Lets talk about wordpress

Wordpress is a pain to develop for. The looping mechanism sucks, most template functions output html and there seems to be no consistency in naming functions.

This is where the broken glass theory shines. A lot of design decisions taken in developing PHP early on were complete crap not to mention the inconsisties in naming conventions. This design philosophy somewhat carried over onto wordpress.

Wordpress sucks, PHP sucks.

Now that we have got that out of our way, lets talk about making websites in wordpress.

After working for over six months at True, I have come up with a plan on making better websites with wordpress

  • Don’t use the default archive pages. Use a custom wp_query()
  • Use ACF. Worth every cent.
  • Use BackupBuddy for deployments
  • Make a new html template for every page. Namespace your page specific css with the classname generated by wordpress inside the body tage.
  • For advanced functionalities, use a custom post type. If you want a archive page, just make a new template and run a custom loop instead of relying on the default loop.

Based on these guidelines, I created a custom starter theme based on the _s theme.


If you haven’t tried out browserstack for browser testing, you’re missing out! They have improved by leaps and bounds since I first started using them. The interface is extremely smooth and the emulation devices are pretty snappy too.


Its been a long time since I’ve blogged. I went to New Zealand during New Year’s, visited Wilson’s Prom afterwards and overall had a blast during the summer. I actually feel sad that this will probably be the last heat spell of the summer.

I am not a big fan of cold weather. This could be because I come from a place where the average daytime temperature is 35+

Which is a shame because nine out of twelve months, Melbourne is pretty friggin cold.

Floating at the Mordialloc beach I calculated how many days could I enjoy like this. Two more weekends this summer plus around six on an average every summer. I reckon I’ll live to at least 50 and total comes out to 180.

Fuck, I already miss the summer.