Stick with ‘plain vanilla’ Word Press

If you’re considering using WordPress for your site, stick with the simple, out of the box version.

Customize your header graphic so it looks nice. Customize your background colors.

Pick the options you want to display from the basic menu offered.

Don’t do a ton of extracurricular customizing…unless you are extremely wonky and will enjoy pretty much completely troubleshooting and reworking the coding in various files in your installation every few months. I speak from first-hand experience.

Here are reasons why it pays to stick with plain-jane vanilla:

+ The basic version of WordPress is highly functional and offers many options. Work within them and your site will work well for you and your visitors most of the time.

+ The WordPress community upgrades the software constantly, solving security problems and adding functionality and making current versions obsolete. You will need to upgrade your installation at least every three months, if not more often.

+ Upgrades are simple and quick if you use the basic out-of-the-box version. Sometimes as simple as pushing one button and all your current options are preserved and the installation upgrades automatically.

+ Upgrades become extremely problematic if you decide to customize a lot of files in the installation, and even more so, if like me, you were intent on creating a highly unique presentation and customized lots of files in a particularly complex theme. (I’m using as a base, the especially artsy and attractive 3-Column Relaxation theme by Clemens Orth. And I’ve modified it a lot.)

+ The way WordPress displays on computer screens (and acts) is determined by what is called the theme. WordPress comes (out of the box) with two basic themes to choose from, “Classic” and “Default.”

WordPress users have created and are sharing hundreds more. Maybe more than a thousand more by now. Some are really, really cool. There is a theme to fit just about any site’s personality and needs. But the WordPress engine itself is really only tested on the two basic ones that come with the installation.

If you go with a theme other than those two and you have problems, you may have trouble getting help to fix it. And you may need to fix it after any WordPress upgrade. And you may need to fix it for many other reasons as well.

Some theme authors maintain active forums and respond almost daily to users’ inquiries and seem to enjoy helping them troubleshoot problems with their theme. Others do not.

+ Wordpress has a great, free, volunteer-run and maintained users’ support forum. Post a question there about a problem with basic WordPress and chances are you’ll have replies that will lead you to the solution within hours. Post a question there about a problem you are having with a non-plain-vanilla, customized theme and you may go days, weeks, months without help.

In the meantime, your site may be down or not be functioning well for visitors.

I’ve been there for a few months now with the comments function not working, not accepting new comments and not displaying old ones. And I’ve spent about 100 frustrating hours troubleshooting this on my own to no avail and seeking (but not receiving) help on forums, and am about to do some more radical troublehooting… And may even give up on my sophisticated, customized theme and go lightly modified plain vanilla. So that I have a useful, functioning site. And one that upgrades and grows with WordPress easily.

+ If to get your site working the way you want it to and to look the way you want it to you make a lot of little changes here and there to WordPress files and to your theme files, you are going to have to remember absolutely every one of those changes. And maybe make them again and again each time WordPress upgrades.

Document them carefully.

There are 180-plus files and many thousands of lines of code in Wordpress. Any change you make in any line in any file may break your site and/or may not be compatible with the next WordPress upgrade.

And, of course, any change YOU make won’t be included in the next upgrade.

As I said, the upgrades come quickly and regularly. And they often abandon coding and features in the older versions. So if you don’t upgrade, not only is your site subject to security vulnerabilities, but newer components (like cool plug-ins) built for WordPress won’t work with it. You’ll want to upgrade regularly.

Unlike in the early days of the web, you can’t view the time you spend customizing your WordPress site as a “permanent” improvement that adds long-term value to the site. Rather, you need to view it as work that likely will need to be repeated regularly.

Your life will be simpler if you don’t do a lot of file customizing. And your site will function more predictably and will be down less often.

So that’s why I recommend “plain vanilla.”

I recommend this because I didn’t go plain vanilla. And I’ve learned.

Plain vanilla doesn’t mean you can’t be creative. It just means you must allow yourself to work within the parameters and limitations of the “system,” rather than insisting on changing the system to fit your vision of how it should work.

Hope this saves you the literal thousand hours I’ve spent on WordPress unnecessarily because I wanted a certain look and function that wasn’t available in the plain vanilla versions.

If you’ll allow yourself to work with what’s there, rather than with what’s not, you’ll be much happier and you’ll have a working site pretty doggone quickly.
– ken winston caine