Again you are steering of course. We are only discussing the underlying design of the code architecture, not of the success of those software packages as a whole. I can analyze each and point out exactly what made each so successful (in my opinion), but that's not what we are discussing.But I'm not the one who called anyone's code crap or claimed I could rewrite it better. I think saying that WordPress or phpBB are "way down the quality scale" is not understanding the difficulty of building applications with that level of functionality and polish. Plus, comparing frameworks and applications is not really fair -- they are different in many, many ways.
Ultimately there is a lot written above that says that your opinions of what is "good" is contrary to what the world says is "good." And obviously I have some of the same understanding of best practices that you guys do. But you seem to be saying negative things about solutions like WordPress' plugins or phpBB's mods that are in reality quite brilliant solutions. They have enabled thousands and thousands of people to do very interesting stuff. I continue to think there are some blinders on here about the domain of "good."
Do you really think the "world" care about the architectural design of those open-source package? only developers care or have the knowledge to understand. Again, I'm not talking about the qualities that made those packages successful (though you will ineviteably fall back to this), only the design of the code and how it affects us developers.
There is definitely a lot of funtionality in both wordpress and phpBB, but I have to disagree on polish. How many times did I rue the day when I had to work to make a couple conflicting wordpress plug-ins work together since a client just updated to a newer release ... for me working on wordpress code after being used to abstraction, separation of concerns in the form of MVC and OO scoping, is like having to forget almost everything I learned in the past 5 years.is not understanding the difficulty of building applications with that level of functionality and polish
And phpBB is even worse - I had to integrate a forum into my startup a week ago, and for some reason I choose phpBB. One of the requirements was to be able to sign-on with the same user name and password (and prefereably, session) as the main application. It took me a while to face the fact that it would take me less time to rebuild the forum functionality I needed from scratch than make this heap of global infested junk work with my code, and not to mention that it's highly annoying cache mechanism was really putting a damper on my designer's ability to style it's look and feel.
So after spending some serious time dabbling with this arcane code, I do allow myself to pass some judgement.
What's even worse, is that most people who are more familiar with those popular packages and don't know better, use them as a model for good design. I searched for other open-source forum packages, but unfortunately they all seem like carbon-copies of phpBB.. though somewhat stripped down.
So my question to all of you is this - if you had to define the properties of a good software design (in PHP), what would those be?