How to write a terrible WordPress tutorial

https://twitter.com/#!/evansolomon/status/189909728145571841

True, and here’s a related post I wrote earlier about Plugins vs. Without a Plugin. Still, we keep seeing such tutorials piling up everyday, even obvious ones like Google Analytics.

Why would one want to go through the trouble of copying and pasting code into their theme’s header.php file, and then breaking everything when they change their theme or when the theme gets an update? Why not just use a plugin that will retrieve the analytics profile via OAuth?

Is it considered “cool” to copy/paste all my plugins into my theme’s functions.php file? If so, I might just try it out right here on my site! And since I’m running multisite with quite a few different sites, I’ll have to do that ten times for each plugin that I need to use. Then maybe use constants to indicate which snippets I want active and which ones I don’t. *

And as soon as I end up with a 5000-line functions.php file, I can go complain that WordPress is too difficult to learn, and that it’s a pain switching themes or domains, and maybe blame Otto for absolute URLs too. *

* Sarcasm

About the author

Konstantin Kovshenin

WordPress Core Contributor, ex-Automattician, public speaker and consultant, enjoying life in Moscow. I blog about tech, WordPress and DevOps.

6 comments

    • Wow cool, thanks so much for the tip Alex! I will now copy all core files into index.php. Maybe then minify the file and remove all comments too. How to run WordPress without a WordPress :) ha!

  • I’ve found that if you just save the rendered pages as html files and upload, it speeds things up considerably! Bonus: No plugins required!

    • Wow, Ryan, that really does work! I can now even move them to a hosting account with no php/mysql support, so it’s not only faster, but also cheaper. Thanks so much for the tip! P.S. I had to go back to my WordPress and save the page in HTML again to render this comment :)