Logician.org

Well being a webdev who compares every webapplication with the beloved vbulletin, I have to compare it to wordpress which I installed in this site too.  Of course their niches are different so this is like comparing apples with bananas but I’ll try to find common grounds from user point of view while comparing.

I developed a few minor modifications for wordpress before but had never used it until today so I can say wordpress is a new world to me (yet). And since I’m a big vbulletin fan, I have to admit that my initial comparison today can be somehow biased and uneducated (on WP part) but I wanted to share my first impressions in the first days of my wordpress experience.

Here is some comments

• WP installation is a breeze. Vb installation is not hard either but WP is really very well designed from installation point of view especially for newbies. Kudos to WP devs!
• I’m sorry but I don’t like WP coding. I worked with it before and it is a not a clean coding at all. Nothing can compare to marvelous coding syntax of vbulletin anyway but WP devs still clean the coding a little bit, it is too untidy. But I have to admit vb coding is an exception and nearly all applications are coded in a messy syntax in PHP world so WP is not an exception here. BTW when I say coding is not clean, I don’t mean it is insecure or buggy, I just mean it is not documented very well, has a clean syntax to follow while reading or modifying. So its being clean does not mean anything to its users but it means a lot to developers who need to work with this code.
• WP is pretty easy to use and learn even for newbies. It is designed greatly in this aspect and no wonder why it became so popular. Unfortunately vbulletin is losing its grip in this field. It is developing so immensely that it is no more easy to use for internet newbies but I guess its market calls for such a progress so I don’t blame it so much. I merely point a fact that vb is no more easy to learn or use for a total newbie anymore.
• Theme (style) editing and pluggin (product) support are similiar in WP and vb and both are quite good in my opinion.
• What I didn’t like about WP is its WYSIWYG edit interface. It is much more advanced than WYSIWYG interface of vbulletin by supporting image/media additions and formating etc. but it is too slow in browsers. I understand that these features are important in a blog editing interface but if parsing time would be increased it would be great. I didn’t like waiting a long time whenever I’m typing something in the interface. Although vb interface is not as developed as WP, it is for sure faster. Yet I know that vb edit interface can easily become problematic if you load long formatted text into it. I don’t know what’s the case for WP in longer texts. I couldn’t test it yet.
• Auto save feature of WP is very nice and vb definetely needs such a tool

When I dug WP more, I may give a more detailed comparison report. For starters I can say that I like WP for now and it is a big kudo for them as I very rarely like a new application especially since I’m too biased to vbulletin. 😉 But well, this is just an initial impression..