Is WordPress getting too “fat” and vulnerable?

September 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Vladimir Prelovac has written a very insightful critique about the direction of WordPress development. He states several concerns with what this piece of blogging software is turning into. First we have bloat:

But more importantly, I have noticed that WordPress is not developing “far” anymore, and it started going “wide” instead. By this I mean there are less inventions and new technologies with every update. There is just more functionality that relies on current existing technologies.

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WordPress started out like Google, but is now becoming more and more like Yahoo. It stopped going “far” and started becoming fat (”wide”). It is becoming slow and clumsy.

Second, we have security issues, most notably with WordPress plugins. Jeff Chandler at Performancing suggests the WordPress community could adopt phpBB’s plugin validation system.

All in all, Vladimir wants WordPress to focus on speed, simplicity, and security in future WordPress versions.

You’ll find Matt Mullenweg’s answers in the comments section. He mentions WP 2.3 is a lot more bloated and insecure than WP 2.6—better beware of this fact for those who haven’t upgraded! He also says he’s aware of speed issues, hence the integration with Google Gears, and the constant drive towards improving the backend:

I’m obsessed with speed. On the backend WP has done a ton to speed itself up, as evidenced by the fact that it now runs the largest blogs in the world. More than 1.6 billion pageviews a month are going through WordPress.

As for plugins, this is what Matt had to say:

There are some automated things we do to watch out for bad stuff but ultimately I think we need a human team of volunteers to keep an eye on plugin changesets. Is this something you’d be interested in helping out with?

What do you think? I think that as long as there is a strong community backing up WordPress, such issues will never go unnoticed. I can only hope that this same community continues to help out with new initiatives, such as plugin and theme inspection.