Pixelrage.net

Nobody could possibly be more of a Wordpress.org fanboy than me. I recommend it to anyone who even begins to ask “what CMS should I use for…”, I use it for every project I work on, I modify it, read about it, and live it. There’s one thing that annoys the hell out of me about Wordpress, though – and it is a real nuisance in terms of website structure.

If you’re using Wordpress as a CMS or a substitute for heavyweight platforms like Joomla, you’ll notice one pretty bad flaw: the linking structure. It’s all due to one simple, stupid reason – pages are named “mysite.com/page“, and posts are named “mysite.com/category/post“. Nowhere in between can you backtrack a post to a page, nor can you create a truly structured site hierarchy because of those truly worthless Wordpress categories.

What is a Wordpress category? Basically, it’s a page you can visit that lists every single post within it. It truly makes no sense to me, UNLESS we’re talking about blogs. But, for Wordpress driven storefronts, affiliate stores and whatever other project you are trying to create, it’s a glass ceiling. Let me illustrate with a little case study:

• I create a store for office supplies using Wordpress and ePN (eBay Partner Network) using the PHPbay plugin.
• I start off creating the home pages, and categories for writing utensils and computer peripherals. I add 50 products to each of those two categories, totaling 100 individual product pages. Those pages branch down further into deeper pages for ‘brand name writing utensils’ and ‘brand name computer peripherals.’
• I install a breadcrumb plugin for my Wordpress affiliate site, only to see that something is very wrong. The site will not backtrack from home page, to main product category to the subcategory to the product page, like this: mysite.com/writing-utensils/pens/bic. It dawns on you that “writing-utensils,” as in “mysite.com/writing-utensils,” does not even exist!  The whole second level of that URL is in limbo.

That “second level” position is reserved for Wordpress Pages, only – not Wordpress categories or posts. Don’t even think of cheating by creating a Wordpress Page named “../writing-utensils,” it would tear a hole in the space-time continuum. Well, not really, but it will probably look like some really strange case of duplicate content, and mess up your XML sitemap and structure. The true address of that second level would be “mysite.com/category/writing-utensils,” even though “/category/” disappears in the actual URL for a deep link. Catch my drift?

This is one extraordinarily frustrating aspect of Wordpress. It can be used to create anything, but it always comes down to one simple fact: it was engineered to be blogging software, and that core structure hasn’t been modified in any way to accommodate traditional website hierarchies.

The biggest fix Wordpress could implement is to allow us to forfeit Wordpress pages completely. They consume the 2nd level of the URL (mysite.com/whatever), which is where the first breadcrumb must reside. That first breadcrumb (in the aforementioned example) should be the “sub-category” or main product page that branches directly off of the home page. Instead, your ecommerce site doesn’t have any main product page. The products awkwardly backtrack to the home page.

There have been attempts to delete Page functionality out of Wordpress through the usage of Wordpress plugins, but they were deemed to be dangerous, and threatened to seriously screw with the infrastructure of a Wordpress build. It’s a total shame. The one functionality, as simple and stupid as it is, cannot be done for Wordpress…a platform celebrated for its expandability.

We should only hope that Wordpress can reach full CMS status one day, so that its link structure doesn’t have to conform to Posts and Pages; rather, all content within a Wordpress site should flow directly from home page to landing page.