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Wordpress: Shipping crap to force people into the hosted service

Submitted by johnh on February 7, 2007 - 15:13.

I'd just like to say that Wordpress 2.1 is a shockingly poor piece of bug-ridden horse crap, whose file upload routine is spectacularly inept, and in whose admin section's option-editing fails with a 403 unless it has a .htaccess file in the right place which they don't even include in the download.

For chewing up an entire day of my life which I will never see again, you will all burn in hell.

And would it kill you to at least differentiate your own fucking website between the four intra-incompatible releases of your product? Ninja-level Google-fu is not an alternative to having a Support link on Wordpress.org which isn't entirely bloody useless.

On a related note if anyone, anywhere, can point me towards something I can bolt onto this POS which can let someone upload an image, create a thumbnail, and then post it in a blog entry, then I can stop wasting my time and money trying to be psychic. Update: The installer failed, for reasons unexplained, to give the ID columns in the posts and posts_meta tables the required 'auto_increment' attribute, which completely banjaxed a bunch of things, requiring quite a lot of manual MySQL surgery to repair.

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Conor O'Neill (not verified) | February 7, 2007 - 16:17

Does not sound fun. I was surprised by how well my 2.1 upgrade went - I think I had to only update one plug-in afterwards.

Co-incidentally I was playing with an Image Manager Plug-in for WP yesterday on a WPMU install and it "might" be what you are looking for.

http://www.soderlind.no/archives/2006/01/03/imagemanager-20/

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Donncha O Caoimh (not verified) | February 8, 2007 - 12:29

Wow, you didn't have a good time with the new WP. It's been working really well for me for ages.

Want to drop me a mail and run through with me how you installed it and where the problems were? I've never heard of a problem with options requiring a .htaccess file, unless you mean the permalinks, in which case it's probably permission problems which are quickly solved. The first Google result for "wordpress .htaccess" is http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks which covers most problems and explains things well.

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johnh | February 8, 2007 - 14:01

More info, since it's Donncha asking.

I just spent about 20 minutes piecing everything together, and that particular problem is: lots of shared hosts have mod_security. If mod_security is there, WP2.1 breaks because of unwanted (read: incompatible with WP's assumptions) security filter inheritance from / to /wp-admin.

This .htaccess file in /wp-admin makes it go away:


<Files options.php>
SecFilterInheritance Off
</Files>

Now, if this comes up a lot (I suspect it might though I don't use shared hosts myself, ever, or Apache for that matter), my suggestion would be to include that snippet and any others which might be necessary inside a conditional like <if modsecurity.c> (insert correct syntax here) and ship it.

This forum topic touches on the subject but in an unuseful manner (it could do with some subject editing, I think).

More usefully still, since you've got a proper grown up project these days, I could strongly suggest someone goes over to api.drupal.org and make a direct copy of it for Wordpress. Its main purpose being that it lists which functions call which other functions, and which files they live in.

Because yesterday, three times, I had to start walking back through included file after included file, one at a time, and reading every damned function, because (and this criticism remains as vehement as it was in the heat of annoyance yesterday), you've got four or more Wordpress codebases in the wild and users can't tag which ones they're talking about in fora even if they wanted to. FFS, even your own plugins list doesn't distinguish between versions.

----
John H

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martinb (not verified) | February 8, 2007 - 14:25

Versions? They have versions? Crikey, you'll be demanding the impossible like release management next...

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Donncha O Caoimh (not verified) | February 8, 2007 - 18:31

I've never used mod_security myself so I'm not familiar with it unfortunately, and I don't use a shared host either.

I'm glad you figured out how to fix the problem, hopefully someone else with the same problem will find it in the future!

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Michele (not verified) | February 10, 2007 - 21:15

Nice to see not everyone sings WP's praises :)

Posts like yours help to bring out some of the issues that developers like Donncha need to be aware of.

Personally I think there should be some sanity built in for checking issues with file versions etc., as my main install only started working at 100% capacity when I accidentally nuked the entire thing...

Upgrading blindly can cause issues. Anyone who says otherwise is either running a base install or is really adventurous

Michele

PS: I'm still annoyed with the .org's refusal to list hosting providers outside the US.

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