Well, WordPress is big. Yes, that sounds silly, I know how big WordPress is, I just never really cared about the opportunity that it provides. I am currently looking for some freelance work to do, and I was pretty disappointed that most of what I found are WordPress jobs. Not that there is any problem with that, it was a wonderful blogging software, but it is a terrible CMS. As it tries to be more of a CMS, a terrible API that is hard to work with is what we have. That is the reason why I would prefer to write a web app from scratch rather than bending WordPress to do what I want, it is just too much work, and for some reason people seems to prefer using WordPress for everything. The other day, I received a request to write an event management website with WordPress. I am not confident that I can do that, since I honestly had a hard time understanding its API.

When I uploaded my Mog WordPress theme to the wordpress.org theme directory, I didn’t have much expectation. It was just a side project that I did for fun, and honestly, it was my first try on building a WordPress theme for myself (I was blogging on WordPress.com at the time). To be honest, it wasn’t that good of an experience. The API are kind of messy, in no small part are caused by having to accommodate a large variety of use cases by its even larger user base. Somewhere along the way I got fed up and decided to just build the things that I need. So, I left out custom menus support, ability to customize the theme via the WordPress option, and I don’t even style the drop down menu properly, since I wasn’t planning to have any nested menu.

Then, few days ago, I noticed that the theme has reached 10.000 downloads. I know, that given WordPress' scale, that number is nothing. It is nowhere near the number of some “popular"WordPress plugin or theme. Still, it is kind of different knowing that something that I made was interesting enough that it was downloaded by that many people.

I came to think that something that I initially considered good enough for me to use, is nowhere near good enough for public consumption, so I decided to start working on the theme again, and make it better. Starting by fixing some of the problems I mentioned above. I still hate how messy the WordPress API is, but it also got me thinking, maybe I should give it a more serious consideration. Even though it is not very likely, I still hope that the WordPress team can consider redesigning the API. There are some projects that seems promising, but while I am sure they are all great projects, I don’t see it can replace WordPress anytime soon. So, I guess it’s time to open up the WordPress books again.