The cottage site is based on a theme that I've created called kubrick-CMS, that I intend to make available as soon as a) this election is over, and b) I've shifted whitelabel.org from Movable Type to Wordpress.

The Theme is basically kubrick, but with all the blog-specific stuff ripped out, a simple way to fix the home page to a single section, and stuff that makes it more geared to static sites. Because Wordpress is so nice to use, many people have been trying to do this with it.

### About Wordpress

Wordpress is one of the best bits of open source I've come across. It's clean, it has good default designs, a fabulously simple installer, and good documentation. I love it.

It's also in well-written PHP, which should make it easy for a neanderthal coder like me to fiddle around with it.

Except that some programmer needs to get taken back to programming school and before forced to write only comments for a year before being allowed out again.

A cursory grep reveals over 700 function declarations in the wp-includes/ directory. Of these, less than 150 have any kind of legal comment character in the 5 lines previous to the function declaration, and only a handful have a meaningful comment describing what the function does. PHP is a weakly-typed language, so you cannot infer shit without reading the whole damn function.

For any system, let alone one that is supposed to be actively encouraging audience participation, this is beyond stupid. If you worked for me, and you didn't comment your code properly, you'd lose your job.

It's a shame, when they've put so much fine thought and effort into all the other bits, that this should let the product down.

## 3 Comments »

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### Martin Geisler Online » Blog Archive » WordPress code quality Said,

May 22, 2005 @ 9:36 pm

[...] d improve some of the things I've described above. Apparently, there are others who agree with me about the quality of the WordPress code. Despite my complains, I [...]

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### Joseph Scott's Blog Said,

June 6, 2005 @ 6:44 pm

You Don't Have To Be Pretty To Be Successful

I think most people would agree that over the last year or so WordPress (WP) has been successful as an open source project. It's been around longer than that, but it has certainly gained a lot more attention in the last 12 to 18 months. It was...

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### Alastair Said,

November 6, 2005 @ 8:22 pm

I purposely write code that requires as little comment as possible - if your code is good enough, it shouldn't need commenting.

But perhaps that's because I write in a real language (C) not PHP, which any old moron can write (though not well).