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WordPress's Matt in debate with Netlify's Matt

100 points by velmu 6y ago

nix23 6y ago
Oh look free marketing for both of them
singemonkey 6y ago
I've been a WP developer for more than 10 years and have had enough. I'm doing what I can to persuade clients that WP isn't the only solution, and that CMS's like Statamic and frameworks like Laravel can be a viable and cost effective solution.
- parsley27 6y ago
  Are any of those platforms ready yet for everyone to use? I feel like we're getting closer, and devs and most designers probably can leave WP behind, but if I have a friend who wants a site and I don't want to ever touch it for them, I'm not sure I know of a non-WP option that is ready for that. Ghost, maybe?
  - whatsmyusername 6y ago
    Hugo, jekyll, webflow, wordpress.com, I'm sure there are others.
    - arkitaip 6y ago
      Good luck getting businesses to manage hugo or jekyll on their $10 hosting.
      - whatsmyusername 6y ago
        The request was for something they could setup and not look at. If it's a throwaway site that's what I use (usually backed by s3/cloudfront). Costs pennies and can be ignored for years without issue.
  - joe_momma 6y ago
    Contentful is great for content management
  - nevi-me 6y ago
    Ghost needs the developer momentum that WP and other PHP frameworks got. I last used it in 1., and picked it up 2 weeks ago when I found myself needing a headless CMS. I got a sense from the new features since 1. that it's moving towards a membership system which might not be relevant for many websites. In terms of an editor and a way to expose content, is good enough; but like I say with more developers, this could bring more hands to implement stronger plugin systems and improve the core editing options.
  - singemonkey 6y ago
    For non-technical people who just want to create content, I'd recommend a hosted service, like Squarespace, Wix, etc. Even wordpress.com if they want something relatively simply and 'bloggy'. I've stopped recommending the self-hosted (wordpress.org) version to non technical people (even if it's a 1 click hosting platform), because there are just too many things that can go wrong, particularly with plugins. As a developer, my experience with Statamic and Laravel has been joyful, compared to WP.
  - georgiecasey 6y ago
    > but if I have a friend who wants a site and I don't want to ever touch it for them I did this for a few friends, hosted them on my server, set up Wordpress. Worked for some but most found even Wordpres too complicated. I sent to them to Squarespace and they're happy with that, albeit paying a hefty enough monthly fee after the initial trial period. Not my problem though! washing my hands
- arkitaip 6y ago
  Great, now they are on some unknown platform where trivial dynamic features are going to be expensive and difficult to implement.
  - yurishimo 6y ago
    I think that's why they specifically mentioned Statamic. Other MVC framework backed CMS's would work too. OctoberCMS comes to mind, and I'm sure there are others for Rails/Django. Those would give you a modest plugin ecosystem to get stuff like form submissions, but also give developers an escape hatch for when something more custom is required.
- scarecrowbob 6y ago
  Yeah, I basically spend most of my working days troubleshooting weird WP issues... gutenberg can't find taxonomies because when the site was developed the devs didn't add the tax to the REST API, etc. I really wanted to like Gutenberg. I learned how to build blocks (and the f- me, they totally changed a ton of stuff about how that works). At this point, I have some pretty deep knowledge about WP and how to make it do all kinds of funky stuff it shouldn't do... but holy hell if I could get the sales folks to start selling about any other CMS I'd do that in a heart beat. But I'd still have 600 or so legacy WP sites to support. I'm grateful to have work, and WP can be a real shit show when you look at that many sites.
mattl 6y ago
I don’t want to use npm at all. Hundreds of megabytes of packages and I don’t know what they all do. WordPress I can run with a few minimal packages from my OS/distribution and then use the built in update mechanism for WordPress itself.
whatsmyusername 6y ago
Wordpress is fine if you're using wordpress.com edit: not .org (though I usually push webflow). Hosting it yourself is a mistake. Not because it's inherently insecure (the base install isn't) but because no one can control themselves with plugins. There's an entire cottage industry revolving around wpscan and securing/popping the millions of poorly secured wordpress instances floating around.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  Surely you mean wordpress.com. Also, millions of people host WordPress themselves and it works fine considering how much value it delivers.
  - whatsmyusername 6y ago
    It you just want to throw up a semi static site with a couple updates a year, sure. Go nuts. The moment marketing wants to be able to login to make dynamic updates and load the instance up with plugins it's time to outsource the hosting. My team already has too much going on to spend time on this foolishness. This got especially worse with 5.x since you can't 403 the REST API off the corporate network anymore (aka the REST API that shipped vulnerable on day 1). It's used for customer facing 'stuff' now.
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  We self-hosted dozens of WP sites for years. It definitely requires careful attention to keep it secure and performant. As you say, one important factor was to carefully control plugins. As an in-house team, we were able to manage these on behalf of our colleagues rather than allowing a free-for-all. We switched our WP hosting to WP Engine a couple years ago and have been happy with that.
- frankzander 6y ago
  Crazy opinion. Thing is that if you have such problems you maybe shouldn't use WP. Well IMHO in general I wouldn't recommend WP because of this whole mess with plugins to gain some functional enhancement. I would recommend some CMSs which have a good core functionality by default.
iongoatb 6y ago
As someone that develops Wordpress and Jamstack sites for a living (among other things like apps / devops), this is silly. Debating Wordpress versus Jamstack is like comparing apples to oranges. I use Gatsby + Contentful (or other APIs, like a Headless Wordpress setup) for some situations, and I use Wordpress for many companies as well. Small businesses are not going to hire a designer for PDF designs and then hire a developer to build a Gatsby site, and relearn using a CMS like Contentful instead of Wordpress. Not going to happen. For more sophisticated clients, or for building static sites myself, I always use Gatsby. These type of clients have a higher budget, and can pay for a designer and developer to build the site properly and deal with a more sophisticated deployment architecture. Wordpress is not going away. As long as you don't have to code to use Wordpress, it will be easier and far more accessible for people that don't have a lot of money for a website to hire a web designer (lower skill, lower pay than developer). Gatsby or another Jamstack client could build themes that don't require coding, similar to Wordpress, but I don't see it happening. Webflow is sort of doing that now by allowing designers to build websites without coding. Ultimately, the debate is silly because Wordpress and Jamstack have two different use cases. Wordpress will probably become less popular for big companies, but it will still be very popular for your average small to mid-sized business.
- joe_momma 6y ago
  Popular for small to midsize businesses to do what? Blog? They don't need wordpress to sell items or create their brochure pages. If they need a blog wordpress is good for that but even something like Medium may be a better option. The day of putting everything under one roof is gone.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Mooty 6y ago
    Maybe ecommerce or anything else, as it's also a bulletproof framework.
  - iongoatb 6y ago
    Blogging is not the primary use of Wordpress in practice for small to medium sized businesses.
joe_momma 6y ago
I use netlify and will never go back to wordpress. Enterprise devs are also focused on jamstack so the shiny new stuff will start there. That doesn't mean that wordpress isn't needed but its plugin features may also be it's greatest strength and weakness.
mattlondon 6y ago
Anecdata: I have semi-recently converted a couple of Wordpress and also Docuwiki sites to static sites. First with Hugo, then converted again from Hugo -> Jekyll. I could not be happier with the results (...with Jekyll anyway, less so with Hugo). And there is no npm. The biggest problem for me was mentioned in the article - security. It felt like I was frequently having to babysit updates in Dokuwiki and Wordpress. Both of the update procedures felt precarious and dangerous - more than once they'd fail to update and hose something on the server and I'd need to go in with a SFTP client or SSH and try to rectify whatever the hell happened. I grew to fear the updates and started to procrastinate doing them which was a warning sign. Perhaps they are perfect and flawless these days? And even when I had updated there was always this lingering feeling that there was some unknown/unpatched exploit or I was 12 hours too late patching and so someone was "inside" my wordpress running a spam/phishing operation without me knowing (happened to me, but perhaps 15 years ago now and was due to the hosting provider so not really relevant... I only found out about that one when a victim of the phishing operation did a whois on the domain and sent me threatening messages. Nice.) These sites that were on Wordpress/dokuwiki didn't even need to be "dynamic" anyway - they just needed to serve content and provide a simple way for people to edit the content. Github pages does a great job for this - non-tech users just use the in-browser editor and if they accidentally delete something there is the git changelog. The time "lost" to do a one-time compilation of the site is totally paid back by the near instantaneous loading time compared to the bloated feel of the previous sites waiting for PHP+MySQL to do its thing on some VPS or shared host (I did not have a CDN).
- nsomaru 6y ago
  Why not run Wordpress locally and bake the site out to static files? That way you get Wordpress content authoring and all the advantages of a static site you mention
  - shiftpgdn 6y ago
    IMO this is the perfect middle ground where you need non technical people to make rapid edits to a live website. They can make edits to a dev/local environment which automatically get baked out and pulled into the live site on a set schedule.
calcsam 6y ago
Mullenweg is right. Wordpress is a great content management system. From a content writer's perspective, it is perhaps the best way to write and publish content. And it does offer a simple, integrated solution. But Biilmann is also right. The Javascript world (React, Vue, the npm ecosystem, ES6/7+), modularized services like Stripe, Algolia, etc, plus eg Git, have passed the Wordpress development ecosystem by. Wordpress needs a bridge to modern development, so people can get the best of both worlds. That's how we see Gatsby, so we built a source plugin to import content, built Gatsby Cloud to do live content previews, created incremental builds to match the instant content go-live experience. There's a great quote from Jason Bahl, the maintainer of WPGraphQL, on this: "I don’t see Jamstack competing against WordPress. This isn’t a zero sum game. If the Gatsby + WordPress experience can allow users to use the best CMS in the world while using modern dev tooling, it’s a win all around.” https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-and-jamstack-community-square-off-making-long-term-bets-on-the-predominant-architecture-for-the-web https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-and-jamstack-community-s...
- claudiulodro 6y ago
  This bridge already exists. The latest versions of the WordPress post editor are built almost entirely in React. Why do you think Facebook backed down from the BSD+Patents React license scheme they were trying a couple years ago? Because of pressure from WordPress!
open-source-ux 6y ago
I don't like WordPress, but Jamstack will never overtake WordPress adoption quite simply because Jamstack is too complicated. In particular, it will never find an audience among non-technical users which is a very different audience from technical users who often think only of their own likes and needs. If you don't like WordPress, there are more modern CMS apps with modern coding practices (often written in PHP). They aren't part of the Jamstack and but are often much simpler to deploy.
- duhi88 6y ago
  Jamstack needs to smooth out the client side of the experience. Netlify CMS has been great in testing, but I haven't deployed anything to a client with it. I know that, as a dev, I'll never get stuck in a situation where I can't accomplish something with Jamstack (Gridsome is the one I prefer). I just fear the day a client needs to use a CMS and they can't edit/demo something the way the expect.
shiftpgdn 6y ago
FYI: Netlify has a trademark on JAMSTACK and strictly controls it. They have a very weak profitability model and over 120 million dollars of early Series VC raises. Netlify is a company working hard to get lots of people locked into their companies ecosystem. This is a very bad thing for the open web.
- armonraphiel 6y ago
  They host static web pages. I’m not exactly seeing the angle on how this is a bad thing.
- schwartzworld 6y ago
  A lot of what is great about netlify and the jamstack is that it doesn't lock you in. Migrating away from WordPress means a new codebase. Migrating away from netlify just means putting my files somewhere else.
- gherkinnn 6y ago
  Netlify is semi-anonymously creating hype and then offering what they think is the best solution to the problem they’ve created. The principles behind JAM are platform-agnostic though. As I see it, Netlify is just dressing serverless in a new hat.
- CarelessExpert 6y ago
  How can you "lock" someone into an ecosystem that's literally just a bunch of open standards and an architectural pattern? Heck, my own Jekyll-based static blog is technically a "JAMstack" website and I've never had any interactions with Netlify. What are you implying?
  - shiftpgdn 6y ago
    Then you don't have a JAMSTACK website. You have a static + serverless architecture. Netlify is heavily promoting "JAMSTACK" as the next hot thing because only they are allowed to provide a "JAMSTACK" platform.
louiechristie 6y ago
Wordpress or JAMstack? Why not do both? I did... as an experiment for my blog: https://www.louiechristie.com/blog/ https://www.louiechristie.com/blog/ The secret sauce is https://github.com/henrikwirth/gatsby-starter-wordpress-twenty-twenty https://github.com/henrikwirth/gatsby-starter-wordpress-twen...
pier25 6y ago
What's the average use case for WP these days? Shopify has probably eaten all the WP ecommerce sites. Blogging has probably moved to Medium, Substack, static sites, etc.
- Giorgi 6y ago
  What? woocommerce is viewed as next step from Shopify and Medium/Substack is basically graveyard at this point
  - pier25 6y ago
    > woocommerce is viewed as next step from Shopify Is it? I honestly thought it was they other way around. > Medium/Substack is basically graveyard at this point This is definitely not true. Just look at how many Medium articles are shared to HN daily: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=medium.com&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- rchaud 6y ago
  Plenty of use cases, especially if you want to maintain control over your digital presence instead of handing everything over to third parties. - Ecommerce store via WooCommerce - Online Course via Learndash LMS - Lead Generation/Capture via WPForms, or other plugins.
- scarecrowbob 6y ago
  We do a lot of customer-facing CMSs using it. We're rebuilding the Social Security Admin's customer-facing blog system... it's already WordPress, but we are building out additional functionality and creating a more accessible theme in addition to some other work. We have quite a few NGOs and large enterprises which we do that kind of work for.... it's a very popular and easy to use system for non-technical users who need to manage content.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  > Blogging has probably moved to Medium, Substack, static sites, etc. Where are you getting this information? WP is an order of magnitude larger than all of them combined for blogging. Matt Mullenweg's 50% market share goal isn't crazy hyperbole.
armonraphiel 6y ago
I simply can’t recommend a self-hosted Wordpress install for most users. The vast majority of users that WP caters to are better served by Facebook Pages, Wix, Squarespace and Webflow. Large and high traffic sites aren’t a great fit for WP either as the codebase was never meant for scalability and still maintains a painful developer expierence. There are plenty of options, “JAMStack” included, that are still a much better fit.
- duhi88 6y ago
  All these people who "miss Wordpress"...have they ever worked on a WP site that wasn't just modifying an existing theme and installing a handful of common plugins? Most sites I work on these days are either simple enough to be solved with no-code solutions, or complex enough that Wordpress is going to hold you back.
  - yurishimo 6y ago
    Yeah, I've seen the ideal fit for WP sites shrinking over the past 5 years. In my mind, the ideal fit is a business who needs some custom workflow/development that isn't easily attainable on the hosted platforms, but going full custom dev is also too expensive. $10M/yr business or less essentially. Granted, in most of the world, that's still a huge swath of businesses, but most of them realistically don't need a heavily customized online presence. Professional services are a great example of potentially higher revenue businesses that don't need a fully custom web presence. In competitive markets, I've seen plumbing firms/electricians/pest control all compete for SEO, thus spending more on web dev services, but they're the minority. I work for a company that specializes in E-Commerce, with a narrower focus on high performance WooCommerce and custom Shopify development. We've seen some enterprise level customers start on WP and Woo for an MVP and then spend half a decade working to get off of it to their own in-house stack, or to transition to a more managed platform like Shopify. Each one has it's ups and downs, but by no means is any one a silver bullet. It largely depends on what your business requirements are and the expectations of your customers. Selling a dozen individual SKUs with limited customization? Shopify is fantastic and has an extremely optimized checkout flow. Need more customizations to the checkout or you want to create extremely customized user experiences for interactions like Add-to-cart? WP might be a better fit since you can control the entire stack. But WP doesn't scale as easily as Shopify (though it can scale, that's our job) so you'll pay a premium to develop the platform to handle that scale. Outside E-commerce, I see a lot of potential for WP in the higher ed space still. Community colleges and trade schools especially as you can work towards a unified branding effort, while still providing customization and flexibility for teachers. I know a few colleges that keep a small staff of less than 5 people, who manage web development and maintenance for decent sized institutions. All that I guess to say, is that WP still has a place, but that it's shrinking in scope, despite the increase in actual usage numbers. Only time will tell if the trend stays positive for another decade, or if we start to see a slip as other offerings continue to improve and mature.
drummer 6y ago
I'm not so confident anymore about WordPress's future ever since Gutenberg got integrated.
brylie 6y ago
Most static site generators seem oriented towards blogging/publishing content. Is there an open-source static page builder like Wix?
- mmmateo 6y ago
  I’m working on this: https://primo.af https://primo.af But it’s more like a Wix for developers
benfrain 6y ago
Jamstack is nice locally but doesn’t have a solid solution to something simple like comments. WordPress is horrid to develop with locally but can do almost anything. Choose your poison.
ksec 6y ago
> Even rebuilding sites in Jamstack harkens [sic] back to the Movable Type days, where the bigger your site gets, the slower it is to rebuild or update templates." Oh I remember that. But that was before the era of SSD and Multicore CPU. And Echoing all the other comments, the two system ( at its current form ) aren't even targeting the same market.

100 points by velmu 6y ago

Oh look free marketing for both of them

I've been a WP developer for more than 10 years and have had enough. I'm doing what I can to persuade clients that WP isn't the only solution, and that CMS's like Statamic and frameworks like Laravel can be a viable and cost effective solution.

parsley27 6y ago
Are any of those platforms ready yet for everyone to use? I feel like we're getting closer, and devs and most designers probably can leave WP behind, but if I have a friend who wants a site and I don't want to ever touch it for them, I'm not sure I know of a non-WP option that is ready for that. Ghost, maybe?
- whatsmyusername 6y ago
  Hugo, jekyll, webflow, wordpress.com, I'm sure there are others.
  - arkitaip 6y ago
    Good luck getting businesses to manage hugo or jekyll on their $10 hosting.
    - whatsmyusername 6y ago
      The request was for something they could setup and not look at. If it's a throwaway site that's what I use (usually backed by s3/cloudfront). Costs pennies and can be ignored for years without issue.
- joe_momma 6y ago
  Contentful is great for content management
- nevi-me 6y ago
  Ghost needs the developer momentum that WP and other PHP frameworks got. I last used it in 1., and picked it up 2 weeks ago when I found myself needing a headless CMS. I got a sense from the new features since 1. that it's moving towards a membership system which might not be relevant for many websites. In terms of an editor and a way to expose content, is good enough; but like I say with more developers, this could bring more hands to implement stronger plugin systems and improve the core editing options.
- singemonkey 6y ago
  For non-technical people who just want to create content, I'd recommend a hosted service, like Squarespace, Wix, etc. Even wordpress.com if they want something relatively simply and 'bloggy'. I've stopped recommending the self-hosted (wordpress.org) version to non technical people (even if it's a 1 click hosting platform), because there are just too many things that can go wrong, particularly with plugins. As a developer, my experience with Statamic and Laravel has been joyful, compared to WP.
- georgiecasey 6y ago
  > but if I have a friend who wants a site and I don't want to ever touch it for them I did this for a few friends, hosted them on my server, set up Wordpress. Worked for some but most found even Wordpres too complicated. I sent to them to Squarespace and they're happy with that, albeit paying a hefty enough monthly fee after the initial trial period. Not my problem though! washing my hands
arkitaip 6y ago
Great, now they are on some unknown platform where trivial dynamic features are going to be expensive and difficult to implement.
- yurishimo 6y ago
  I think that's why they specifically mentioned Statamic. Other MVC framework backed CMS's would work too. OctoberCMS comes to mind, and I'm sure there are others for Rails/Django. Those would give you a modest plugin ecosystem to get stuff like form submissions, but also give developers an escape hatch for when something more custom is required.
scarecrowbob 6y ago
Yeah, I basically spend most of my working days troubleshooting weird WP issues... gutenberg can't find taxonomies because when the site was developed the devs didn't add the tax to the REST API, etc. I really wanted to like Gutenberg. I learned how to build blocks (and the f- me, they totally changed a ton of stuff about how that works). At this point, I have some pretty deep knowledge about WP and how to make it do all kinds of funky stuff it shouldn't do... but holy hell if I could get the sales folks to start selling about any other CMS I'd do that in a heart beat. But I'd still have 600 or so legacy WP sites to support. I'm grateful to have work, and WP can be a real shit show when you look at that many sites.

mattl 6y ago

I don’t want to use npm at all. Hundreds of megabytes of packages and I don’t know what they all do. WordPress I can run with a few minimal packages from my OS/distribution and then use the built in update mechanism for WordPress itself.

whatsmyusername 6y ago

Wordpress is fine if you're using wordpress.com edit: not .org (though I usually push webflow). Hosting it yourself is a mistake. Not because it's inherently insecure (the base install isn't) but because no one can control themselves with plugins. There's an entire cottage industry revolving around wpscan and securing/popping the millions of poorly secured wordpress instances floating around.

arkitaip 6y ago
Surely you mean wordpress.com. Also, millions of people host WordPress themselves and it works fine considering how much value it delivers.
- whatsmyusername 6y ago
  It you just want to throw up a semi static site with a couple updates a year, sure. Go nuts. The moment marketing wants to be able to login to make dynamic updates and load the instance up with plugins it's time to outsource the hosting. My team already has too much going on to spend time on this foolishness. This got especially worse with 5.x since you can't 403 the REST API off the corporate network anymore (aka the REST API that shipped vulnerable on day 1). It's used for customer facing 'stuff' now.
snowwrestler 6y ago
We self-hosted dozens of WP sites for years. It definitely requires careful attention to keep it secure and performant. As you say, one important factor was to carefully control plugins. As an in-house team, we were able to manage these on behalf of our colleagues rather than allowing a free-for-all. We switched our WP hosting to WP Engine a couple years ago and have been happy with that.
frankzander 6y ago
Crazy opinion. Thing is that if you have such problems you maybe shouldn't use WP. Well IMHO in general I wouldn't recommend WP because of this whole mess with plugins to gain some functional enhancement. I would recommend some CMSs which have a good core functionality by default.

iongoatb 6y ago

As someone that develops Wordpress and Jamstack sites for a living (among other things like apps / devops), this is silly. Debating Wordpress versus Jamstack is like comparing apples to oranges. I use Gatsby + Contentful (or other APIs, like a Headless Wordpress setup) for some situations, and I use Wordpress for many companies as well. Small businesses are not going to hire a designer for PDF designs and then hire a developer to build a Gatsby site, and relearn using a CMS like Contentful instead of Wordpress. Not going to happen. For more sophisticated clients, or for building static sites myself, I always use Gatsby. These type of clients have a higher budget, and can pay for a designer and developer to build the site properly and deal with a more sophisticated deployment architecture. Wordpress is not going away. As long as you don't have to code to use Wordpress, it will be easier and far more accessible for people that don't have a lot of money for a website to hire a web designer (lower skill, lower pay than developer). Gatsby or another Jamstack client could build themes that don't require coding, similar to Wordpress, but I don't see it happening. Webflow is sort of doing that now by allowing designers to build websites without coding. Ultimately, the debate is silly because Wordpress and Jamstack have two different use cases. Wordpress will probably become less popular for big companies, but it will still be very popular for your average small to mid-sized business.

joe_momma 6y ago
Popular for small to midsize businesses to do what? Blog? They don't need wordpress to sell items or create their brochure pages. If they need a blog wordpress is good for that but even something like Medium may be a better option. The day of putting everything under one roof is gone.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Mooty 6y ago
  Maybe ecommerce or anything else, as it's also a bulletproof framework.
- iongoatb 6y ago
  Blogging is not the primary use of Wordpress in practice for small to medium sized businesses.

joe_momma 6y ago

I use netlify and will never go back to wordpress. Enterprise devs are also focused on jamstack so the shiny new stuff will start there. That doesn't mean that wordpress isn't needed but its plugin features may also be it's greatest strength and weakness.

mattlondon 6y ago

Anecdata: I have semi-recently converted a couple of Wordpress and also Docuwiki sites to static sites. First with Hugo, then converted again from Hugo -> Jekyll. I could not be happier with the results (...with Jekyll anyway, less so with Hugo). And there is no npm. The biggest problem for me was mentioned in the article - security. It felt like I was frequently having to babysit updates in Dokuwiki and Wordpress. Both of the update procedures felt precarious and dangerous - more than once they'd fail to update and hose something on the server and I'd need to go in with a SFTP client or SSH and try to rectify whatever the hell happened. I grew to fear the updates and started to procrastinate doing them which was a warning sign. Perhaps they are perfect and flawless these days? And even when I had updated there was always this lingering feeling that there was some unknown/unpatched exploit or I was 12 hours too late patching and so someone was "inside" my wordpress running a spam/phishing operation without me knowing (happened to me, but perhaps 15 years ago now and was due to the hosting provider so not really relevant... I only found out about that one when a victim of the phishing operation did a whois on the domain and sent me threatening messages. Nice.) These sites that were on Wordpress/dokuwiki didn't even need to be "dynamic" anyway - they just needed to serve content and provide a simple way for people to edit the content. Github pages does a great job for this - non-tech users just use the in-browser editor and if they accidentally delete something there is the git changelog. The time "lost" to do a one-time compilation of the site is totally paid back by the near instantaneous loading time compared to the bloated feel of the previous sites waiting for PHP+MySQL to do its thing on some VPS or shared host (I did not have a CDN).

nsomaru 6y ago
Why not run Wordpress locally and bake the site out to static files? That way you get Wordpress content authoring and all the advantages of a static site you mention
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  IMO this is the perfect middle ground where you need non technical people to make rapid edits to a live website. They can make edits to a dev/local environment which automatically get baked out and pulled into the live site on a set schedule.

calcsam 6y ago

Mullenweg is right. Wordpress is a great content management system. From a content writer's perspective, it is perhaps the best way to write and publish content. And it does offer a simple, integrated solution. But Biilmann is also right. The Javascript world (React, Vue, the npm ecosystem, ES6/7+), modularized services like Stripe, Algolia, etc, plus eg Git, have passed the Wordpress development ecosystem by. Wordpress needs a bridge to modern development, so people can get the best of both worlds. That's how we see Gatsby, so we built a source plugin to import content, built Gatsby Cloud to do live content previews, created incremental builds to match the instant content go-live experience. There's a great quote from Jason Bahl, the maintainer of WPGraphQL, on this: "I don’t see Jamstack competing against WordPress. This isn’t a zero sum game. If the Gatsby + WordPress experience can allow users to use the best CMS in the world while using modern dev tooling, it’s a win all around.” https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-and-jamstack-community-square-off-making-long-term-bets-on-the-predominant-architecture-for-the-web https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-and-jamstack-community-s...

claudiulodro 6y ago
This bridge already exists. The latest versions of the WordPress post editor are built almost entirely in React. Why do you think Facebook backed down from the BSD+Patents React license scheme they were trying a couple years ago? Because of pressure from WordPress!

open-source-ux 6y ago

I don't like WordPress, but Jamstack will never overtake WordPress adoption quite simply because Jamstack is too complicated. In particular, it will never find an audience among non-technical users which is a very different audience from technical users who often think only of their own likes and needs. If you don't like WordPress, there are more modern CMS apps with modern coding practices (often written in PHP). They aren't part of the Jamstack and but are often much simpler to deploy.

duhi88 6y ago
Jamstack needs to smooth out the client side of the experience. Netlify CMS has been great in testing, but I haven't deployed anything to a client with it. I know that, as a dev, I'll never get stuck in a situation where I can't accomplish something with Jamstack (Gridsome is the one I prefer). I just fear the day a client needs to use a CMS and they can't edit/demo something the way the expect.

shiftpgdn 6y ago

FYI: Netlify has a trademark on JAMSTACK and strictly controls it. They have a very weak profitability model and over 120 million dollars of early Series VC raises. Netlify is a company working hard to get lots of people locked into their companies ecosystem. This is a very bad thing for the open web.

armonraphiel 6y ago
They host static web pages. I’m not exactly seeing the angle on how this is a bad thing.
schwartzworld 6y ago
A lot of what is great about netlify and the jamstack is that it doesn't lock you in. Migrating away from WordPress means a new codebase. Migrating away from netlify just means putting my files somewhere else.
gherkinnn 6y ago
Netlify is semi-anonymously creating hype and then offering what they think is the best solution to the problem they’ve created. The principles behind JAM are platform-agnostic though. As I see it, Netlify is just dressing serverless in a new hat.
CarelessExpert 6y ago
How can you "lock" someone into an ecosystem that's literally just a bunch of open standards and an architectural pattern? Heck, my own Jekyll-based static blog is technically a "JAMstack" website and I've never had any interactions with Netlify. What are you implying?
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  Then you don't have a JAMSTACK website. You have a static + serverless architecture. Netlify is heavily promoting "JAMSTACK" as the next hot thing because only they are allowed to provide a "JAMSTACK" platform.

louiechristie 6y ago

Wordpress or JAMstack? Why not do both? I did... as an experiment for my blog: https://www.louiechristie.com/blog/ https://www.louiechristie.com/blog/ The secret sauce is https://github.com/henrikwirth/gatsby-starter-wordpress-twenty-twenty https://github.com/henrikwirth/gatsby-starter-wordpress-twen...

pier25 6y ago

What's the average use case for WP these days? Shopify has probably eaten all the WP ecommerce sites. Blogging has probably moved to Medium, Substack, static sites, etc.

Giorgi 6y ago
What? woocommerce is viewed as next step from Shopify and Medium/Substack is basically graveyard at this point
- pier25 6y ago
  > woocommerce is viewed as next step from Shopify Is it? I honestly thought it was they other way around. > Medium/Substack is basically graveyard at this point This is definitely not true. Just look at how many Medium articles are shared to HN daily: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=medium.com&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
rchaud 6y ago
Plenty of use cases, especially if you want to maintain control over your digital presence instead of handing everything over to third parties. - Ecommerce store via WooCommerce - Online Course via Learndash LMS - Lead Generation/Capture via WPForms, or other plugins.
scarecrowbob 6y ago
We do a lot of customer-facing CMSs using it. We're rebuilding the Social Security Admin's customer-facing blog system... it's already WordPress, but we are building out additional functionality and creating a more accessible theme in addition to some other work. We have quite a few NGOs and large enterprises which we do that kind of work for.... it's a very popular and easy to use system for non-technical users who need to manage content.
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
> Blogging has probably moved to Medium, Substack, static sites, etc. Where are you getting this information? WP is an order of magnitude larger than all of them combined for blogging. Matt Mullenweg's 50% market share goal isn't crazy hyperbole.

armonraphiel 6y ago

I simply can’t recommend a self-hosted Wordpress install for most users. The vast majority of users that WP caters to are better served by Facebook Pages, Wix, Squarespace and Webflow. Large and high traffic sites aren’t a great fit for WP either as the codebase was never meant for scalability and still maintains a painful developer expierence. There are plenty of options, “JAMStack” included, that are still a much better fit.

duhi88 6y ago
All these people who "miss Wordpress"...have they ever worked on a WP site that wasn't just modifying an existing theme and installing a handful of common plugins? Most sites I work on these days are either simple enough to be solved with no-code solutions, or complex enough that Wordpress is going to hold you back.
- yurishimo 6y ago
  Yeah, I've seen the ideal fit for WP sites shrinking over the past 5 years. In my mind, the ideal fit is a business who needs some custom workflow/development that isn't easily attainable on the hosted platforms, but going full custom dev is also too expensive. $10M/yr business or less essentially. Granted, in most of the world, that's still a huge swath of businesses, but most of them realistically don't need a heavily customized online presence. Professional services are a great example of potentially higher revenue businesses that don't need a fully custom web presence. In competitive markets, I've seen plumbing firms/electricians/pest control all compete for SEO, thus spending more on web dev services, but they're the minority. I work for a company that specializes in E-Commerce, with a narrower focus on high performance WooCommerce and custom Shopify development. We've seen some enterprise level customers start on WP and Woo for an MVP and then spend half a decade working to get off of it to their own in-house stack, or to transition to a more managed platform like Shopify. Each one has it's ups and downs, but by no means is any one a silver bullet. It largely depends on what your business requirements are and the expectations of your customers. Selling a dozen individual SKUs with limited customization? Shopify is fantastic and has an extremely optimized checkout flow. Need more customizations to the checkout or you want to create extremely customized user experiences for interactions like Add-to-cart? WP might be a better fit since you can control the entire stack. But WP doesn't scale as easily as Shopify (though it can scale, that's our job) so you'll pay a premium to develop the platform to handle that scale. Outside E-commerce, I see a lot of potential for WP in the higher ed space still. Community colleges and trade schools especially as you can work towards a unified branding effort, while still providing customization and flexibility for teachers. I know a few colleges that keep a small staff of less than 5 people, who manage web development and maintenance for decent sized institutions. All that I guess to say, is that WP still has a place, but that it's shrinking in scope, despite the increase in actual usage numbers. Only time will tell if the trend stays positive for another decade, or if we start to see a slip as other offerings continue to improve and mature.

drummer 6y ago

I'm not so confident anymore about WordPress's future ever since Gutenberg got integrated.

brylie 6y ago

Most static site generators seem oriented towards blogging/publishing content. Is there an open-source static page builder like Wix?

mmmateo 6y ago
I’m working on this: https://primo.af https://primo.af But it’s more like a Wix for developers

benfrain 6y ago

Jamstack is nice locally but doesn’t have a solid solution to something simple like comments. WordPress is horrid to develop with locally but can do almost anything. Choose your poison.

ksec 6y ago

> Even rebuilding sites in Jamstack harkens [sic] back to the Movable Type days, where the bigger your site gets, the slower it is to rebuild or update templates." Oh I remember that. But that was before the era of SSD and Multicore CPU. And Echoing all the other comments, the two system ( at its current form ) aren't even targeting the same market.