Blogging A to Z Challenge: W is for WordPress

The A to Z challenge is a challenge in which bloggers post every day during the entire month, and each day has a post starting with a different letter of the alphabet. The first day, the post features “A”, the second day “B”, and so on. It’s much better explained on the Blogging from A to Z website, so I’ll just refer you there.

Today I’m going to talk about WordPress. WordPress is a blogging platform (well, it started out that way, but it can do a lot more now). People use it to build all kinds of websites: blogs, author websites, portfolios, even business websites. I use it on all my websites: here, I Heart Reading, I Heart Designs and Enchanted Book Promotions. I bought shared hosting and domain names, and all those websites run on WordPress. I love it. The platform is great and has tons of functionality, and if there’s something I need that isn’t built in yet, chances are high someone already made a plugin for it.

But….there’s a downside too.

WordPress is awesome if the installation works properly. But I’ve never managed to install it 100% correctly. There’s always something. Or I can’t upload images (which took hours to fix on both this website and I Heart Reading, although my other websites didn’t have a problem with it), or the images can’t be resized, or the plugin can’t be uploaded. This week, WordPress 4.2 was released, and I kept getting emails about having to upgrade my websites.

So, I got started on that Saturday morning. WordPress has a built-in automatic upgrade button, so I hoped upgrading would be a breeze.

WRONG.

Automatic upgrading didn’t work and gave all sorts of permission errors. Fine. I looked up what the permissions should be for all WordPress folders and files in my FTP program, and I changed them to the correct permissions. Now it had to work, right?

WRONG.

It still didn’t work. I tried solving the error a few more times, but all the solutions offered in the WordPress forums, from changing .htaccess to changing permissions, failed. Only one option remained.

Manual update.

And WordPress advertises its famous five minute install, but let me tell you, it takes a lot more than five minutes to manually update this thing. It took over half an hour just for I Heart Reading. Then I still had four websites to go. I upgraded this one on Sunday, and now I still have three websites to upgrade during the week, and I keep getting emails about it, and it drives me nuts.

Also, for some reason, although I used the same folder with the update file, and did it exactly the same way, I can’t login to I Heart Reading’s admin panel anymore unless I change the name of my .htaccess file. Of course then I have to change it again right after or else my permalinks won’t work. I don’t have this problem here, so it completely blows my mind how it could happen in the first place.

So, WordPress? It’s great, but it has its flaws. Many, many, many flaws.