Wordpress Issues

I have been working with the Wordpress script that powers this blog and several of my other for almost three years now and can say that the overall experience is quite positive. It’s easy to setup and maintain and provides a good level of customization.

So far so good. Several issues appeared over time that I would like to address in this short article. I tried to fix them before but I failed to really find solutions for them. I did post a few help requests at the official Wordpress forum which remained unanswered even after pushing them a few times and a search on Google did not return the desired results as well.

So, here we start with my personal Wordpress issues that other webmasters might also experience:

• Akismet is not perfect: Akismet is the default Wordpress anti-spam plugin which is delivered with the default installation of Wordpress. That puts it in an unfair advantage over other spam plugins like Spam Karma which is in many aspects a better plugin. But I do not want to talk about politics here. Akismet comes with no configuration options at all. The only things that can be added are the Wordpress Api Key which is mandatory and a checkbox to delete spam that is older than a year.

  If you compare it to Spam Karma you are comparing Notepad to Notepad++. That’s the difference in usability. Akismet divides spam into user comments, trackback and pingback spam but it is not possible to delete only one category. The delete all button always deletes all spam.

  Akismet does have a search field but that search field is global, there is no way to only search the author name, email or filter by other parameters like only showing posts with one link or less in the body.

  It does catch quite a few valid comments which are then lost forever because it is impossible to work with Akisment on websites that get 1000+ spam comments a day unless you do that full time.

• Spammers can still register accounts although registration has been turned off: When I turn off registration to my website in the settings of Wordpress I expect to see no new users in the future unless I add them manually. The option however does not really help because even though it has been turned off spammers can still register accounts on my blog.
• There is no history: - The admin cannot see what authors or subscribed users of the blog have been doing. He cannot see if an author deleted an article that he wrote earlier, he cannot see if a user edited or removed a comment.
• Publishing an pending article: When someone else with not enough user rights is writing an article that article gets added to the Pending Articles and an user with enough rights can publish it after reviewing it. The problem that I face is that I have a hard time figuring out how to publish the article so that it is published in that instance and not in the past. If I just hit publish the article is published when the author of it saved the final version. This can be a few hours or even a few days in the past.

  I have not investigated that matter further but I suppose it could be problematic for RSS Feeds and even the site itself. I tried to change the date to the current one and publish it but it still felt like I missed something here. It’s definitely a strange behavior in my opinion.

Those are my issues with Wordpress and I always cross my fingers and hope that they get fixed in one of the next updates.