I love WordPress. I also love pretty much anything open source (when it works). Ever since I got into this industry I’ve been amazed that people would take the time to develop and build something only to then provide it for free!

It’s like paying it forward in a really unselfish way, but at the same time sticking around to answer questions and offer support is above and beyond!

Today, however; I am a little “meh” about WordPress and its future. Here’s why.

A few weeks ago I thought it’s about that time of the year when the new WordPress theme gets released. This time round it was time for TwentyFifteen and a quick Google search revealed some initial designs with launch date due any day…

The initial design snippets released looked promising. Light, minimalistic and great new layout i.e. header on the side with content on the right.

Upon release I looked for an opportunity to really give it a test run and found a client that liked the look of it. How exciting I thought, here’s my opportunity to test drive TwentyFifteen!

How wrong was I?

TwentyFifteen lost me at the logo.

Once you install the new TwentyFifteen theme you quickly notice that this particular theme has had no additional customisation options added.

It immediately feels like a blank canvas and quickly reminded me of the hassle of having to climb into PHP and CSS to get basic stuff done.

Besides this, the overall feel (once testing on a demo site) is mostly disappointing. Was for me anyway. The look, the font, the functionality, the way the footer sort of floats below the posts, size of everything on screen (a little too big to view easily) etc… I can go on and on…

Noam, just do it, I said to myself. I go in to add a logo and try the change header image. Boom. The whole side bar is now full of a stretched version of my logo. The whole damn side bar is the header.

I jump onto Google to see if anyone has a tutorial on how to add the logo properly and one suggestion failed whilst the other simply suggested loading a logo that has additional canvas i.e. the size of the side bar; added to the bottom so that when you upload it, it fits so that the logo sits topside and the white space fills the remaining part of the header… MEH! Im done.

Canvas from Woo; here we go.

Come on WordPress!

Now, in defence of WP, this is open source and a lot of time has gone into building it. Thank you. But, come on, how hard is it to simply release a version of WordPress where one can add a f&$king logo?

It’s a blogging platform. Sure, we get that but everyone still adds a logo in the end. Also, it almost feels that there are way too many chiefs and too little indians involved in the build and development of WordPress. Too many opinions and everyone trying to put their stamp on it.

The design (TwentyFifteen) and those before (since TwentyTwelve) have simply tried following a trend and ended up being a year late.

So, in closing this rant, I still love WordPress but it’s the lack of basic website functionality is seriously going to let its competitors catch up.

The price of getting sites built on the likes of Shopify (hate Shopify) or Wix and the added benefit of the vast majority of themes out there will slowly steal our valued support from those choosing to use WordPress.

Please, WordPress, add functionality to add a logo to WordPress without having to go into code or Googling it. This is design and UX numero uno. Add a customisation panel to allow for minimal changes like changing colours or basic tweaks that you and the rest of us know we all end up Googling anyway (those of us who don’t know how to code with ease).

Thanks for reading. No bashing please, I still love WordPress just having a harmless rant. Thanks.