Why you should not use WordPress

The appeal of WordPress is obvious: cheap and easy, and lots of “developers” know it. The biggest problem with WordPress is that something originally designed as a blog platform, has evolved general CMS features, and is widely used a development platform. The problems are that it has security issues, and is neither flexible nor productive when used a a development platform and cheap developers are not good developers. Continue reading

WordPress plugin: Simple Sparklines

Updated version available.

This is a very simple WordPress plugin that allows the creation of simple sparklines (small graphs that fit in the flow of text). It uses James Byers’ Sparkline PHP Graphing Library.

The aim of this plugin is simplicity, it therefore does not use the full range of features of the PHP sparkline library, let alone the full potential of sparklines per se. However it is very easy to use. For example this graph [spark] [type line] [size 20,30] [series 66,64,62,60,56,54,52,50,40,30,20,10,0][dot 7,50,5,green][/spark] illustrates the kinked demand curve faced by a firm in a oligopolistic market. The EBITDA of telecoms company Thus over the last five years is shown by [spark] [type bar] [size 20, 4] [series -24.6,3.1,27.1,43.6,39.1][/spark]. Continue reading