Arranging Light: almost finished

My Photoblog is almost finished. It will be called “Arranging Light”.

If you look at the code, “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org/ is really just a bunch of pieces of really bad, procedural, brute-force style coding tied together with a thin thread that they call an API and wrapped in enough global variables to leave even the most experienced coders in a state of confusion. However, it offers the most out-of-the-box functionality, is easy to extend if you don’t try to write good code yourself, and, despite its highly inefficient code, it still runs faster than most other alternatives. Therefore, it powers this site, and will be powering my new Photoblog.

I wrote a plugin to give WordPress a few more features that I needed in a Photoblog that weren’t available from other plugins or in the core WordPress system. It took me a while to convince myself not to write the code well. After several frustrated and failed attempts due to the poorly written WordPress core, I eventually decided to look at the code as a short term solution that was allowed to break all of the commonly held conventions. 30 minutes later, I have a very handy little plugin. I figure, if I’m still using the code 5 years from now and haven’t updated it enough in that time-span to understand what it’s doing anymore, I can easily rewrite it in another 30 minutes.

I have a few more changes that I need to make to the plugin so that it can lend a hand on other sections of my site. Once that’s done, I have a few more cosmetic changes to make to the site and it’ll be ready to go live. I’m very excited about this.

I’m not sure if I should release the plugin or not. I’m sure other’s considering “PixelPost”:http://www.pixelpost.org/ for their Photoblog needs would find it useful, especially if they are already fans of the WordPress feature set. I’m reluctant, however, because the code is so bad. Then again, if you’re using WordPress you’re either oblivious to bad code, or using it knowing that the code is bad as I am. In both cases, the feature is probably more important than the method of invocation.