Peter Marklund's Home

As a result of my move to Stockholm and no longer working for Collaboraid I have now moved my homepage over to a new server at Dreamhost - an excellent LAMP hosting company in the US.

For my weblog I chose to use Wordpress and I have certainly not been disappointed. In fact, Worpress continues to impress me in so many different ways. The UI is very slick and the software feature rich. It has a great community with many themes and plugins, and it has seemed robust so far.

Most importantly, I was totally blown away by the simplicity and elegance with which I could extend Wordpress using a simple callbacks / hooks mechanism. I was able to quickly add a language filter for posts allowing users to view only posts in english, and I managed to do this without modifying the Wordpress source code!

I've only looked at the Wordpress codebase briefly, but it seems to me they are following conventions whenever they can, and keeping things simple. It's the beauty of the PHP software I've seen so far - it's very easy to find your way around the software and make small hacks and get immediate feedback on your changes.

Wordpress retains most of the typical PHP simplicity and straightforwardness and combines it with good design, very little duplication, and most notably a brilliant callback extension mechanism that preserves upgradability. I hope this kind of callback approach is more widely adopted in the industry. I think it is the way forward and finally I am hopeful that we can solve the annoying problem that has been with us for so long of allowing open source customizations and upgrades to play well together.