My main beef with PHP is that the most deployed applications that use it are some of the most difficult to manage and messy pieces of code that I've ever seen.
I'm talking about Wordpress and vBulletin.
While MVC isn't the only valid design pattern, some varient of it is rather nice when working with websites and these two seem to ignore it through and through. Testing? What's that?
I know that better can be written in PHP, but for apps that I've had to deal with, PHP normally looks like an overpowered scripting language that's just a mess. I'll stay with Rails and Sinatra when I can.
Having recently created a theme for MediaWiki and then reskinning that theme for another install, let me just say... it is frightening.
MediaWiki is all over the place and the themes included in the install are just horrifying. Whoever made the original (monobook) theme should get slapped in the face.
I agree with you that WordPress and Drupal aren't examples of great code. It has to do with the fact that CMSes take a long time to gain traction and acquire a true community, and WordPress and Drupal were started at a time when MVC was almost unknown in the web community. By the time they got traction, the oldest code in the codebase was, well, ugly. Things that have been added to WordPress and Drupal recently are usually okay code-wise.
I'm talking about Wordpress and vBulletin.
While MVC isn't the only valid design pattern, some varient of it is rather nice when working with websites and these two seem to ignore it through and through. Testing? What's that?
I know that better can be written in PHP, but for apps that I've had to deal with, PHP normally looks like an overpowered scripting language that's just a mess. I'll stay with Rails and Sinatra when I can.