WP Install. What's changed since I started web dev?

January 29, 2020

In the beginning

When I was first starting out as web developer, my first big project was to be the point of contact between an insurance company and a digital agency in charge of revamping the website. Outside of the design and the branding, the website was more informative than a place of much interaction. We built out an email form and that was pretty much it.

The fun part was to look under the hood and kind of peel back the mystery of how the internet rendered words that were seemingly quasi English sentences and spit back a design that matched what we wanted to see. It was the beginning of less magic and more math.

I was hooked

I loved it. Every meeting I wanted to learn more, and I wanted to dig into how Wordpress sites worked and did all of their mathematical (no longer magical in nature but still splendid) things. And I remember being really frustrated by the amount of interfaces that abstracted away how the actual code worked. It was fine for the project I was working on, but I was hungry to learn.

It’s one thing to be told “Hey kid, this is a magic trick, see the second rabbit?” and it’s another to reply “Yeah I get it but show me what you’re doing with your hands so how I can hide the first rabbit and be my own magician, dumbledork.”

Some years later..

It’s 2020, and I’m back in a Wordpress build for another project, this time helping out a really cool nonprofit to make their standing website a little more functional. I understand a lot more about what it takes to get a website standing on a server, what the main differences are between Wordpress and the rest of the web apps. So, you can imagine my interest in going back to Wordpress to see if I was right to complain in my head about not knowing all the magic.

Spoiler alert: it’s still really fucking annoying.

I get why it’s built the way it’s built. You don’t have a platform own 40-some-odd-percent of the web and build unintuitively. The wealth of knowledge on the WP Codex is massive too, and there’s plenty of really, REALLY easy ways to set up a hosted build for Wordpress.

But trying to build a theme or a WP site on my local machine has been like giving myself a root canal. It’s really my fault, and I could have gone to the dentist to make this WAY easier on myself, but dammit, I’m cheap.

Anyway, this is a long way to say I don’t miss doing Wordpress, but it’s nostalgic to be back in the environment again.

Using his superhuman patience and imagination, he daydreamed so hard that it broke the universe that he knew, granting him access to all daydreams and to all possiblities. He could materialize anything he could imagine with his mind. He even brings back the dead at one point, to a horrible failure. With this failure in mind, he roams the streets in search of adventure.