Re: bbPress Plugin is Born
With all the eyeballs looking at WordPress and all the new faces every few years, it’s amazing to me how much code optimization falls through the cracks and is never addressed.
bbPress as a plugin is now going to be exposed to that. In fact, ironically in 0.9 there are functions from earlier versions of WordPress that were never optimized and do “expensive” recalculations and yet it’s STILL significantly faster than 1.0 with the newer functions from BackPress.
WordPress still has places where it calculates kinds of conversion tables yet never stores them statically for when it will likely be used again in the same page load. All those eyeballs looking at the code never see it and never fix it.
WordPress after all these years STILL uses the poorly performing SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS, something that was discovered and fixed in bbPress 0.9 but ironically was re-introduced with BackPress in 1.0, and will likely continue as a plugin.
My problem with “progress” is regression. It happens often because no-one questions the bloat and then the bloat starts to hide mistakes because the code is too hard to follow and people forget the original purpose of a function.
But by all means, keep throwing junk into the core, don’t dare keep it isolated in a plugin where it can be examined and improved easily (ie. avatars, tinymce, phpmailer, etc.)
They never do version freezes for long periods of time to clean up and optimize code, they just pile on features in the name of progress.
Go install WP 2.1 and check the memory and query footprint.
Then install WP 3.0 and compare. It’s fairly disgusting in comparison.
