Creative Grease: Stains on the Driveway of Hot Glue Media

WordPress Custom Post Types Fail

Indulge me while I rant.

One of the big freaking deals made over WordPress 3.0 was the introduction of Custom Post Types and its partner in crime, Custom Taxonomies. These are amazing wonderful things that will help make WordPress even more customizable! It’ll be even more like a CMS! Amazing! New! Oh Frabjous day! It’ll be so easy!

“That’s funny,” I thought to myself when I installed WordPress 3.0 for the first time, “I can’t find anything in the admin area anywhere about Custom Posts or Custom Taxonomies.” So I Googled these amazing new features to see where they were hidden, because surely they couldn’t be missing from the interface.

Turns out, I was entirely wrong. These features were missing from the interface entirely, because they’re not supported natively in WordPress 3.0. In fact, if I wanted to play with these “new features”, I’d have to hack core with entirely new code to make them work.

Whut?

Why don’t we take a closer look at these “features”?

Custom Taxonomies were introduced in WordPress 2.3. (Do you remember that? No? Neither does anyone else.) They started out as a hacky, but serviceable, solution. Here’s a good example of what you needed to do in WordPress 2.3 and above to enact custom taxonomies on your blog. Lots of coding. Lots of advanced coding, especially for a WordPress site. And check out the article: it’s for WordPress 2.8. Even taking into account that between WP 2.3 and WP 2.8 was The Era Of Hackiness, this clearly isn’t a feature that evolved much.

But then, Custom Taxonomies were refreshed for WordPress 3.0! What did we get? An incredibly inelegant and entirely code-based solution that’s exactly the same as it’s always been. Nothing has changed. There’s no easy way to do this, folks.

I hear you cry “Custom Post Types! They will liberate WordPress to take over the CMS world filled with Tumblr and Expression Engine!”

Ok, first? Shut up. Second, if you want to use WordPress for tumblogging, you’ll save yourself a lot of time if you install the Custom Post Template plugin and use that, and you’ll save even more time if you just get a Tumblr account. Third? Shut up, Expression Engine, stop being so unfinished and completely overpriced at the same time.

Custom Post Types, you say? What does my favorite WordPress codemeister Justin Tadlock have to say about it?

In WordPress 3.0, we’ll have the capability to easily create and manage content via custom post types. Not only that, but you won’t have to rely on a plugin to do this for you. It can be done via your theme’s functions.php file with a few lines of code.

Really, WordPress? Thank you for hyping the ever-living crap out of a feature that is effectively unusable for the average user and lives completely in the domain of the professional WordPress geek, like me. I appreciate it, I do. I could always use the work. I mean, look at this. And this. And this. And here’s what WordPress has to say about it, with their characteristic lack of practical, working examples. Clearly, not rocket science, and quite a powerful hack for those in the know.

Just as clearly, this is beyond your average WordPress user.

Maybe I shouldn’t bother getting so worked up about this, but WordPress is what it is because it’s supposed to combine a relatively easy-to-use interface with powerful power for power users. WordPress has a (relatively) long history of consistent growth in power and usability, with both elegant solutions and powerful public hacks, all available for everyone, everywhere.

Never have I seen such a cockup between an elegant feature and a hackity hack job hack as we have here. There’s a difference between features and hacks, and Custom Taxonomies and Custom Post Types are hacks, and it’s utterly ridiculous that the Automattic team has forgotten the difference.

Still don’t believe me? Check this out. If an average user wants to take advantage of these features, they need to install a third-party plugin. Do you understand how wrong that sentence is?

The Custom Post Type UI plugin is a marvelous little tool, by the way.  It automates the creation of custom post types and taxonomies for you. In other words, it does what WordPress really should be doing for you already and doesn’t.

So! If you want to take advantage of Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies but just can’t figure out how to make it go? Drop me a line. Obviously, when using some of the most populist software on the internet, this is a job for professionals.

Mer made this mess on August 11th, 2010 and filed it under WordPress