WordPress code base spinning out of control

Because WordPress likes to be backwards compatible and break as few things as possible. This allows people to upgrade from version 1.5 to 3.3 without loss of data, or having to learn how to code.

Different philosophies ??

And building on that backwards compatibility, the updating process itself is amazingly easy compared to Drupal.

Also, even with that compatibility, you may have noticed that a lot of work IS put into optimizing execution performance in WordPress. WordPress may not have a sharpest code in certain respects, but there isn’t the loading lag time in the backend as can sometimes be experienced with Drupal.

honestly, in favor of smaller, cleaner, more nimble code, I wouldn’t mind limiting the backwards compatibility to n-1 major versions. If someone is on n-2 then they can do interim upgrades. This is common.

n-1 of 3.3 is 3.1, though.

Having worked in both Drupal and WordPress, I have to say… I find WordPress to be A LOT more flexible and easier to code for than Drupal. With one exception, none of the sites I’ve set up in WordPress have been blog sites (in fact, one of my recent sites was a conversion from Drupal to WordPress that ended up looking and functioning almost identically in the frontend).

Drupal modules were always a hassle to write… WordPress plugins are far easier. And I never did get a really solid grasp of Drupal’s templating system.

Not to mention that, in terms of speed and resource usage, WordPress kicks Drupal’s butt and scales a whole lot better.

As a sidebar, this relevant post came up and explains a lot about why a ground-up rewrite is complicated: https://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=75&t=41583