15 ms·

On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project

202 points by ziodave 6y ago

momokoko 6y ago
Shameful. As someone that has worked with Craft it has a ton of awful edge cases once you get deep into a project. Craft absolutely does not scale.
- asddubs 6y ago
  such as?
  - momokoko 6y ago
    https://craftcms.com/docs/3.x/matrix-fields.html https://craftcms.com/docs/3.x/matrix-fields.html Get a few hundred of those on a site and see how much ram you need.
    - technicallyian 6y ago
      Can validate. Craft is amazing, by far my favorite CMS, but if you have a true enterprise site and need to do any changes to fields, it's a nightmare. Crashes the site constantly, only solution is to boost RAM.
- jawngee 6y ago
  Not sure why you are being downvoted. We've done two migrations from Craft for clients. WordPress isn't great, but Craft isn't a panacea either.
- j0ej0ej0e 6y ago
  I don't think it's shameful, though just niaeve to expect it to work well. To be fair I do think it is difficult to make a choice until you make an app of size you will not know about those edge cases. My agency worked on a site which had ~1M+ pages and the backend became unusable (entries table was dead), task management had to be bespoke, search had to be dealt with by Elasticsearch amongst other things.
- lwhi 6y ago
  The argument put forward by this agency, doesn't actually hold much weight. Feels more like their choice was made to fit with the agency capability.
darekkay 6y ago
Not choosing and inaccessible platform was the right thing to do. Hopefully this will make Automattic reconsider their priorities regarding web accessibility. Related write-up: https://adrianroselli.com/2020/09/gutenberg-accessibility-costs-wordpress-the-w3c-work.html https://adrianroselli.com/2020/09/gutenberg-accessibility-co...
- LordAtlas 6y ago
  I am an adult with no accessibility challenges and I still find Gutenberg a piece of crap whose interface seems designed to make you pull your hair out. All my clients who just want to write posts ask me to turn the damn thing off. Somebody once yelled, "WTF is this stupid thing making me add blocks for each subheading and paragraph? That is not how writing works!"
- cheeze 6y ago
  Ironic that the link looks kinda... terrible. I can read it, but it's not pleasant at all.
  - LordAtlas 6y ago
    Adrian is a talented designer. I've known of him since his evolt.org days. Rather surprising then that this is the design he went with. But hey, personal blog allowances, I guess.
  - 411111111111111 6y ago
    Design is entirely broken in Firefox on android... Half the header is cut off etc
    - Drdrdrq 6y ago
      Fwiw, it works perfectly for me, no issues whatsoever. Which is rare. Ff on Android too, but 68.8 (I dare not upgrade, lest I lose uMatrix).
    - mattmanser 6y ago
      That's how it's supposed to look. I think. It is truly terrible, isn't it!
stoolpigeon 6y ago
Never mind - their contributing.md document makes clear it isn't a FOSS project. --------------- I wasn't familiar with Craft. Looking at it they seem to have their own license and it seems pretty restrictive. Can anyone point to any existing discussions about the implications of the license and if it is truly open source? I understand FOSS projects that have some kind of payment option, but I don't understand how the code can be available but there is no way to run it without paying for it. The language of the license is also rather informal. As a layman it has an appeal to me but at the same time I'm wondering how some of those things are defined.
- gexla 6y ago
  > Never mind - their contributing.md document makes clear it isn't a FOSS project. Where did you end up finding this information? How did you not see the "pricing" link in the navigation at their website? Or did you not look at their website? If you're having to pay for the software, then you probably don't need to dig much further to see that it's not FOSS. You seem to be making this more complicated than it actually is.
  - brylie 6y ago
    I'm not sure it's so cut and dry. We tend to reduce things down to binary thinking, perhaps by training. There do exist several prominent FOSS projects that also have pricing pages. They usually charge for hosted/managed deployments of their project or binary distributions (e.g. compile it yourself for free). While I believe it poses a conflict-of-interest, there are also a number of FOSS projects with pricing pages for "enterprise" features.
  - stoolpigeon 6y ago
    I went to the repo and read the license. The article made me think it was sold but open. Lots of FOSS software has purchase options. That alone doesn't indicate if something is foss or not. The license confused me, as I stated but they have another file "Contributing.md" that explicitly states it is not a FOSS license. Now I just wonder why anyone would work for them for free. The post linked here has the section "The question of open source" and it states "While their source code is open, they do have commercial licenses and cost money (though a modest sum)." That is where they link to the github repo. I'd say all that wording also muddies the waters. I guess it's "open" in the sense that you can read it. But I don't consider that to be open. I guess they are drawing a distinction between FOSS and "open". I can't argue that but I still think the way it's written is confusing. (or maybe I'm just not current on how these terms are being more commonly used.)
ponker 6y ago
The W3C has to make accessibility priority #1 — commercial entities usually deprioritize accessibility so the W3C must lead by example.
ognarb 6y ago
So while talking during the entire article about being firm supporter of open source software, they choose a proprietary CMS. I'm disappointed by the W3C.
- ponker 6y ago
  The W3C’s core mission is web standards, not FOSS. They are right to prioritize standards #1 just like the FSF website must be FOSS.
- dgellow 6y ago
  I have to say that I’m not sure why we would care about the license of their CMS. Their work is on standardization, whatever tool works well for them in their context is a good choice. What matters is their output, that standard documents are available publicly and are accessible by the majority.
  - bad_user 6y ago
    The long term support of that CMS also matters. Exported HTML/CSS/JS files look more and more like binary blobs. If you can't edit those pages in 10 years from now, without yet another expensive migration, then in retrospect it will rightfully seem like a poor decision.
    - Drdrdrq 6y ago
      Not really. As they explain, they took great care to make sure that the output (and thus saved data) is in line with W3C mission. Maybe migration might be needed in the future, but I see no reason why it would be any more expensive than migrating from WP (which is, btw, notorious for its storage schema choices).
- oever 6y ago
  They also chose the proprietary cloud service GitHub for managing their core workflow.
digitalengineer 6y ago
Does anyone know why Drupal wasn’t considered?
- stoolpigeon 6y ago
  The article says due to front end complexity. It's in the last sentence of the section with that header.
  - digitalengineer 6y ago
    Weird. I first somehow read a shorter version of the article in the HN iOS app.
- lwhi 6y ago
  I'd suggest using Drupal with a static generation tool, headless with Next.JS or Gatsby.
- cdubzzz 6y ago
  > Drupal also has this complexity issue which makes developing sites harder than it needs to be, and is why we didn’t consider that platform either. I’ve talked to other agencies who have decided to drop Drupal due to its complexity. I am sure I’m biased as I’ve spent a lot of time in Drupal. There are certainly some oddities wrt Drupal’s frontend but dismissing it entirely on that seems silly. Especially when it does a decent job of ticking some of their other boxes (e.g accessibility, open source, headless tooling).
ggm 6y ago
Is wp still php? What if you want a cdn outcome which doesn't drive to an sql backend? I've yet to experience wp consciously without it making me wince. I know a lot of former print press is using it, so the for profit sector likes it. That does not axiomatically make it best of breed. Being php is also not axiomatically worst of breed. The questions are decoupled really. 1) is wp still php 2) is wp best of breed. 3) if you want static site through cdn is wp the best fit?
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  These are most of the time not the good questions. Can WordPress be deployed by anybody ? Yes, there's a ton of PHP hosting providers and they all have a one-click install WordPress button. Does WordPress enable authors and owners to update their website content and the design with a WYSIWYG interface ? Yes and yes (see divi, beaver, etc.).
  - ggm 6y ago
    Is that a good fit for w3c against all the other choices?
    - johnchristopher 6y ago
      That is a different question from your first comment. Please stop, it's going nowhere.
- ehnto 6y ago
  Changing from PHP wouldn't change WordPress, it's general engineering approach hasn't changed since it gained popularity a decade or more ago. Except for Gutenberg, which could be characterized as an admin facing HTML editor powered by React components but with an interfacing layer between Gutenberg and React, so only some of your React knowledge applies. It gets saved as HTML. The actual served content is still served as PHP generated HTML. React isn't involved in the client workflow. All of this javascript code is of course bootstrapped and defined by PHP hooks including dependencies, and redefined again in the JS, so you're constantly diving between PHP and JS just to set up the JS. Now to work on WordPress idiomatically you need a whole new set of skills that introduce a whole new slew of problems. So it's not best practice or well engineered PHP, and it's not best practice or idiomatic React. The docs for Gutenberg are incomplete, so no luck there either. Another platform that failed in this same way was Magento 2. They want to use the Cool Kids Tooling, but they want to do it their way, so there's all this Bullshit™ inbetween and you get a hamfisted barely documented Frankenstein's monster. The third party tooling docs can't help you because of the proprietary integration making much of it no longer apply, and all the novel domain knowledge to get it to work is floating around in Stackoverflow threads and github issue tickets.
systemvoltage 6y ago
> One final note. We are currently considering a Headless CMS option for front-end page delivery. This means using the CMS in a decoupled way to manage content but use a separate system to deliver front-end pages. Please note this solution would not be reliant on JavaScript (e.g. a single page app which is common with headless. Excellent. SPAs have their place in things like Notion and Google Docs. I’m glad they’re not depending on Javascript.
- slim 6y ago
  it would be ridiculous if w3c relied on javascript for it's website. for instance the current website demonstrated a lot of advanced html/css when it was updated ~15 years ago
cjfd 6y ago
The 'eat your own dog food' principle would dictate that the W3C writes their site in plain html + css. The fact that this is not even considered proves the these languages are so incredibly non ergonomic. I know.... it is an often reiterated point, but when it is the site of the W3C it really is very hard not to notice this....
- Meph504 6y ago
  I don't see how the w3c establishing a rule set would mean they would code it by hand, can you provide more details as to why the should, and not use a CMS that produces compliant code?
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    Because they edited and published the HTML spec with lots of examples portraying HTML as an authoring language. If W3C actually does intend to publish further HTML specs based on WHATWG (which they haven't done since 2017), they should consider injecting their own navi/styles into the bikeshed-generated WHATWG material as part of their CMS setup (and they have tons of static HTML anyway).
    - Meph504 6y ago
      W3C and WHATWG signed and MOU last year to work together on documents and specs. Regardless, to define a language it only makes sense to author the specification from the language perspective. From what I've read, and honestly it's been many years since I have read their stuff, most of the authoring docs have a section in them talking about applications and editors creating the documents. I don't know, seems consistent to me?
- ehnto 6y ago
  They're still using HTML and CSS, all websites do. It's the dynamic and generated nature of web applications that makes static HTML and CSS not useful on it's own. You could argue the right choice then is a static site generator, but the difference between static site generation and dynamic site generation is really just when you do the generating work.
userbinator 6y ago
Please note this solution would not be reliant on JavaScript Please choose it then, because it would be a sad day for the Web indeed if the W3C's site turned into a horrible JS SPA like so many others unfortunately have. The W3C's collection of standards is an important and prominent example of the document-centric-web, and keeping them as static pages that can be viewed with anything down to a text browser is definitely important for accessibility.
vorpalhex 6y ago
Glad they realized the issues of Wordpress but a shame they went with proprietary nonsense with a faux license. A php based platform has a lot of negatives for scalability. Using a cms to generate static content is much more simple, scalable and cheaper. Keep it simple.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- m_mueller 6y ago
  WP is php, and it tends to take a ton of plugins of various quality, vendors and support to get it to where you want it. Last I looked at it, it didn’t even support multi-language out of the box.
  - lixtra 6y ago
    That’s a feature not a bug. >90% of the websites don’t care about multi-language. Why should their CMS be more complex just to carter the rest? Plugins nicely separate the concern and let the authors of the plugins get paid for their efforts.
    - lwhi 6y ago
      Surely it's a lack of features.
    - m_mueller 6y ago
      Typical American viewpoint that is. In European markets it is probably the inverse, most sites need multi language support. For a content management system I find it pretty poor to be missing this.
      - lixtra 6y ago
        Indeed, I thought for a moment about Switzerland, that might have one of the highest rate of multilingual websites at least in Europe. I wasn’t able to find what fraction of the Internet sites are multilingual but would be curious what’s your estimate. I still would be surprised if it is >10%. Maybe more if you weight by traffic but that is not the relevant metric here. The plug-in approach has another advantage: there are several reasonable approaches to a multilingual site, i.e. you can have a default language if a translation is not available. Or rather show nothing. You may want to force a translation of each page. How do you track the translation of changes in one language, etc. By picking/adjusting a plug-in you get the behavior you want instead of a one approach satisfies nobody default solution.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
> The use of React complicates front-end build. We have very talented front-end developers, however, they are not React experts - nor should they need to be. > I believe front-end should be built as standards-compliant HTML/CSS with JavaScript used to enrich functionality where necessary and appropriate. This is what worries me about React (and with other front end frameworks in general). I'm writing this as someone who choose Vue for their latest project. Web pages started off being documents - electronic versions of printed typeset pages - and could often look very beautiful. A lot of React pages seem, to me, to look like a collection of components - like modern versions of VB forms - facebook/twitter spring to mind etc. There are a lot of very good HTML and CSS 'coders' that aren't developers, they come from more of a design background. Are they being disenfranchised by the modern frameworks? Will we end up making the web look less beautiful?
- prox 6y ago
  I use Wordpress extensively and I find the whole Gutenberg switch to be absolutely atrocious. From the design to the technical implementation. And it is also received as such. The classic editor has been downloaded millions of times. What worries me most is that the developers haven’t responded one bit to these issues (if I read the relevant issues) and it solves no problems. It feels a lot like the technology du jour was picked and molded in a preconceived idea of a page builder. Forgoing a lot of that professional page builder plugins do great and much better already. So the absolutely silence on these criticisms is what worries me most. And yes, using react feels like a bad fit, it creates another layer where none needs to be, like the article stresses.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    I have a self-hosted blog with Wordpress and the change from classic editor to Gutenberg was like re-educating yourself to writing with your weak hand. Yuck. In the meantime, I got used to it, because I did not want to fight the development direction that was seemingly set in stone. And, to be just, Gutenberg got better. Nowadays you can pull most things off in it without thinking twice. But once you start horsing around with something untypical in mind, woe is you.
fevangelou 6y ago
Not a WP fan (although I've built large scale sites professionally) but the arguments regarding the frontend are kinda BS. What does Gutenberg have to do with the entire frontend layout? Gutenberg can still be used just for the main content region, not surrounding blocks. Not really a "talented" team after all. Plus, UK dev companies tend to be biased towards Craft these days cause (guess why) it's also UK based. I also wonder how they got Statamic in the list (probably to dilute the argument for the need for a commercial CMS) and not the 2nd largest CMS in the world (Joomla). All in all a pointless marketing article.
- brylie 6y ago
  I started my web development career with Joomla, around 2008. At that time it seemed somewhat convoluted -- having arbitrary levels of hierarchy to define a basic content model and redundant concepts for extending core functionality (i.e. what WordPress calls plugins and Drupal calls modules). Has Joomla managed to simplify it's architecture in the past 12-or-so years? Also, open-source CMSs are lacking for non-proprietary drag-and-drop layout builders (such as can be seen in Wix). Does Joomla have core or a fully open-source extension for drag-and-drop page building?
  - fevangelou 6y ago
    Joomla has several d'n'd content builders nowadays. As for the separation of types of extensions, that's actually a good thing for many practical reasons. In the end, it depends on what you're building...
- 3stripe 6y ago
  Just to correct one of your points: Craft was created by Pixel & Tonic who are a US company, not UK based.
  - fevangelou 6y ago
    Indeed, mea culpa.
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago
ComodoHacker 6y ago
Huge credit to Craft team! A proprietaty product being chosen for so heavily open-source leaning project is a big win. I'm bad at analogies, but it's like a minority person took top position in a big company with strong discrimination culture in the XX century.
- VadimPR 6y ago
  Open source is discriminated against, not the other way around.
sradman 6y ago
TL;DR: The W3C Redesign Project has selected Craft CMS over Wordpress. From the CMS strategy and requirements document [1]: > At a minimum, it’s expected W3C will have 10-30 people editing content on a new CMS, though this may be more. Why is the CMS used by the internal marketing team even under consideration for a web site redesign? This has the feel of busy work to me. [1] https://w3c.studio24.net/docs/cms-strategy-and-requirements/ https://w3c.studio24.net/docs/cms-strategy-and-requirements/
gassius 6y ago
I am almost sure this is not the case, but the article leave me with the impression that the author is not up to latest trends and paradigms. React, or any other modern front end framework, is not equivalent to SPA.
- brailsafe 6y ago
  Not necessarily equivalent, but usually used for that. Most frontend libraries are good tools for that task, and ok tools for other tasks.
quantummkv 6y ago
The biggest issue I have with Gutenberg is the typing latency when you are editing a standard 6 paragraph blog post with 2-3 images. On my laptop I can actually see the latency while typing. Characters appear on the screen seconds after typing them like a slow motion reveal frequently used in school PowerPoint presentation by kids to to look cool. It's maddening to see this much latency while typing a bunch of plain text on a machine than can comfortably handle big Android Studio projects without any such latency issues. Modern web really is a dumpster fire.
sascha_sl 6y ago
WordPress has some serious edge cases, and lots of stale issues in Core, many with patches that just go stale themselves. If it isn't prioritized by Automattic, it's not getting in. https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/32101 https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/32101
- Ayesh 6y ago
  This is my experience as well. Any tickets related to a11y, PHP code clean up/modernization, or security don't get the love JS-heavy tickets get. Thumbs up to people as Sergey who triage issues and brought up some of the tickets. Drupal is sort of following the same way; if it's not related to the latest Drupal version or related to media uploads, editing experience, etc, those issues are lucky to picked up.
somishere 6y ago
I kind of feel for these guys. This kind of project is the worst (massive, content/maintenance-heavy website with many admin users .. urghh). And given that they are likely to be heavily scrutinized on whatever direction they take, I mean it's pretty much lose lose (I really hope they are killer designers). That said, reading the blog post took me back to 2013 .. symfony/PHP? If I was the W3C product manager I really wouldn't be confident with the technical approach. It reeks of confusion, and appears to be relying on others for technical leadership. The W3C should be leading the way here. The approach should be something you write about and people go wow! They nailed it. At the moment it sounds like someone's googled accessibility and is in the process of pushing high-contrast lemons through the orange peeler.
frereubu 6y ago
I'm technical director of an agency that builds websites solely in WordPress, and I can say with feeling that Gutenberg has (so far) been a disaster not just in terms of accessibility but in terms of clarity of the development process. It's been a moving target since day one, with us constantly scrambling to keep up with large changes in each release. We held off for a while, and have only built three sites with it, but I wish we'd held off longer. For example, there have been major interfaces changes on a regular basis, each of which we have to spend time walking our clients through. One change - defaulting to full-screen editing, which hides the menus and loses a lot of context that editors were used to - was pushed through at the last minute of a release cycle with a personal intervention from Matt Mullenweg. That meant that suddenly editors were confronted with an unfamiliar editing interface even if they were already registered and hadn't changed anything themselves, rather than a dismissible tooltip letting existing editors know that they could use a new full-screen editing interface. That seemingly arbitrary and personal style of project management really doesn't foster confidence that things are being thought through carefully. I know from personal experience that you need to keep up momentum in a development project otherwise things stagnate, but so far the development of Gutenberg has been very much "move fast and break things" which would feel appropriate for a beta, but not for the default editing experience. I think Gutenberg may well turn out to be really good - our clients do prefer it over the classic editor once we have it under control - but the way this has been managed has lost a lot of good will on our part as an agency and I've been actively looking at other CMSes like Craft as a result.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  Gutenberg shipped way too soon. It has been a textbook case of how not to launch a product. Solid idea...horrendous execution. Mullenweg owes the WP community a massive apology. He especially owes the #a11y Community an apology. Hint: In either case don't hold your breath. But more importantly, it should not be in core. Full stop. Once WP became REST-driven the push should have been to lighten core. That is to decouple as muxh as possible. Core is that _core_. Then you configure your needs from there. Core should be the basics, as light and as lean as possible. But instead, more and more unnecessary bloat. More and more features with less and less benefit. Yes, I'm looking at CraftCMS and others as well. WP has jumped the shark. It's not going away. But I'm tired of having to shower after everytime I work with it.
trbfred 6y ago
Why did they not consider Pimcore? Other parts of their platform seem to be using Symfony too... Could be either used as "full CMS" or as data source for a downstream static site generator...
tiborsaas 6y ago
It's no wonder, Craft is a great pick. I've built numerous sites with it and it works like a charm. What they nailed down is that it has great UX for content creators and developers as well. The speed at which you can build sites is amazing. You can even build your startup MVP with it if you consider it as a headless, REST API prototype tool. Data modelling is where it excels. I guess I have to stop praising, it starts to feel like a paid ad :) BTW I don't get the naysaying for being proprietary, the source is open.
- Conan_Kudo 6y ago
  The source is shared, it is not an open source CMS. If it was an open source CMS, it would be provided under an open source license that complies with the OSD in full.
- nicbou 6y ago
  I love Craft's data structure. What WordPress mashes together as custom post types, Craft natively implements as entries, which are arbitrary collections of fields. It's also trivial to keep under source control. My only gripe with Craft is Redactor, which can easily be replaced.
seanwilson 6y ago
Is there an open source CMS that people would recommended for use with a static website generator for large websites? Netlify CMS is interesting for example and I love how content changes are versioned in Git. I like static website generation but don't want to get locked into a proprietary CMS platform.
- mobilefriendly 6y ago
  Drupal has modernized (its highly modular with OO PHP) and is an excellent enterprise CMS. It can be implemented as the headless backend: https://www.gatsbyjs.com/guides/drupal/ https://www.gatsbyjs.com/guides/drupal/
  - lwhi 6y ago
    Currently using Drupal 8 with a decoupled Next.js frontend .. works very well. Seem less upgrade to Drupal 9. Advanced CMS editing tools, moderation tools, media management, componentised content modules, content library, all content exposed via JSON:API, multilingual by default .. built on Symfony. To say it's more complex than WP is true .. but to completely discount it, is foolish.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  I belive that with GatsbyJS you can your a repo + markdown as a "backend".
  - seanwilson 6y ago
    Does Gatsby build fast enough for a large site though? I find their business model strange if I'm understanding it correctly - faster builds are a paid feature. I also don't understand the hype. I think it's just good marketing, people don't know the alternatives, and it uses React. I usually side with Hugo because it's so fast and simple to get running. I don't love the template language but the majority of sites don't need complex template logic anyway.
    - 6y ago
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lovetocode 6y ago
Am I the only one who hates the whole concept of a CMS? I much prefer just working HTML changes into a dev cycle. CMS encourages marketing and sales people to wreak havoc on your web experience. Working in HTML changes into the dev process also helps keep the engineering team aligned with the business/marketing strategy. I use Middleman for generating static html websites and it works great. I would love to see the concept of a webmaster come back.
- pindab0ter 6y ago
  There’s real value in allowing people with no HTML/CSS knowledge to write content. I also don’t see how writing and publishing content would wreak havoc on someone’s web experience, or am I missing something?
- ThinkBeat 6y ago
  I think all CMS I have used (aside for one I built of course) Are annoying, and getting pixel perfect results is challenging. I presume that will become easier when we move to headless CMS. The reason I like he and that often insists on it ,is because my team finds it both tedious and boring to have to make constant changes every time some in marking or legal or content writers which to ”change a few things” It is also far cheaper for them to so it themselves, and my team can can focus on on more important things. And yes there will be times when a developer needs to make changes still. The company I am at now sends” superusers to pretty tremendously comprehensive training on how to use the CMS tool. Usually, one or two people from each department are chosen to be superusers. That all works out much better than my team had to do the training. We were frankly not very good at it and it is far cheaper to outsource that for us. All of that means that our team get magnitudes fewer phone calls or tickets about how to do X or Y since the go to the super users for help. If the superusers are not about to figure it out he or she contacts us. This is awesome because when the superusers contacts us she can give a much more insightful description that a newbie employee with limited exposure to CMS's. To our tools. And often not that familiar with computers. People often talk about CMS being too slow in production. We have very few problems with that. We took a lot of time evaluating and testing the tools we use both for performance and for ease of expanding extending and customizing and developing And superusers how we believe our superusers will like the interface. And yes of course we had focus groups with potential superusers we're they could give us feedback.
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seanwilson 6y ago
When working with WordPress, can anyone recommend a trustworthy place to go for plugin recommendations? The problems I find with WordPress are: - WordPress core is missing a ton of stuff you'd expect to be there so you have to turn to plugins. - It's hard to assess the quality of plugins. They conflict with each other, kill page speed, they break as WordPress is upgraded, and there's tons of bad advice you have to navigate around (I find this problem with PHP in general, where top voted answers/suggestions are bad so you need to keep your wits about you more-so than other communities). Generally when I'm fixing WordPress websites, I'm stripping out all plugins (I've seen over 50 on one site before!) that have been added by non-technical users, then trying to find the simplest way with the fewest plugins to get the functionality back to what it was. You can get pretty far with just ACF, a contact form plugin, an optimisation plugin (how is page caching still not built into WordPress?), and coding small features into themes directly.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > You can get pretty far with just ACF, a contact form plugin, an optimisation plugin (how is page caching still not built into WordPress?), and coding small features into themes directly. This. I work on large, high-traffic WP sites a lot, and we're essentially keeping a hand full of plugins and writing everything else ourselves. Lots of plugins are complicated because they want to enable ordinary users to customize their behavior, which you don't need if you have even basic php skills. And from a code quality point, I prefer our own over most plugins. If anyone builds sites for clients and uses a lot of plugins, it's because they don't have anyone that can write code.
  - rmccue 6y ago
    Indeed. This is one of the reasons we started maintaining what is essentially a WordPress-for-enterprise distro, with a mix of first- and third-party code. The third-party plugins we bundle with it are from the select few sources we trust to build and maintain quality code (typically our peers).
    - pbowyer 6y ago
colourgarden 6y ago
One important point tucked away here that is getting missed: > Another major factor in the decision to remove WordPress from consideration was that they found “no elegant solution to content localization and translation.” To restate - WordPress does not support multiple languages by default. And anyone who has built a multi-language WP site with one of the popular plugins (WPML, Polylang) can attest that it's a pretty terrible editorial experience. Craft, for example, has (very good) multi-language support out-of-the-box. Studio24 and W3C probably should have pushed that point rather than accessibility concerns.
colourgarden 6y ago
For reference, here's the list of CMS requirements put together by the team - https://w3c.studio24.net/docs/cms-strategy-and-requirements/ https://w3c.studio24.net/docs/cms-strategy-and-requirements/
mattweinberg 6y ago
Hey all: we build a ton of websites in Craft and I've presented technical topics at their yearly conferences before. Happy to answer any technical or other questions about Craft here or via email, if anyone is curious to learn more. In my opinion it's a great CMS and a good choice for the W3C site. It's content author-friendly, is also very developer-friendly and supports modern development/SDLC processes. You'll be pleasantly surprised if your only PHP-based CMS experience is with other CMSes.
- nicbou 6y ago
  How's Redactor working for you? I have constant issues with it.
  - mattweinberg 6y ago
    It’s been good for our clients! WYSIWYG is a required feature for many of them and I’ve found Redactor better than a lot of alternatives we’ve tried. What issues do you have? One thing that’s helped us is making heavy use of Craft’s matrix blocks. That keeps a lot of styling and inline elements out of the WYSIWYG itself. Then we can turn off a lot of the WYSIWYG buttons/features and keep it simple.
conatus 6y ago
Massive props to Studio 24 for showing their working in public on all of this. It is amazing to see. More large scale projects of this kind should do this sort of thing. Its really thrilling to see someone think technical decisions out loud. So keep it up, despite what I am about to type! There are a couple of interesting things in this article. 1. It is absolutely remarkable they got 15 days to rather requirements and choose a CMS. Having worked in a couple of agencies, this is a lot of time, which is to the good W3C paid for it. 2. > We have very talented front-end developers, however, they are not React experts - nor should they need to be. I believe front-end should be built as standards-compliant HTML/CSS with JavaScript used to enrich functionality where necessary and appropriate. It makes a lot of sense for websites to be written in HTML/CSS in this progressively enhanced way, but does it make sense for complex user interfaces like any WYSIWYG editor? Even the Classic Editor basically dropped probably thousands of lines of (actually third party) Javascript into the mix in the form of TinyMCE. 3. > We won’t stop trying though and plan to do more R&D with Gutenberg in the future. The W3C project, however, did not feel like the right place to do this. On a project as wide-ranging as this one, development time does become a factor. This is about agency and project risk which is entirely fair enough. However, what is slightly strange, if risk of delivery due to unfamilar technology is a factor, is that the project then goes onto make two other decisions. - Use Craft - "We are currently considering a Headless CMS option for front-end page delivery" It is unclear from this piece if they have much experience using Craft, but my project manager alarm bells are ringing a bit when a team is intending to "deliver project in technology they have no internal expertise in". Of course, Craft is by all accounts excellent, but could be a source of problems. The judgement is between the technical difficulty of using Gutenberg and learning a whole new CMS as a developer. Further: the headless CMS option. Do the team have the experience of doing this? Where I currently work we are actually considering moving back from headless CMS because the current leader in the field, Gatsby, has some pretty major downsides. One of the reasons is that site build time is terrifically slow. Their approach seems to be roll our own headless thing with Symfony which will presumably do calls in real time. Symfony is very full-featured, but this seems like rolling your own headless framework - who is going to maintain it? Of course it could be very simple, but launching a project in: an unknown CMS, with an unknown way of doing a website, seems a strange move when one object seems to be reduce technical risk.
pythonbase 6y ago
What options do we have in Python world if someone wants to migrate CMS based sites built using WordPress ?
- webmaven 6y ago
  > What options do we have in Python world if someone wants to migrate CMS based sites built using WordPress ? It is more of an equivalent to Drupal than WP in terms of scope, but Plone[0] has been used on a lot of sites, and has ticked all of the boxes mentioned (i18n, a11y, etc.) for a very long time. The underlying Zope web application framework isn't particularly popular these days, but is a solid (if somewhat idiosyncratic) foundation. At 22 years old, you could call Zope the emacs of Python web frameworks. There are also a variety of CMSs based on Django or Flask, but I'm less familiar with those. [0] https://plone.org/ https://plone.org/
- tomd 6y ago
  Wagtail - https://wagtail.io https://wagtail.io - is the most popular Python CMS. It runs sites for NASA, Google, Mozilla, NHS.uk. It's open source and under very active development.
paledot 6y ago
Given W3C's emphasis on URLs as a permanent reference to content, I'm surprised they use a CMS at all. My next blog-ish project will be static HTML compiled from markdown. When I move on, so long as I keep paying for hosting, it'll remain accessible at the original URL. I don't know of a proper CMS that behaves this way, but I confess I haven't investigated the problem since it's not a pressing one for me right now.
ollyjackson 6y ago
Technical director of a LAMP stack creative agency here. This write-up almost exactly mirrors our experiences across Wordpress, Drupal and Craft. I think they've made an excellent choice. If anyone from studio24 is reading this we've developed a Craft plugin for Varnish purging etc that we're using across multiple production deployments: https://github.com/Whitespacers/Citrus https://github.com/Whitespacers/Citrus

202 points by ziodave 6y ago

Shameful. As someone that has worked with Craft it has a ton of awful edge cases once you get deep into a project. Craft absolutely does not scale.

asddubs 6y ago
such as?
- momokoko 6y ago
  https://craftcms.com/docs/3.x/matrix-fields.html https://craftcms.com/docs/3.x/matrix-fields.html Get a few hundred of those on a site and see how much ram you need.
  - technicallyian 6y ago
    Can validate. Craft is amazing, by far my favorite CMS, but if you have a true enterprise site and need to do any changes to fields, it's a nightmare. Crashes the site constantly, only solution is to boost RAM.
jawngee 6y ago
Not sure why you are being downvoted. We've done two migrations from Craft for clients. WordPress isn't great, but Craft isn't a panacea either.
j0ej0ej0e 6y ago
I don't think it's shameful, though just niaeve to expect it to work well. To be fair I do think it is difficult to make a choice until you make an app of size you will not know about those edge cases. My agency worked on a site which had ~1M+ pages and the backend became unusable (entries table was dead), task management had to be bespoke, search had to be dealt with by Elasticsearch amongst other things.
lwhi 6y ago
The argument put forward by this agency, doesn't actually hold much weight. Feels more like their choice was made to fit with the agency capability.

darekkay 6y ago

Not choosing and inaccessible platform was the right thing to do. Hopefully this will make Automattic reconsider their priorities regarding web accessibility. Related write-up: https://adrianroselli.com/2020/09/gutenberg-accessibility-costs-wordpress-the-w3c-work.html https://adrianroselli.com/2020/09/gutenberg-accessibility-co...

LordAtlas 6y ago
I am an adult with no accessibility challenges and I still find Gutenberg a piece of crap whose interface seems designed to make you pull your hair out. All my clients who just want to write posts ask me to turn the damn thing off. Somebody once yelled, "WTF is this stupid thing making me add blocks for each subheading and paragraph? That is not how writing works!"
cheeze 6y ago
Ironic that the link looks kinda... terrible. I can read it, but it's not pleasant at all.
- LordAtlas 6y ago
  Adrian is a talented designer. I've known of him since his evolt.org days. Rather surprising then that this is the design he went with. But hey, personal blog allowances, I guess.
- 411111111111111 6y ago
  Design is entirely broken in Firefox on android... Half the header is cut off etc
  - Drdrdrq 6y ago
    Fwiw, it works perfectly for me, no issues whatsoever. Which is rare. Ff on Android too, but 68.8 (I dare not upgrade, lest I lose uMatrix).
  - mattmanser 6y ago
    That's how it's supposed to look. I think. It is truly terrible, isn't it!

stoolpigeon 6y ago

Never mind - their contributing.md document makes clear it isn't a FOSS project. --------------- I wasn't familiar with Craft. Looking at it they seem to have their own license and it seems pretty restrictive. Can anyone point to any existing discussions about the implications of the license and if it is truly open source? I understand FOSS projects that have some kind of payment option, but I don't understand how the code can be available but there is no way to run it without paying for it. The language of the license is also rather informal. As a layman it has an appeal to me but at the same time I'm wondering how some of those things are defined.

gexla 6y ago
> Never mind - their contributing.md document makes clear it isn't a FOSS project. Where did you end up finding this information? How did you not see the "pricing" link in the navigation at their website? Or did you not look at their website? If you're having to pay for the software, then you probably don't need to dig much further to see that it's not FOSS. You seem to be making this more complicated than it actually is.
- brylie 6y ago
  I'm not sure it's so cut and dry. We tend to reduce things down to binary thinking, perhaps by training. There do exist several prominent FOSS projects that also have pricing pages. They usually charge for hosted/managed deployments of their project or binary distributions (e.g. compile it yourself for free). While I believe it poses a conflict-of-interest, there are also a number of FOSS projects with pricing pages for "enterprise" features.
- stoolpigeon 6y ago
  I went to the repo and read the license. The article made me think it was sold but open. Lots of FOSS software has purchase options. That alone doesn't indicate if something is foss or not. The license confused me, as I stated but they have another file "Contributing.md" that explicitly states it is not a FOSS license. Now I just wonder why anyone would work for them for free. The post linked here has the section "The question of open source" and it states "While their source code is open, they do have commercial licenses and cost money (though a modest sum)." That is where they link to the github repo. I'd say all that wording also muddies the waters. I guess it's "open" in the sense that you can read it. But I don't consider that to be open. I guess they are drawing a distinction between FOSS and "open". I can't argue that but I still think the way it's written is confusing. (or maybe I'm just not current on how these terms are being more commonly used.)

ponker 6y ago

The W3C has to make accessibility priority #1 — commercial entities usually deprioritize accessibility so the W3C must lead by example.

ognarb 6y ago

So while talking during the entire article about being firm supporter of open source software, they choose a proprietary CMS. I'm disappointed by the W3C.

ponker 6y ago
The W3C’s core mission is web standards, not FOSS. They are right to prioritize standards #1 just like the FSF website must be FOSS.
dgellow 6y ago
I have to say that I’m not sure why we would care about the license of their CMS. Their work is on standardization, whatever tool works well for them in their context is a good choice. What matters is their output, that standard documents are available publicly and are accessible by the majority.
- bad_user 6y ago
  The long term support of that CMS also matters. Exported HTML/CSS/JS files look more and more like binary blobs. If you can't edit those pages in 10 years from now, without yet another expensive migration, then in retrospect it will rightfully seem like a poor decision.
  - Drdrdrq 6y ago
    Not really. As they explain, they took great care to make sure that the output (and thus saved data) is in line with W3C mission. Maybe migration might be needed in the future, but I see no reason why it would be any more expensive than migrating from WP (which is, btw, notorious for its storage schema choices).
oever 6y ago
They also chose the proprietary cloud service GitHub for managing their core workflow.

digitalengineer 6y ago

Does anyone know why Drupal wasn’t considered?

stoolpigeon 6y ago
The article says due to front end complexity. It's in the last sentence of the section with that header.
- digitalengineer 6y ago
  Weird. I first somehow read a shorter version of the article in the HN iOS app.
lwhi 6y ago
I'd suggest using Drupal with a static generation tool, headless with Next.JS or Gatsby.
cdubzzz 6y ago
> Drupal also has this complexity issue which makes developing sites harder than it needs to be, and is why we didn’t consider that platform either. I’ve talked to other agencies who have decided to drop Drupal due to its complexity. I am sure I’m biased as I’ve spent a lot of time in Drupal. There are certainly some oddities wrt Drupal’s frontend but dismissing it entirely on that seems silly. Especially when it does a decent job of ticking some of their other boxes (e.g accessibility, open source, headless tooling).

ggm 6y ago

Is wp still php? What if you want a cdn outcome which doesn't drive to an sql backend? I've yet to experience wp consciously without it making me wince. I know a lot of former print press is using it, so the for profit sector likes it. That does not axiomatically make it best of breed. Being php is also not axiomatically worst of breed. The questions are decoupled really. 1) is wp still php 2) is wp best of breed. 3) if you want static site through cdn is wp the best fit?

johnchristopher 6y ago
These are most of the time not the good questions. Can WordPress be deployed by anybody ? Yes, there's a ton of PHP hosting providers and they all have a one-click install WordPress button. Does WordPress enable authors and owners to update their website content and the design with a WYSIWYG interface ? Yes and yes (see divi, beaver, etc.).
- ggm 6y ago
  Is that a good fit for w3c against all the other choices?
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    That is a different question from your first comment. Please stop, it's going nowhere.
ehnto 6y ago
Changing from PHP wouldn't change WordPress, it's general engineering approach hasn't changed since it gained popularity a decade or more ago. Except for Gutenberg, which could be characterized as an admin facing HTML editor powered by React components but with an interfacing layer between Gutenberg and React, so only some of your React knowledge applies. It gets saved as HTML. The actual served content is still served as PHP generated HTML. React isn't involved in the client workflow. All of this javascript code is of course bootstrapped and defined by PHP hooks including dependencies, and redefined again in the JS, so you're constantly diving between PHP and JS just to set up the JS. Now to work on WordPress idiomatically you need a whole new set of skills that introduce a whole new slew of problems. So it's not best practice or well engineered PHP, and it's not best practice or idiomatic React. The docs for Gutenberg are incomplete, so no luck there either. Another platform that failed in this same way was Magento 2. They want to use the Cool Kids Tooling, but they want to do it their way, so there's all this Bullshit™ inbetween and you get a hamfisted barely documented Frankenstein's monster. The third party tooling docs can't help you because of the proprietary integration making much of it no longer apply, and all the novel domain knowledge to get it to work is floating around in Stackoverflow threads and github issue tickets.

systemvoltage 6y ago

> One final note. We are currently considering a Headless CMS option for front-end page delivery. This means using the CMS in a decoupled way to manage content but use a separate system to deliver front-end pages. Please note this solution would not be reliant on JavaScript (e.g. a single page app which is common with headless. Excellent. SPAs have their place in things like Notion and Google Docs. I’m glad they’re not depending on Javascript.

slim 6y ago
it would be ridiculous if w3c relied on javascript for it's website. for instance the current website demonstrated a lot of advanced html/css when it was updated ~15 years ago

cjfd 6y ago

The 'eat your own dog food' principle would dictate that the W3C writes their site in plain html + css. The fact that this is not even considered proves the these languages are so incredibly non ergonomic. I know.... it is an often reiterated point, but when it is the site of the W3C it really is very hard not to notice this....

Meph504 6y ago
I don't see how the w3c establishing a rule set would mean they would code it by hand, can you provide more details as to why the should, and not use a CMS that produces compliant code?
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Because they edited and published the HTML spec with lots of examples portraying HTML as an authoring language. If W3C actually does intend to publish further HTML specs based on WHATWG (which they haven't done since 2017), they should consider injecting their own navi/styles into the bikeshed-generated WHATWG material as part of their CMS setup (and they have tons of static HTML anyway).
  - Meph504 6y ago
    W3C and WHATWG signed and MOU last year to work together on documents and specs. Regardless, to define a language it only makes sense to author the specification from the language perspective. From what I've read, and honestly it's been many years since I have read their stuff, most of the authoring docs have a section in them talking about applications and editors creating the documents. I don't know, seems consistent to me?
ehnto 6y ago
They're still using HTML and CSS, all websites do. It's the dynamic and generated nature of web applications that makes static HTML and CSS not useful on it's own. You could argue the right choice then is a static site generator, but the difference between static site generation and dynamic site generation is really just when you do the generating work.

userbinator 6y ago

Please note this solution would not be reliant on JavaScript Please choose it then, because it would be a sad day for the Web indeed if the W3C's site turned into a horrible JS SPA like so many others unfortunately have. The W3C's collection of standards is an important and prominent example of the document-centric-web, and keeping them as static pages that can be viewed with anything down to a text browser is definitely important for accessibility.

vorpalhex 6y ago

Glad they realized the issues of Wordpress but a shame they went with proprietary nonsense with a faux license. A php based platform has a lot of negatives for scalability. Using a cms to generate static content is much more simple, scalable and cheaper. Keep it simple.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
m_mueller 6y ago
WP is php, and it tends to take a ton of plugins of various quality, vendors and support to get it to where you want it. Last I looked at it, it didn’t even support multi-language out of the box.
- lixtra 6y ago
  That’s a feature not a bug. >90% of the websites don’t care about multi-language. Why should their CMS be more complex just to carter the rest? Plugins nicely separate the concern and let the authors of the plugins get paid for their efforts.
  - lwhi 6y ago
    Surely it's a lack of features.
  - m_mueller 6y ago
    Typical American viewpoint that is. In European markets it is probably the inverse, most sites need multi language support. For a content management system I find it pretty poor to be missing this.
    - lixtra 6y ago
      Indeed, I thought for a moment about Switzerland, that might have one of the highest rate of multilingual websites at least in Europe. I wasn’t able to find what fraction of the Internet sites are multilingual but would be curious what’s your estimate. I still would be surprised if it is >10%. Maybe more if you weight by traffic but that is not the relevant metric here. The plug-in approach has another advantage: there are several reasonable approaches to a multilingual site, i.e. you can have a default language if a translation is not available. Or rather show nothing. You may want to force a translation of each page. How do you track the translation of changes in one language, etc. By picking/adjusting a plug-in you get the behavior you want instead of a one approach satisfies nobody default solution.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

> The use of React complicates front-end build. We have very talented front-end developers, however, they are not React experts - nor should they need to be. > I believe front-end should be built as standards-compliant HTML/CSS with JavaScript used to enrich functionality where necessary and appropriate. This is what worries me about React (and with other front end frameworks in general). I'm writing this as someone who choose Vue for their latest project. Web pages started off being documents - electronic versions of printed typeset pages - and could often look very beautiful. A lot of React pages seem, to me, to look like a collection of components - like modern versions of VB forms - facebook/twitter spring to mind etc. There are a lot of very good HTML and CSS 'coders' that aren't developers, they come from more of a design background. Are they being disenfranchised by the modern frameworks? Will we end up making the web look less beautiful?

prox 6y ago
I use Wordpress extensively and I find the whole Gutenberg switch to be absolutely atrocious. From the design to the technical implementation. And it is also received as such. The classic editor has been downloaded millions of times. What worries me most is that the developers haven’t responded one bit to these issues (if I read the relevant issues) and it solves no problems. It feels a lot like the technology du jour was picked and molded in a preconceived idea of a page builder. Forgoing a lot of that professional page builder plugins do great and much better already. So the absolutely silence on these criticisms is what worries me most. And yes, using react feels like a bad fit, it creates another layer where none needs to be, like the article stresses.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  I have a self-hosted blog with Wordpress and the change from classic editor to Gutenberg was like re-educating yourself to writing with your weak hand. Yuck. In the meantime, I got used to it, because I did not want to fight the development direction that was seemingly set in stone. And, to be just, Gutenberg got better. Nowadays you can pull most things off in it without thinking twice. But once you start horsing around with something untypical in mind, woe is you.

fevangelou 6y ago

Not a WP fan (although I've built large scale sites professionally) but the arguments regarding the frontend are kinda BS. What does Gutenberg have to do with the entire frontend layout? Gutenberg can still be used just for the main content region, not surrounding blocks. Not really a "talented" team after all. Plus, UK dev companies tend to be biased towards Craft these days cause (guess why) it's also UK based. I also wonder how they got Statamic in the list (probably to dilute the argument for the need for a commercial CMS) and not the 2nd largest CMS in the world (Joomla). All in all a pointless marketing article.

brylie 6y ago
I started my web development career with Joomla, around 2008. At that time it seemed somewhat convoluted -- having arbitrary levels of hierarchy to define a basic content model and redundant concepts for extending core functionality (i.e. what WordPress calls plugins and Drupal calls modules). Has Joomla managed to simplify it's architecture in the past 12-or-so years? Also, open-source CMSs are lacking for non-proprietary drag-and-drop layout builders (such as can be seen in Wix). Does Joomla have core or a fully open-source extension for drag-and-drop page building?
- fevangelou 6y ago
  Joomla has several d'n'd content builders nowadays. As for the separation of types of extensions, that's actually a good thing for many practical reasons. In the end, it depends on what you're building...
3stripe 6y ago
Just to correct one of your points: Craft was created by Pixel & Tonic who are a US company, not UK based.
- fevangelou 6y ago
  Indeed, mea culpa.
tweetle_beetle 6y ago

ComodoHacker 6y ago

Huge credit to Craft team! A proprietaty product being chosen for so heavily open-source leaning project is a big win. I'm bad at analogies, but it's like a minority person took top position in a big company with strong discrimination culture in the XX century.

VadimPR 6y ago
Open source is discriminated against, not the other way around.

sradman 6y ago

TL;DR: The W3C Redesign Project has selected Craft CMS over Wordpress. From the CMS strategy and requirements document [1]: > At a minimum, it’s expected W3C will have 10-30 people editing content on a new CMS, though this may be more. Why is the CMS used by the internal marketing team even under consideration for a web site redesign? This has the feel of busy work to me. [1] https://w3c.studio24.net/docs/cms-strategy-and-requirements/ https://w3c.studio24.net/docs/cms-strategy-and-requirements/

gassius 6y ago

I am almost sure this is not the case, but the article leave me with the impression that the author is not up to latest trends and paradigms. React, or any other modern front end framework, is not equivalent to SPA.

brailsafe 6y ago
Not necessarily equivalent, but usually used for that. Most frontend libraries are good tools for that task, and ok tools for other tasks.

quantummkv 6y ago

The biggest issue I have with Gutenberg is the typing latency when you are editing a standard 6 paragraph blog post with 2-3 images. On my laptop I can actually see the latency while typing. Characters appear on the screen seconds after typing them like a slow motion reveal frequently used in school PowerPoint presentation by kids to to look cool. It's maddening to see this much latency while typing a bunch of plain text on a machine than can comfortably handle big Android Studio projects without any such latency issues. Modern web really is a dumpster fire.

sascha_sl 6y ago

WordPress has some serious edge cases, and lots of stale issues in Core, many with patches that just go stale themselves. If it isn't prioritized by Automattic, it's not getting in. https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/32101 https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/32101

Ayesh 6y ago
This is my experience as well. Any tickets related to a11y, PHP code clean up/modernization, or security don't get the love JS-heavy tickets get. Thumbs up to people as Sergey who triage issues and brought up some of the tickets. Drupal is sort of following the same way; if it's not related to the latest Drupal version or related to media uploads, editing experience, etc, those issues are lucky to picked up.

somishere 6y ago

I kind of feel for these guys. This kind of project is the worst (massive, content/maintenance-heavy website with many admin users .. urghh). And given that they are likely to be heavily scrutinized on whatever direction they take, I mean it's pretty much lose lose (I really hope they are killer designers). That said, reading the blog post took me back to 2013 .. symfony/PHP? If I was the W3C product manager I really wouldn't be confident with the technical approach. It reeks of confusion, and appears to be relying on others for technical leadership. The W3C should be leading the way here. The approach should be something you write about and people go wow! They nailed it. At the moment it sounds like someone's googled accessibility and is in the process of pushing high-contrast lemons through the orange peeler.

frereubu 6y ago

I'm technical director of an agency that builds websites solely in WordPress, and I can say with feeling that Gutenberg has (so far) been a disaster not just in terms of accessibility but in terms of clarity of the development process. It's been a moving target since day one, with us constantly scrambling to keep up with large changes in each release. We held off for a while, and have only built three sites with it, but I wish we'd held off longer. For example, there have been major interfaces changes on a regular basis, each of which we have to spend time walking our clients through. One change - defaulting to full-screen editing, which hides the menus and loses a lot of context that editors were used to - was pushed through at the last minute of a release cycle with a personal intervention from Matt Mullenweg. That meant that suddenly editors were confronted with an unfamiliar editing interface even if they were already registered and hadn't changed anything themselves, rather than a dismissible tooltip letting existing editors know that they could use a new full-screen editing interface. That seemingly arbitrary and personal style of project management really doesn't foster confidence that things are being thought through carefully. I know from personal experience that you need to keep up momentum in a development project otherwise things stagnate, but so far the development of Gutenberg has been very much "move fast and break things" which would feel appropriate for a beta, but not for the default editing experience. I think Gutenberg may well turn out to be really good - our clients do prefer it over the classic editor once we have it under control - but the way this has been managed has lost a lot of good will on our part as an agency and I've been actively looking at other CMSes like Craft as a result.

chiefalchemist 6y ago
Gutenberg shipped way too soon. It has been a textbook case of how not to launch a product. Solid idea...horrendous execution. Mullenweg owes the WP community a massive apology. He especially owes the #a11y Community an apology. Hint: In either case don't hold your breath. But more importantly, it should not be in core. Full stop. Once WP became REST-driven the push should have been to lighten core. That is to decouple as muxh as possible. Core is that _core_. Then you configure your needs from there. Core should be the basics, as light and as lean as possible. But instead, more and more unnecessary bloat. More and more features with less and less benefit. Yes, I'm looking at CraftCMS and others as well. WP has jumped the shark. It's not going away. But I'm tired of having to shower after everytime I work with it.

trbfred 6y ago

Why did they not consider Pimcore? Other parts of their platform seem to be using Symfony too... Could be either used as "full CMS" or as data source for a downstream static site generator...

tiborsaas 6y ago

It's no wonder, Craft is a great pick. I've built numerous sites with it and it works like a charm. What they nailed down is that it has great UX for content creators and developers as well. The speed at which you can build sites is amazing. You can even build your startup MVP with it if you consider it as a headless, REST API prototype tool. Data modelling is where it excels. I guess I have to stop praising, it starts to feel like a paid ad :) BTW I don't get the naysaying for being proprietary, the source is open.

Conan_Kudo 6y ago
The source is shared, it is not an open source CMS. If it was an open source CMS, it would be provided under an open source license that complies with the OSD in full.
nicbou 6y ago
I love Craft's data structure. What WordPress mashes together as custom post types, Craft natively implements as entries, which are arbitrary collections of fields. It's also trivial to keep under source control. My only gripe with Craft is Redactor, which can easily be replaced.

seanwilson 6y ago

Is there an open source CMS that people would recommended for use with a static website generator for large websites? Netlify CMS is interesting for example and I love how content changes are versioned in Git. I like static website generation but don't want to get locked into a proprietary CMS platform.

mobilefriendly 6y ago
Drupal has modernized (its highly modular with OO PHP) and is an excellent enterprise CMS. It can be implemented as the headless backend: https://www.gatsbyjs.com/guides/drupal/ https://www.gatsbyjs.com/guides/drupal/
- lwhi 6y ago
  Currently using Drupal 8 with a decoupled Next.js frontend .. works very well. Seem less upgrade to Drupal 9. Advanced CMS editing tools, moderation tools, media management, componentised content modules, content library, all content exposed via JSON:API, multilingual by default .. built on Symfony. To say it's more complex than WP is true .. but to completely discount it, is foolish.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
I belive that with GatsbyJS you can your a repo + markdown as a "backend".
- seanwilson 6y ago
  Does Gatsby build fast enough for a large site though? I find their business model strange if I'm understanding it correctly - faster builds are a paid feature. I also don't understand the hype. I think it's just good marketing, people don't know the alternatives, and it uses React. I usually side with Hugo because it's so fast and simple to get running. I don't love the template language but the majority of sites don't need complex template logic anyway.
  - 6y ago

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lovetocode 6y ago

Am I the only one who hates the whole concept of a CMS? I much prefer just working HTML changes into a dev cycle. CMS encourages marketing and sales people to wreak havoc on your web experience. Working in HTML changes into the dev process also helps keep the engineering team aligned with the business/marketing strategy. I use Middleman for generating static html websites and it works great. I would love to see the concept of a webmaster come back.

pindab0ter 6y ago
There’s real value in allowing people with no HTML/CSS knowledge to write content. I also don’t see how writing and publishing content would wreak havoc on someone’s web experience, or am I missing something?
ThinkBeat 6y ago
I think all CMS I have used (aside for one I built of course) Are annoying, and getting pixel perfect results is challenging. I presume that will become easier when we move to headless CMS. The reason I like he and that often insists on it ,is because my team finds it both tedious and boring to have to make constant changes every time some in marking or legal or content writers which to ”change a few things” It is also far cheaper for them to so it themselves, and my team can can focus on on more important things. And yes there will be times when a developer needs to make changes still. The company I am at now sends” superusers to pretty tremendously comprehensive training on how to use the CMS tool. Usually, one or two people from each department are chosen to be superusers. That all works out much better than my team had to do the training. We were frankly not very good at it and it is far cheaper to outsource that for us. All of that means that our team get magnitudes fewer phone calls or tickets about how to do X or Y since the go to the super users for help. If the superusers are not about to figure it out he or she contacts us. This is awesome because when the superusers contacts us she can give a much more insightful description that a newbie employee with limited exposure to CMS's. To our tools. And often not that familiar with computers. People often talk about CMS being too slow in production. We have very few problems with that. We took a lot of time evaluating and testing the tools we use both for performance and for ease of expanding extending and customizing and developing And superusers how we believe our superusers will like the interface. And yes of course we had focus groups with potential superusers we're they could give us feedback.

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seanwilson 6y ago

When working with WordPress, can anyone recommend a trustworthy place to go for plugin recommendations? The problems I find with WordPress are: - WordPress core is missing a ton of stuff you'd expect to be there so you have to turn to plugins. - It's hard to assess the quality of plugins. They conflict with each other, kill page speed, they break as WordPress is upgraded, and there's tons of bad advice you have to navigate around (I find this problem with PHP in general, where top voted answers/suggestions are bad so you need to keep your wits about you more-so than other communities). Generally when I'm fixing WordPress websites, I'm stripping out all plugins (I've seen over 50 on one site before!) that have been added by non-technical users, then trying to find the simplest way with the fewest plugins to get the functionality back to what it was. You can get pretty far with just ACF, a contact form plugin, an optimisation plugin (how is page caching still not built into WordPress?), and coding small features into themes directly.

luckylion 6y ago
> You can get pretty far with just ACF, a contact form plugin, an optimisation plugin (how is page caching still not built into WordPress?), and coding small features into themes directly. This. I work on large, high-traffic WP sites a lot, and we're essentially keeping a hand full of plugins and writing everything else ourselves. Lots of plugins are complicated because they want to enable ordinary users to customize their behavior, which you don't need if you have even basic php skills. And from a code quality point, I prefer our own over most plugins. If anyone builds sites for clients and uses a lot of plugins, it's because they don't have anyone that can write code.
- rmccue 6y ago
  Indeed. This is one of the reasons we started maintaining what is essentially a WordPress-for-enterprise distro, with a mix of first- and third-party code. The third-party plugins we bundle with it are from the select few sources we trust to build and maintain quality code (typically our peers).
  - pbowyer 6y ago

colourgarden 6y ago

One important point tucked away here that is getting missed: > Another major factor in the decision to remove WordPress from consideration was that they found “no elegant solution to content localization and translation.” To restate - WordPress does not support multiple languages by default. And anyone who has built a multi-language WP site with one of the popular plugins (WPML, Polylang) can attest that it's a pretty terrible editorial experience. Craft, for example, has (very good) multi-language support out-of-the-box. Studio24 and W3C probably should have pushed that point rather than accessibility concerns.

colourgarden 6y ago

For reference, here's the list of CMS requirements put together by the team - https://w3c.studio24.net/docs/cms-strategy-and-requirements/ https://w3c.studio24.net/docs/cms-strategy-and-requirements/

mattweinberg 6y ago

Hey all: we build a ton of websites in Craft and I've presented technical topics at their yearly conferences before. Happy to answer any technical or other questions about Craft here or via email, if anyone is curious to learn more. In my opinion it's a great CMS and a good choice for the W3C site. It's content author-friendly, is also very developer-friendly and supports modern development/SDLC processes. You'll be pleasantly surprised if your only PHP-based CMS experience is with other CMSes.

nicbou 6y ago
How's Redactor working for you? I have constant issues with it.
- mattweinberg 6y ago
  It’s been good for our clients! WYSIWYG is a required feature for many of them and I’ve found Redactor better than a lot of alternatives we’ve tried. What issues do you have? One thing that’s helped us is making heavy use of Craft’s matrix blocks. That keeps a lot of styling and inline elements out of the WYSIWYG itself. Then we can turn off a lot of the WYSIWYG buttons/features and keep it simple.

conatus 6y ago

Massive props to Studio 24 for showing their working in public on all of this. It is amazing to see. More large scale projects of this kind should do this sort of thing. Its really thrilling to see someone think technical decisions out loud. So keep it up, despite what I am about to type! There are a couple of interesting things in this article. 1. It is absolutely remarkable they got 15 days to rather requirements and choose a CMS. Having worked in a couple of agencies, this is a lot of time, which is to the good W3C paid for it. 2. > We have very talented front-end developers, however, they are not React experts - nor should they need to be. I believe front-end should be built as standards-compliant HTML/CSS with JavaScript used to enrich functionality where necessary and appropriate. It makes a lot of sense for websites to be written in HTML/CSS in this progressively enhanced way, but does it make sense for complex user interfaces like any WYSIWYG editor? Even the Classic Editor basically dropped probably thousands of lines of (actually third party) Javascript into the mix in the form of TinyMCE. 3. > We won’t stop trying though and plan to do more R&D with Gutenberg in the future. The W3C project, however, did not feel like the right place to do this. On a project as wide-ranging as this one, development time does become a factor. This is about agency and project risk which is entirely fair enough. However, what is slightly strange, if risk of delivery due to unfamilar technology is a factor, is that the project then goes onto make two other decisions. - Use Craft - "We are currently considering a Headless CMS option for front-end page delivery" It is unclear from this piece if they have much experience using Craft, but my project manager alarm bells are ringing a bit when a team is intending to "deliver project in technology they have no internal expertise in". Of course, Craft is by all accounts excellent, but could be a source of problems. The judgement is between the technical difficulty of using Gutenberg and learning a whole new CMS as a developer. Further: the headless CMS option. Do the team have the experience of doing this? Where I currently work we are actually considering moving back from headless CMS because the current leader in the field, Gatsby, has some pretty major downsides. One of the reasons is that site build time is terrifically slow. Their approach seems to be roll our own headless thing with Symfony which will presumably do calls in real time. Symfony is very full-featured, but this seems like rolling your own headless framework - who is going to maintain it? Of course it could be very simple, but launching a project in: an unknown CMS, with an unknown way of doing a website, seems a strange move when one object seems to be reduce technical risk.

pythonbase 6y ago

What options do we have in Python world if someone wants to migrate CMS based sites built using WordPress ?

webmaven 6y ago
> What options do we have in Python world if someone wants to migrate CMS based sites built using WordPress ? It is more of an equivalent to Drupal than WP in terms of scope, but Plone[0] has been used on a lot of sites, and has ticked all of the boxes mentioned (i18n, a11y, etc.) for a very long time. The underlying Zope web application framework isn't particularly popular these days, but is a solid (if somewhat idiosyncratic) foundation. At 22 years old, you could call Zope the emacs of Python web frameworks. There are also a variety of CMSs based on Django or Flask, but I'm less familiar with those. [0] https://plone.org/ https://plone.org/
tomd 6y ago
Wagtail - https://wagtail.io https://wagtail.io - is the most popular Python CMS. It runs sites for NASA, Google, Mozilla, NHS.uk. It's open source and under very active development.

paledot 6y ago

Given W3C's emphasis on URLs as a permanent reference to content, I'm surprised they use a CMS at all. My next blog-ish project will be static HTML compiled from markdown. When I move on, so long as I keep paying for hosting, it'll remain accessible at the original URL. I don't know of a proper CMS that behaves this way, but I confess I haven't investigated the problem since it's not a pressing one for me right now.

ollyjackson 6y ago

Technical director of a LAMP stack creative agency here. This write-up almost exactly mirrors our experiences across Wordpress, Drupal and Craft. I think they've made an excellent choice. If anyone from studio24 is reading this we've developed a Craft plugin for Varnish purging etc that we're using across multiple production deployments: https://github.com/Whitespacers/Citrus https://github.com/Whitespacers/Citrus