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I'm obviously in my own bubble, but I don't understand people complaining about WordPress. WordPress is by far the worst CMS you could possibly use, every othe

I'm obviously in my own bubble, but I don't understand people complaining about WordPress. WordPress is by far the worst CMS you could possibly use, every other single CMS is better in every capacity. Let's go through why - Uses PHP 5 spaghetti code with a handful of garbage event listeners and output buffering - Has no integration with composer at all - Doesn't have any form of content types without plugins - Has no cache, no theming engine, no multi-language, etc etc - Beyond a media library it has literally no aspects of a "content management system" It's built for a simple blogging platform and for that purpose Gutenberg is amazing. Why do people continue to try and shove weirdly hacked on garbage plugins on top of basically a glorified blogging platform is beyond me.

katzgrau 6y ago
Like PHP in general, it was easy to get started with and now there are tons of developers pushing it in the ecosystem. Now that so many people know it, it's self-perpetuating at this point.
conatus 6y ago
Most of this plain isn't true - afraid it does feel very much like a bubble there! > - Uses PHP 5 spaghetti code with a handful of garbage event listeners and output buffering I mean it has listeners for almost every event you might want to interupt and trigger something on that are well documented and have been for decades. The PHP 5 code is very much legacy so I will grant you this. > - Has no integration with composer at all Composer support is absolutely fine and there are well maintained ways of keeping plugins and themes under Composer and have been for many years. > - Doesn't have any form of content types without plugins Yes, but adding further content types at the level of code or these plugins is easy, trivially so. > - Has no cache, no theming engine, no multi-language, etc etc It has several caches that are very powerful indeed, including those included by default. PHP is a theming engine. Internationalisation built into the core, I'll grant the multi-language support is not as good as it might be. Could be better. > - Beyond a media library it has literally no aspects of a "content management system" I mean, people use it to run newspapers, so not sure if this is true. It depends what you need. The organisations behind WordPress decided to meet their user need and provide a really good, well understood platform for content management with an extensively tested UX experience of end users. They prioritised this over developer niceities. If the purpose of software is to augment human capacity and be genuinely useful, this was the right decision. The rough edges from a developer experience perspective have been largely smoothed off by a well established ecosystem like Roots.
- dubcanada 6y ago
  > Composer support is absolutely fine and there are well maintained ways of keeping plugins and themes under Composer and have been for many years. You need to use a third party service or setup. > Yes, but adding further content types at the level of code or these plugins is easy, trivially so. Compared to what? Drupal? CraftCMS? Joomla? Where you go to a UI and do it all, versus installing a plugin with it's own quirks or using functions.php which ends up being the last place you want to touch after your done? > It has several caches that are very powerful indeed, including those included by default. PHP is a theming engine. No it doesn't, you need a plugin like W3 Total Cache. On their Cache page they tell you to use a plugin. https://wordpress.org/support/article/optimization-caching/ https://wordpress.org/support/article/optimization-caching/ The other caching setups Opcache, Varnish are either integrated in PHP or a completely different service. PHP is not a theming engine. Blade, twig, etc are theming engines. > I mean, people use it to run newspapers, so not sure if this is true. It depends what you need. Newspapers are glorified blogs, so yes that makes sense that they run on WordPress. But the problem isn't random sites use WordPress, the problem is people build weird monstrosities on top of a really garbage system.
  - conatus 6y ago
    Fair enough. Probably at "agree to disagree" here. I'll agree that its easier to do custom post types on other CMS. But sometimes at the cost of real overheads in terms of complexity for users to swallow to get there. Caching is built into the core, which is what all caching plugins leverage, the interface to it is hidden. PHP is a theming engine. I've never got why people escape into Blade, Twig or so on. PHP was designed to have loops, logic, to take variables and so on and interpolate them within HTML. It has an alternative syntax to make this easier. It's one of the unique capabilities the language has over almost all other languages you'd use on the web. More often than not you end up escaping into pure PHP in any case in something like Blade. > But the problem isn't random sites use WordPress, the problem is people build weird monstrosities on top of a really garbage system. Don't think its garbage for the reasons explained, but I think this true of all software projects. Seen plennty of Drupal, Laravel or Joomla projects end in this state.
dmje 6y ago
Literally everything in your list is about developers. Literally nothing in your list is about editors or end users. Maybe take a look at the words "content management platform" and consider whether maybe developers aren't the most important people in this particular world. Most people love WordPress because most people aren't nerds. They want to easily publish content using a familiar and intuitive interface. They couldn't give a monkey's about whether it's written in PHP, Django, Perl, some Jamstack fad or BBC basic.
XCSme 6y ago
WordPress is more about the ecoystem than the CMS itself. If you just install WordPress without any plugins or themes, it's pretty useless. WordPress is so popular because you will find a plugin or theme to fit almost any need. The majority of the users are not developers that care about composer, WP source code or out-of-the-box potential. They are users who know that once they install this platform they can create whatever site they want in a few hours doing a few Google searches and maybe spending a few hundred bucks.
- lemonberry 6y ago
  Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and Webflow all do this better than WordPress now.
  - XCSme 6y ago
    Are those alternatives free or self-hosted?
    - lemonberry 6y ago
      Nope. But anyone that needs one probably isn't a position to self-host and is going to require the services of a developer negating the costs of the services anyway. They also get free suppport. You don't get that with WordPress.
      - XCSme 6y ago
        > But anyone that needs one probably isn't a position to self-host From what I've seen, almost all hosting providers now offer one-click installs for WordPress.
        lemonberry 6y ago
        Sure, but at that point the user is now paying for web hosting rendering the cost issue moot. And when they do run into issues who are they going to turn to? With the exception of WPEngine my, and my client's, experience with support from web hosts is garbage. Aside from that, what's the UX like for a client spinning up a new WP site on GoDaddy or Bluehost vs. a new Wix, Weebly or Squarespace site? In the end most of this is pretty subjective. If you like WordPress keep using it and recommending it. I used to love it and don't anymore. I think my clients get a better value using Statamic or one of the other options I've pointed to.
frereubu 6y ago
"Why do people continue to try and shove weirdly hacked on garbage plugins on top of basically a glorified blogging platform is beyond me." I've been critical about Gutenberg, but I'll respond to this by sticking up for WordPress a bit here. Others have answered the technical questions, but on your point above, that's not what agencies like mine do. We write custom theme code from scratch (although we do have a base framework that we built as a starting point) for clients, and use WordPress as a base system. It deals very well with those kinds of things as long as you know what you're doing. We spend a lot of time with clients up front to understand their use case, and build something robust but user-friendly. The first site we built, for a cross-UK social enterprise with over 200 services, is still going strong. Just because some people (that is, a lot of people) think you can chuck some free hacky plugins at WordPress and get a website doesn't mean that's all it is. It's evolved to a point (well, had evolved to a point) where it was a great base CMS on top of which you could build quite complex websites. There's a decent ecosystem of paid plugins, like Gravity Forms and SearchWP. If you know your stuff there are also some great open source ones, like CMB2. Some other reasons why agencies in particular stick with WordPress: 1. People know it, are familiar with its conventions, and actively request it. It allows organisations who are growing to jump from their little Wordpress site to something more complex without having to relearn a CMS. If you're an organisation that's familiar with a CMS there's a significant time cost involved in your staff learning how to use a new one. That's not a good reason on its own for not picking a different CMS, but it's a barrier when the CMSes you're comparing a much of a muchness. 2. Because it's so ubiquitous, if you want to change agency, that's relatively easy, reduing organisational risk. (Choosing an agency that care about quality, however, is a different matter). If you use something that's not common, you risk having to rebuild a site from scratch because no-one else can take it over. 3. There are excellent WordPress hosting companies out there that take away the legwork of doing things like full page caching, CDNs, git, LetEncrypt etc. etc. We use one that for ~$500 a month offers exactly what one of the hosting companies listed on the CraftCMS site does, but we can have 35 separate sites, whereas the same money would get you just two on the Craft CMS host. Honestly, I think you can do pretty much anything you want in WordPress and Drupal, and possibly CraftCMS too, although I haven't gone deep into Craft yet. What makes a huge difference is getting an agency that knows their stuff and actually cares about both build quality and high-quality hosting.
pacifika 6y ago
https://wpackagist.org/ https://wpackagist.org/
- dubcanada 6y ago
  An Outlandish experiment. Yes I know there is third-party plugins and services. I mean "core" wordpress. Not what a bunch of other's built.

katzgrau 6y ago

Like PHP in general, it was easy to get started with and now there are tons of developers pushing it in the ecosystem. Now that so many people know it, it's self-perpetuating at this point.

conatus 6y ago

Most of this plain isn't true - afraid it does feel very much like a bubble there! > - Uses PHP 5 spaghetti code with a handful of garbage event listeners and output buffering I mean it has listeners for almost every event you might want to interupt and trigger something on that are well documented and have been for decades. The PHP 5 code is very much legacy so I will grant you this. > - Has no integration with composer at all Composer support is absolutely fine and there are well maintained ways of keeping plugins and themes under Composer and have been for many years. > - Doesn't have any form of content types without plugins Yes, but adding further content types at the level of code or these plugins is easy, trivially so. > - Has no cache, no theming engine, no multi-language, etc etc It has several caches that are very powerful indeed, including those included by default. PHP is a theming engine. Internationalisation built into the core, I'll grant the multi-language support is not as good as it might be. Could be better. > - Beyond a media library it has literally no aspects of a "content management system" I mean, people use it to run newspapers, so not sure if this is true. It depends what you need. The organisations behind WordPress decided to meet their user need and provide a really good, well understood platform for content management with an extensively tested UX experience of end users. They prioritised this over developer niceities. If the purpose of software is to augment human capacity and be genuinely useful, this was the right decision. The rough edges from a developer experience perspective have been largely smoothed off by a well established ecosystem like Roots.

dubcanada 6y ago
> Composer support is absolutely fine and there are well maintained ways of keeping plugins and themes under Composer and have been for many years. You need to use a third party service or setup. > Yes, but adding further content types at the level of code or these plugins is easy, trivially so. Compared to what? Drupal? CraftCMS? Joomla? Where you go to a UI and do it all, versus installing a plugin with it's own quirks or using functions.php which ends up being the last place you want to touch after your done? > It has several caches that are very powerful indeed, including those included by default. PHP is a theming engine. No it doesn't, you need a plugin like W3 Total Cache. On their Cache page they tell you to use a plugin. https://wordpress.org/support/article/optimization-caching/ https://wordpress.org/support/article/optimization-caching/ The other caching setups Opcache, Varnish are either integrated in PHP or a completely different service. PHP is not a theming engine. Blade, twig, etc are theming engines. > I mean, people use it to run newspapers, so not sure if this is true. It depends what you need. Newspapers are glorified blogs, so yes that makes sense that they run on WordPress. But the problem isn't random sites use WordPress, the problem is people build weird monstrosities on top of a really garbage system.
- conatus 6y ago
  Fair enough. Probably at "agree to disagree" here. I'll agree that its easier to do custom post types on other CMS. But sometimes at the cost of real overheads in terms of complexity for users to swallow to get there. Caching is built into the core, which is what all caching plugins leverage, the interface to it is hidden. PHP is a theming engine. I've never got why people escape into Blade, Twig or so on. PHP was designed to have loops, logic, to take variables and so on and interpolate them within HTML. It has an alternative syntax to make this easier. It's one of the unique capabilities the language has over almost all other languages you'd use on the web. More often than not you end up escaping into pure PHP in any case in something like Blade. > But the problem isn't random sites use WordPress, the problem is people build weird monstrosities on top of a really garbage system. Don't think its garbage for the reasons explained, but I think this true of all software projects. Seen plennty of Drupal, Laravel or Joomla projects end in this state.

dmje 6y ago

Literally everything in your list is about developers. Literally nothing in your list is about editors or end users. Maybe take a look at the words "content management platform" and consider whether maybe developers aren't the most important people in this particular world. Most people love WordPress because most people aren't nerds. They want to easily publish content using a familiar and intuitive interface. They couldn't give a monkey's about whether it's written in PHP, Django, Perl, some Jamstack fad or BBC basic.

XCSme 6y ago

WordPress is more about the ecoystem than the CMS itself. If you just install WordPress without any plugins or themes, it's pretty useless. WordPress is so popular because you will find a plugin or theme to fit almost any need. The majority of the users are not developers that care about composer, WP source code or out-of-the-box potential. They are users who know that once they install this platform they can create whatever site they want in a few hours doing a few Google searches and maybe spending a few hundred bucks.

lemonberry 6y ago
Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and Webflow all do this better than WordPress now.
- XCSme 6y ago
  Are those alternatives free or self-hosted?
  - lemonberry 6y ago
    Nope. But anyone that needs one probably isn't a position to self-host and is going to require the services of a developer negating the costs of the services anyway. They also get free suppport. You don't get that with WordPress.
    - XCSme 6y ago
      > But anyone that needs one probably isn't a position to self-host From what I've seen, almost all hosting providers now offer one-click installs for WordPress.
      - lemonberry 6y ago
        Sure, but at that point the user is now paying for web hosting rendering the cost issue moot. And when they do run into issues who are they going to turn to? With the exception of WPEngine my, and my client's, experience with support from web hosts is garbage. Aside from that, what's the UX like for a client spinning up a new WP site on GoDaddy or Bluehost vs. a new Wix, Weebly or Squarespace site? In the end most of this is pretty subjective. If you like WordPress keep using it and recommending it. I used to love it and don't anymore. I think my clients get a better value using Statamic or one of the other options I've pointed to.

frereubu 6y ago

"Why do people continue to try and shove weirdly hacked on garbage plugins on top of basically a glorified blogging platform is beyond me." I've been critical about Gutenberg, but I'll respond to this by sticking up for WordPress a bit here. Others have answered the technical questions, but on your point above, that's not what agencies like mine do. We write custom theme code from scratch (although we do have a base framework that we built as a starting point) for clients, and use WordPress as a base system. It deals very well with those kinds of things as long as you know what you're doing. We spend a lot of time with clients up front to understand their use case, and build something robust but user-friendly. The first site we built, for a cross-UK social enterprise with over 200 services, is still going strong. Just because some people (that is, a lot of people) think you can chuck some free hacky plugins at WordPress and get a website doesn't mean that's all it is. It's evolved to a point (well, had evolved to a point) where it was a great base CMS on top of which you could build quite complex websites. There's a decent ecosystem of paid plugins, like Gravity Forms and SearchWP. If you know your stuff there are also some great open source ones, like CMB2. Some other reasons why agencies in particular stick with WordPress: 1. People know it, are familiar with its conventions, and actively request it. It allows organisations who are growing to jump from their little Wordpress site to something more complex without having to relearn a CMS. If you're an organisation that's familiar with a CMS there's a significant time cost involved in your staff learning how to use a new one. That's not a good reason on its own for not picking a different CMS, but it's a barrier when the CMSes you're comparing a much of a muchness. 2. Because it's so ubiquitous, if you want to change agency, that's relatively easy, reduing organisational risk. (Choosing an agency that care about quality, however, is a different matter). If you use something that's not common, you risk having to rebuild a site from scratch because no-one else can take it over. 3. There are excellent WordPress hosting companies out there that take away the legwork of doing things like full page caching, CDNs, git, LetEncrypt etc. etc. We use one that for ~$500 a month offers exactly what one of the hosting companies listed on the CraftCMS site does, but we can have 35 separate sites, whereas the same money would get you just two on the Craft CMS host. Honestly, I think you can do pretty much anything you want in WordPress and Drupal, and possibly CraftCMS too, although I haven't gone deep into Craft yet. What makes a huge difference is getting an agency that knows their stuff and actually cares about both build quality and high-quality hosting.

pacifika 6y ago

https://wpackagist.org/ https://wpackagist.org/

dubcanada 6y ago
An Outlandish experiment. Yes I know there is third-party plugins and services. I mean "core" wordpress. Not what a bunch of other's built.