Atheist Forums Must Change

[Excited Penguin]

Why?

Mostly because it's an archaic mess under the hood, rife with terrible code.  Or, it was the last time I was forced to deal with it a few years ago.

It was first released in 2003 before PHP had real object oriented programming support.  It was merely supposed to be a blogging engine, and because of that the entire thing is based on The Loop, which is quite literally a global level loop (think for-loop or while-loop)  that runs the whole thing.  And for a blog, that kinda sorta makes sense.

Because of how easy it was to install and use, it quickly gained ubiquity, and with it a desire to expand it into other kinds of websites, like CMSes and e-commerce.  Problem is, rather than change the guts to something more logical, they kept The Loop (likely because the user base that could actually troubleshoot code and the various add-on and theme creators were familiar with it).  So, it became a bit of an inflexible, contorted mess.

The code itself was terrible, written before PHP coders really knew what they were doing.  Lots of mixing application logic with presentation logic and global variables (which are very bad things because they blow apart encapsulation and create tightly coupled code that relies on what are essentially magic values) everywhere.

Maybe it's changed since the last time I used it, but I refuse to touch it again.  I'm much happier creating truly custom sites with Symfony because I can do anything a client wants, especially with all of the packages available through Composer.  And I can do it faster than I would mucking around with WordPress.  Even on the front end, as Twig is more flexible than the weird three file thing WordPress has for layouts.

Didn't understand a thing