modular “WordPress” clone, built for developers. However due to the use of a PHP framework and composer you would have restricted those who could use it to people with intermediate/advanced knowledge in PHP and server stacks. So to make it more accessible you would need to write an installer that sorted out the composer packages, ran migrations, seeded the tables and did housekeeping required before the system is ready.

That is a lot of work for a team of developers, let alone one man on his own Which is why I shelved the idea, even though I have written both the taxonomy and content packages. Doing the whole lot on ones lonesome is a tough, lonely job.