I realize that people blogging about their blogging software is about as exciting as hearing about someone changing their socks, but I’m gonna blather a bit.
I upgraded my WordPress just yesterday, and I was partly thinking of ditching it completely for something else. Not that I don’t like WordPress, mind you, it’s just that the history of security issues has always made me a bit nervous.
That aside, I do wish there were an ability to disable one thing across the board — the way WordPress “beautifies” your posts with smart quotes, HTML dashes and the like. It’s always been a minor annoyance to me, especially when I mix code arguments with regular text … fex: pass –foo to program bar.
Anyway, while googling for a plugin that would disable this for me, I saw this excellent post on the wp-hackers mailing list asking, quite simply, for an option to turn off the wptexturize feature. I’d love to quote the whole thing verbatim since it’s so well written, but I’d just invite you to go read it.
Now, not ranting just about WordPress, this is my take on software development in general — if you are going to add a feature to a program that alters things how they were originally input or intended, for the love of cupcakes, please add an *option* to disable that feature. That’s all I’m asking for. A simple binary check. If $this then function(). It’s really not that hard.
And I’ll just leave it at that.
Edit: Found a really simple plugin that works. I’m happy and ignorant again.