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I hope we again see the value of using systems like Wordpress for it’s simplicity in getting a blog/website setup and easily modify content. Lately most of the

I hope we again see the value of using systems like Wordpress for it’s simplicity in getting a blog/website setup and easily modify content. Lately most of the modern marketing websites I see is built using gatsby and next.js. Having been talking to different content/marketing teams, they hate it so much because of the complexity it brings. Editing content? Sign in to this headless CRM app, want a form? Go sign in to another app. It might be a fun project for devs but the actual users if these systems will almost always have a hard time using it.

jakelazaroff 6y ago
Is that because WordPress is simple, though? There are similar CMSes you can use with e.g. Gatsby. They’re just a glorified build systems, after all — there’s nothing inherently complex about the content management experience. And on the flip side, it’s possible to load up WordPress with enough plugins that it becomes a nightmare to use. I think we see people choose WordPress because it’s familiar, popular, battle-tested and has a big community with a lot of plugins. It’s a good choice for a lot of people. But that doesn’t mean people picking other options are just taken in by the hype.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Yes because Wordpress includes frontend rendering (of both the actual pages and the backend admin) by default. This means you get working HTML powered by dynamic content out of the box, and it keeps working as content changes without needing constant builds for static sites. I see the benefits of modern component-driven frontend systems but I think the better opportunity would be to integrate this cleanly into existing server-side engines rather than try to recreate the backend entirely or disassemble it down to such low-level build steps.
  - mmmeff 6y ago
    Like next.js?
  - kristopolous 6y ago
    Wordpress also has a really rich ecosystem of mature and widely used plugins that are quite easy to install. The podcast ones for instance, they'll allow you to schedule the publishing of a new episode, then upload the episode to all the major platforms, format the images, titles and descriptions automatically for the different platforms, cross post to the social media accounts announcing the new episode, allow you to put in show notes for the blog, and embed a way to listen to the show on the site, all built in, for free, using an interface that is clean and well documented. Of course I could do that myself but come on now, that simplifies my life so much. I'm ok with my government saving money and not hiring six figure tech workers to custom roll effectively a press release website. Honestly, they could redirect it to a medium blog and save on the hosting fees as well. The real infrastructure is going to be at the departments, NASA, Smithsonian, CDC etc...
    - dannyw 6y ago
      Governments should moderately prefer self-hosted solutions to cloud services, especially when a president just got banned from all social media platforms.
      - jakelazaroff 6y ago
        The SolarWinds hack is another cautionary tale about not self-hosting.
        OccamsMirror 6y ago
        Not really. What guarantee do you have that your cloud hosting provider wasn't also running SolarWinds services behind their firewalls.
        jakelazaroff 6y ago
        "Self-hosting" in this case means running your own data center as well.
      - kristopolous 6y ago
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  Gatsby isn't a CMS in the WP or Drupal sense of the word. Gatsby to me is more of an "integration first" minded architecture. That is, Gatsby is a way to unite multiple services, CMS's and content sources. But other than using .MD files Gatsby doesn't really have the ability to manage content in a true CMS sense. It's not like you log into some Gatsby admin panel and add content.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  Wordpress makes sense if the goals are: - Big upfront design - Leverage existing plugins to minimize new development - Use managed hosting - Hand off to non-technical or semi-technical people and spin down development to just occasional contract work If you actually have a FTE developer, it doesn’t fit as well at all. Among other problems, it does not work with a git centric development flow, which any modern dev will insist on.
  - arcturus17 6y ago
    Eh, the efficiencies you describe happen regardless of whether the dev team is full-time or outsourced, and I think there are ways of doing git flows with WP.
  - marc_io 6y ago
    > it does not work with a git centric development flow, which any modern dev will insist on. Yes, it does. Just use Trellis and Bedrock.
    - earthboundkid 6y ago
      I am not familiar with them, but a quick Google seems to suggest they won’t work with WPEngine, Wordpress.com, etc. In any event, they’re bolt on solutions, but the core of Wordpress is still a mess of configuration split between files on disk and the database. There is nothing so valuable about Wordpress that you couldn’t just get a more reliable solution from scratch than by bolting more stuff onto WP. I’ve heard people say “oh, our users are already trained on WP, so it’s a good CMS” but I don’t buy that at all. I’ve had users praise my homegrown CMSes before. There’s not much difficulty in pairing a WYSIWYG text editor and some form fields with modern web stacks these days.
      - seanwilson 6y ago
        > “oh, our users are already trained on WP, so it’s a good CMS” but I don’t buy that at all. I’ve had users praise my homegrown CMSes before. There’s not much difficulty in pairing a WYSIWYG text editor and some form fields with modern web stacks these days. I don't think even the admin UI is well organised or consistent though. Most users just know how to create and edit posts. Once you start installing a few required plugins too, the UI becomes even more a mess of controls that users are scared to touch.
pmarreck 6y ago
Have you ever tried to customize or add functionality to Wordpress? Because if it’s anything like Drupal or other PHP based tech of a certain era, it’s hell
- eloisius 6y ago
  It is hell, but there are also millions of contractors that still sit in that webmaster space between designer and developer who will do it cheaply.
- Something1234 6y ago
  add_shortcode is incredible. It's probably my favorite part of wordpress, and writing a plugin is so easy, just a single file zipped up or scp'd. Especially with custom post types or adding a new table.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > just a single file zipped up or scp'd And now your page displays a white page. Error in the log is an exception with no stacktrace/location. This was my experience in production a few times. It's a fun system if it works, but without a testing pipeline and a staging environment it's a lottery with a possible mystery breakage on every update/change.
    - organsnyder 6y ago
      > It's a fun system if it works, but without a testing pipeline and a staging environment it's a lottery with a possible mystery breakage on every update/change. That describes every platform, programming language, layer of the stack, etc. that I've ever worked with.
      - Something1234 6y ago
        At the end. All of our tooling sucks. Although I have to say generally the apache error log guides me to the right place.
thayne 6y ago
From an operations perspective, gatsby and next.js are much simpler though. You are just deploying static content behind a webserver or even something like s3. Horizontal scaling is almost trivial. With wordpress though, you have to worry about a database as well, scaling is more complicated, you need to run php on your webservers (which has security implications), updates that include schema updates frequently require downtime, etc.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- irjustin 6y ago
  Horizontal scaling for static content is just as trivial if not more trivial in WordPress with the plugins. [Edit] downvotes are fine but let's open up discussion. Further edit, WP has great static content manager plugins. It's not direct to S3 but a single server can handle a lot of traffic in that mode. The part that becomes significantly easier is updating that content or adding new ones. You don't need devops to rebuild and redeploy.
  - thayne 6y ago
    I think we are talking about different things. I'm not talking about static assets that you use in your site. I mean the entire site is static, and thus doesn't require any database or any server-side page generation. Which means not only that it is easier to scale since you don't even have any state in the database, but each node can also handle more traffic, because it is doing less. (And if you something like s3 or github pages, or netlify, you don't even need to worry about individual servers). > The part that becomes significantly easier is updating that content or adding new ones. You don't need devops to rebuild and redeploy. From my perspective as an SRE, that's actually a bad thing. I've seen content creators take down big parts of the site because they changed or deleted an asset. Most of the time that could have been caught by automated tests as part of a build pipeline, if one had been in place. There is certainly a trade-off though. Wordpress and Drupal are great for quick turnaround content creation and editing. If you want your changes to be live as soon as you make them , Wordpress is better at that than a static site generator. On the other hand if you want rock-solid stability, and want any changes to go through a gamut of automated tests, Wordpress is not a good fit. It is possible, but it definitely isn't easy.
tootie 6y ago
A pretty standard stack I've done recently is Netlify, Gatsby (I'd lean next at this point) with Prismic, Hubspot and GTM. It's barely more investment to setup than WordPress but lets you build something visually sophisticated really easily and you get user friendly CMS, CRM and all the analytics and user engagement stuff. And running headless means there's almost zero attack surface.
- rapind 6y ago
  Which CMS were you using though? Netlify CMS? Last I looked at it, there was a lot to be desired (not to belittle their effort, but not even close to WP in terms of functionality). Worth mentioning you can also run WP headless and build your front end in w/e js framework du jour you prefer.
  - tomduncalf 6y ago
    They mentioned Prismic, so I assume they are using that as CMS
- arcturus17 6y ago
  The very point of OP is that this micro-service approach is bound to provide a poorer user experience for non-technical users - the vast majority will reason about and operate a monolithic CMS with much more ease.
  - tootie 6y ago
    Poorer author experience maybe. The end user experience will likely be better. And the business results of using a proper CRM and audience engagement product will be far superior.
falcolas 6y ago
Simplicity? Perhaps in its use, but not the code. The code and hosting requirements are, frankly, Frankenstein's monster levels of frightening. ~~You have to~~ WP expect you to install it such that it can modify its install folders - all of them. Security-fucking-nightmare. It will use incoming requests to trigger "cron" jobs (which can include self-upgrades), via a non-loopback HTTP request. It falls apart under any kind of load, both because of unoptimized DB queries, and because of PHP. You have to put a cache in front of it to be able to handle getting on HN, let alone Reddit. Arbitrary plugin installation, in a non-sandboxed environment (see prior point about an application-writable install). Need more be said? You really have to dedicate an admin to it if you want to keep it secure and performant. I still get angry remembering my experience installing, securing, and setting up caching in front of it.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > You have to let it modify its install. Security-fucking-nightmare. You really don't. I've deployed it to Heroku, where the filesystem resets every 24h. It's a part of their famed five minute install for not-very-technical users on shared hosting, but it's by no means a requirement.
  - falcolas 6y ago
    It is if your users expect to be able to add plugins themselves, or you want it to do automatic version upgrades. We disabled it (except for the attachments folders), and boy did it throw up all over the logs. Using a filesystem reset is a nice way around WP's requirements. I'd personally hesitate to rely on it for a popular site, since it still leaves a site vulnerable to code injection for those 24 hours.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      > It is if your users expect to be able to add plugins themselves, or you want it to do automatic version upgrades. I'm fairly certain for the White House's sort of use case this is not an issue. > Using a filesystem reset is a nice way around WP's requirements. I'd personally hesitate to rely on it for a popular site, since it still leaves a site vulnerable to code injection for those 24 hours. We did not permit it to have write access to its own filesystem, at all. It worked fine. Uploads went straight to S3 via a plugin.
Glyptodon 6y ago
Is there a CMS that has a Wordpress-like admin panel and content editing tools that builds and deploys the needed updates to a static site when you save an article, etc.?
- 9935c101ab17a66 6y ago
  Yes, there are lots now! There are some good ones, but some are definitely way pricier than I think they should be. With Next.js, you can even use Wordpress as a cms to back a static blog (https://github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/canary/examples/cms-wordpress https://github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/canary/examples/cms-w...) Just a few off the top of my head: - https://graphcms.com https://graphcms.com - https://prismic.io https://prismic.io - https://www.sanity.io https://www.sanity.io - https://www.datocms.com/ https://www.datocms.com/ - https://www.cosmicjs.com/ https://www.cosmicjs.com/ More at the top of this Next.js docs page: https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/data-fetching#simple-example https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/data-fetching#simple-... I've spent quite a bit of time playing with Nextjs, so if you have more specific questions feel free to let me know.
- onion2k 6y ago
  Most static site generators can use WordPress as a data source, and rebuild via a webhook.
- marc_io 6y ago
  This looks like Publii: https://getpublii.com/ https://getpublii.com/ Much more client-oriented than Getsby, Jeckyl or Hugo.
melomal 6y ago
But Dev's are the people who had issues with WP. WP has been given this awful image but when you can buy a fully functional LMS system for $69 with 6 months support, you just can't beat the value. Want to ensure people don't laugh at your WP site - use Hide My WP. You block most common intrusion attacks such as PHP injections, you see where the attempts are being made and the site works. Need to convert the whole thing to a PWA? There's a plugin for that which will do in in minutes and cost $30. It's like the beer/wine connoisseurs who insist that the 'common' option is just not good enough for them. But $9 wine or $100 - most end users don't know the difference.
mortenjorck 6y ago
The threads of replies debating the technical "simplicity" of Wordpress are missing this part: > easily modify content If you have non-technical users editing a site, this one aspect takes precedence over everything else, and it's there that Wordpress continues to generally obliterate whatever workflow may qualify as "simple" to the average HN reader. If you've never used Wordpress' Gutenberg editor (or others based on the same model such as Medium or Squarespace), you should try it. The ability to not only change formatting but page structure and layout in a guided, template-driven way is simply not comparable to editing a Markdown file. I'm pretty ambivalent on Wordpress' technical merits and its plugin ecosystem is a terrible attractive nuisance for the uninitiated, but if you want to give content authors a robust tool for publishing, there's not much else like it.
- vxNsr 6y ago
  Pretty much this. I as an experiment decided to use GitHub pages for my personal website and used some random simple looking theme that appeared on its face easy to manage. It wasn’t. The whole process is annoying, making changes to the site is annoying, adding content isn’t straightforward and if this is how all Jekyll sites are I don’t understand why anyone bothers with this sort of set up
ehnto 6y ago
I have been thinking about what solution is for this. Do you think users would be happy with a WordPress backed headless app? The other issue is that visual content editing in WordPress is pretty tricky. Site owners want cool modern design, but editable in the WordPress admin, and meeting them in the middle has proven difficult using Gutenberg. They often find the new UI brittle and difficult to work with, even for core WP blocks. The developer experience is also pretty cumbersome. If anyone has found an idiomatic approach that works, I'd love to hear it!
- marc_io 6y ago
  > They often find the new UI brittle and difficult to work with, even for core WP blocks. There's a new (official) UI system in the works that aims to solve usability issues in WordPress components. https://g2-components.com/ https://g2-components.com/
draw_down 6y ago
I really love that you said this. It’s such a great example of what I keep saying, that “simplicity” is more about what one likes or prefers rather than describing some actual sort of elegance of design. “Simplicity” does not really refer to a property of the subject in question, it’s a reflection of one’s attitude toward the subject.
hmillison 6y ago
I built out a site using headless WP with Next.js as the frontend. With server side rendering of React, we still took advantage of caching the HTML in a CDN like you would with vanilla WP but it was much easier to build our own theme as desired with React. While configuring certain parts of Wordpress was tricky at times, especially because deploying it is at odds with the stateless nature of modern containerized infra. Particularly plug-in installation with WP cli requirng a DB connection which makes it tough to fully configure your installation at container build time. I still think it struck a balance between developer experience and a good experience for the content team.
- dgb23 6y ago
  Have you been using the preview feature of Next for this to allow for a fast feedback loop for content?
  - hmillison 6y ago
    We didn't use it initially because the site was built before they launched that feature, but it definitely reduced some of the boilerplate that we had to write ourselves to wire up Next to WP. We had already setup a preview page that was wired up to the Wordpress Admin's Preview button that used the endpoint provided by WP to preview content in our UI.
StreamBright 6y ago
Nothing is stopping you from setting up a site in Hugo or something similar. I don't really understand why dynamic rendering or a huge amount of JS is required other than continue down the road of bloat.
mudlark 6y ago
They can just static dump a site, bar search, and most issues vanish.
antihero 6y ago
> different content/marketing teams, they hate it so much A refreshing change from them making everyone else's life hell then? :)
Zelphyr 6y ago
It’s true that Wordpress is very good at letting you modify content easily. That is, as you say, a major reason to use it. However. That assumes you are only needing to edit text with basic formatting (bold, underline, etc...) As soon as you get into anything more complex you pretty much have to understand HTML and CSS. I just ran into this with three different Wordpress installs. Two use Divi and the third uses WP Bakery. Those are really nice plugins and in 100% of the cases, the person using the site told me they don’t understand what’s going on and kept making a mess of something. I’m guessing that for The Whitehouse site they will mostly be doing minimal content editing. Then again, they have the resources to have a person who understands HTML and CSS manage the site when things get tricky. I’m not saying Wordpress is bad but it very quickly can become not as easy to use as most people make it out to be.
- photomatt 6y ago
  This is why we built Gutenberg, which is the new editor in WP that allows you to do rich layouts without using Divi or Bakery. Gutenberg is what the new White House site uses! You can do really advanced things with it.

jakelazaroff 6y ago

Is that because WordPress is simple, though? There are similar CMSes you can use with e.g. Gatsby. They’re just a glorified build systems, after all — there’s nothing inherently complex about the content management experience. And on the flip side, it’s possible to load up WordPress with enough plugins that it becomes a nightmare to use. I think we see people choose WordPress because it’s familiar, popular, battle-tested and has a big community with a lot of plugins. It’s a good choice for a lot of people. But that doesn’t mean people picking other options are just taken in by the hype.

manigandham 6y ago
Yes because Wordpress includes frontend rendering (of both the actual pages and the backend admin) by default. This means you get working HTML powered by dynamic content out of the box, and it keeps working as content changes without needing constant builds for static sites. I see the benefits of modern component-driven frontend systems but I think the better opportunity would be to integrate this cleanly into existing server-side engines rather than try to recreate the backend entirely or disassemble it down to such low-level build steps.
- mmmeff 6y ago
  Like next.js?
- kristopolous 6y ago
  Wordpress also has a really rich ecosystem of mature and widely used plugins that are quite easy to install. The podcast ones for instance, they'll allow you to schedule the publishing of a new episode, then upload the episode to all the major platforms, format the images, titles and descriptions automatically for the different platforms, cross post to the social media accounts announcing the new episode, allow you to put in show notes for the blog, and embed a way to listen to the show on the site, all built in, for free, using an interface that is clean and well documented. Of course I could do that myself but come on now, that simplifies my life so much. I'm ok with my government saving money and not hiring six figure tech workers to custom roll effectively a press release website. Honestly, they could redirect it to a medium blog and save on the hosting fees as well. The real infrastructure is going to be at the departments, NASA, Smithsonian, CDC etc...
  - dannyw 6y ago
    Governments should moderately prefer self-hosted solutions to cloud services, especially when a president just got banned from all social media platforms.
    - jakelazaroff 6y ago
      The SolarWinds hack is another cautionary tale about not self-hosting.
      - OccamsMirror 6y ago
        Not really. What guarantee do you have that your cloud hosting provider wasn't also running SolarWinds services behind their firewalls.
        jakelazaroff 6y ago
        "Self-hosting" in this case means running your own data center as well.
    - kristopolous 6y ago
chiefalchemist 6y ago
Gatsby isn't a CMS in the WP or Drupal sense of the word. Gatsby to me is more of an "integration first" minded architecture. That is, Gatsby is a way to unite multiple services, CMS's and content sources. But other than using .MD files Gatsby doesn't really have the ability to manage content in a true CMS sense. It's not like you log into some Gatsby admin panel and add content.
earthboundkid 6y ago
Wordpress makes sense if the goals are: - Big upfront design - Leverage existing plugins to minimize new development - Use managed hosting - Hand off to non-technical or semi-technical people and spin down development to just occasional contract work If you actually have a FTE developer, it doesn’t fit as well at all. Among other problems, it does not work with a git centric development flow, which any modern dev will insist on.
- arcturus17 6y ago
  Eh, the efficiencies you describe happen regardless of whether the dev team is full-time or outsourced, and I think there are ways of doing git flows with WP.
- marc_io 6y ago
  > it does not work with a git centric development flow, which any modern dev will insist on. Yes, it does. Just use Trellis and Bedrock.
  - earthboundkid 6y ago
    I am not familiar with them, but a quick Google seems to suggest they won’t work with WPEngine, Wordpress.com, etc. In any event, they’re bolt on solutions, but the core of Wordpress is still a mess of configuration split between files on disk and the database. There is nothing so valuable about Wordpress that you couldn’t just get a more reliable solution from scratch than by bolting more stuff onto WP. I’ve heard people say “oh, our users are already trained on WP, so it’s a good CMS” but I don’t buy that at all. I’ve had users praise my homegrown CMSes before. There’s not much difficulty in pairing a WYSIWYG text editor and some form fields with modern web stacks these days.
    - seanwilson 6y ago
      > “oh, our users are already trained on WP, so it’s a good CMS” but I don’t buy that at all. I’ve had users praise my homegrown CMSes before. There’s not much difficulty in pairing a WYSIWYG text editor and some form fields with modern web stacks these days. I don't think even the admin UI is well organised or consistent though. Most users just know how to create and edit posts. Once you start installing a few required plugins too, the UI becomes even more a mess of controls that users are scared to touch.

pmarreck 6y ago

Have you ever tried to customize or add functionality to Wordpress? Because if it’s anything like Drupal or other PHP based tech of a certain era, it’s hell

eloisius 6y ago
It is hell, but there are also millions of contractors that still sit in that webmaster space between designer and developer who will do it cheaply.
Something1234 6y ago
add_shortcode is incredible. It's probably my favorite part of wordpress, and writing a plugin is so easy, just a single file zipped up or scp'd. Especially with custom post types or adding a new table.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > just a single file zipped up or scp'd And now your page displays a white page. Error in the log is an exception with no stacktrace/location. This was my experience in production a few times. It's a fun system if it works, but without a testing pipeline and a staging environment it's a lottery with a possible mystery breakage on every update/change.
  - organsnyder 6y ago
    > It's a fun system if it works, but without a testing pipeline and a staging environment it's a lottery with a possible mystery breakage on every update/change. That describes every platform, programming language, layer of the stack, etc. that I've ever worked with.
    - Something1234 6y ago
      At the end. All of our tooling sucks. Although I have to say generally the apache error log guides me to the right place.

thayne 6y ago

From an operations perspective, gatsby and next.js are much simpler though. You are just deploying static content behind a webserver or even something like s3. Horizontal scaling is almost trivial. With wordpress though, you have to worry about a database as well, scaling is more complicated, you need to run php on your webservers (which has security implications), updates that include schema updates frequently require downtime, etc.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
irjustin 6y ago
Horizontal scaling for static content is just as trivial if not more trivial in WordPress with the plugins. [Edit] downvotes are fine but let's open up discussion. Further edit, WP has great static content manager plugins. It's not direct to S3 but a single server can handle a lot of traffic in that mode. The part that becomes significantly easier is updating that content or adding new ones. You don't need devops to rebuild and redeploy.
- thayne 6y ago
  I think we are talking about different things. I'm not talking about static assets that you use in your site. I mean the entire site is static, and thus doesn't require any database or any server-side page generation. Which means not only that it is easier to scale since you don't even have any state in the database, but each node can also handle more traffic, because it is doing less. (And if you something like s3 or github pages, or netlify, you don't even need to worry about individual servers). > The part that becomes significantly easier is updating that content or adding new ones. You don't need devops to rebuild and redeploy. From my perspective as an SRE, that's actually a bad thing. I've seen content creators take down big parts of the site because they changed or deleted an asset. Most of the time that could have been caught by automated tests as part of a build pipeline, if one had been in place. There is certainly a trade-off though. Wordpress and Drupal are great for quick turnaround content creation and editing. If you want your changes to be live as soon as you make them , Wordpress is better at that than a static site generator. On the other hand if you want rock-solid stability, and want any changes to go through a gamut of automated tests, Wordpress is not a good fit. It is possible, but it definitely isn't easy.

tootie 6y ago

A pretty standard stack I've done recently is Netlify, Gatsby (I'd lean next at this point) with Prismic, Hubspot and GTM. It's barely more investment to setup than WordPress but lets you build something visually sophisticated really easily and you get user friendly CMS, CRM and all the analytics and user engagement stuff. And running headless means there's almost zero attack surface.

rapind 6y ago
Which CMS were you using though? Netlify CMS? Last I looked at it, there was a lot to be desired (not to belittle their effort, but not even close to WP in terms of functionality). Worth mentioning you can also run WP headless and build your front end in w/e js framework du jour you prefer.
- tomduncalf 6y ago
  They mentioned Prismic, so I assume they are using that as CMS
arcturus17 6y ago
The very point of OP is that this micro-service approach is bound to provide a poorer user experience for non-technical users - the vast majority will reason about and operate a monolithic CMS with much more ease.
- tootie 6y ago
  Poorer author experience maybe. The end user experience will likely be better. And the business results of using a proper CRM and audience engagement product will be far superior.

falcolas 6y ago

Simplicity? Perhaps in its use, but not the code. The code and hosting requirements are, frankly, Frankenstein's monster levels of frightening. ~~You have to~~ WP expect you to install it such that it can modify its install folders - all of them. Security-fucking-nightmare. It will use incoming requests to trigger "cron" jobs (which can include self-upgrades), via a non-loopback HTTP request. It falls apart under any kind of load, both because of unoptimized DB queries, and because of PHP. You have to put a cache in front of it to be able to handle getting on HN, let alone Reddit. Arbitrary plugin installation, in a non-sandboxed environment (see prior point about an application-writable install). Need more be said? You really have to dedicate an admin to it if you want to keep it secure and performant. I still get angry remembering my experience installing, securing, and setting up caching in front of it.

ceejayoz 6y ago
> You have to let it modify its install. Security-fucking-nightmare. You really don't. I've deployed it to Heroku, where the filesystem resets every 24h. It's a part of their famed five minute install for not-very-technical users on shared hosting, but it's by no means a requirement.
- falcolas 6y ago
  It is if your users expect to be able to add plugins themselves, or you want it to do automatic version upgrades. We disabled it (except for the attachments folders), and boy did it throw up all over the logs. Using a filesystem reset is a nice way around WP's requirements. I'd personally hesitate to rely on it for a popular site, since it still leaves a site vulnerable to code injection for those 24 hours.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    > It is if your users expect to be able to add plugins themselves, or you want it to do automatic version upgrades. I'm fairly certain for the White House's sort of use case this is not an issue. > Using a filesystem reset is a nice way around WP's requirements. I'd personally hesitate to rely on it for a popular site, since it still leaves a site vulnerable to code injection for those 24 hours. We did not permit it to have write access to its own filesystem, at all. It worked fine. Uploads went straight to S3 via a plugin.

Glyptodon 6y ago

Is there a CMS that has a Wordpress-like admin panel and content editing tools that builds and deploys the needed updates to a static site when you save an article, etc.?

9935c101ab17a66 6y ago
Yes, there are lots now! There are some good ones, but some are definitely way pricier than I think they should be. With Next.js, you can even use Wordpress as a cms to back a static blog (https://github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/canary/examples/cms-wordpress https://github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/canary/examples/cms-w...) Just a few off the top of my head: - https://graphcms.com https://graphcms.com - https://prismic.io https://prismic.io - https://www.sanity.io https://www.sanity.io - https://www.datocms.com/ https://www.datocms.com/ - https://www.cosmicjs.com/ https://www.cosmicjs.com/ More at the top of this Next.js docs page: https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/data-fetching#simple-example https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/data-fetching#simple-... I've spent quite a bit of time playing with Nextjs, so if you have more specific questions feel free to let me know.
onion2k 6y ago
Most static site generators can use WordPress as a data source, and rebuild via a webhook.
marc_io 6y ago
This looks like Publii: https://getpublii.com/ https://getpublii.com/ Much more client-oriented than Getsby, Jeckyl or Hugo.

melomal 6y ago

But Dev's are the people who had issues with WP. WP has been given this awful image but when you can buy a fully functional LMS system for $69 with 6 months support, you just can't beat the value. Want to ensure people don't laugh at your WP site - use Hide My WP. You block most common intrusion attacks such as PHP injections, you see where the attempts are being made and the site works. Need to convert the whole thing to a PWA? There's a plugin for that which will do in in minutes and cost $30. It's like the beer/wine connoisseurs who insist that the 'common' option is just not good enough for them. But $9 wine or $100 - most end users don't know the difference.

mortenjorck 6y ago

The threads of replies debating the technical "simplicity" of Wordpress are missing this part: > easily modify content If you have non-technical users editing a site, this one aspect takes precedence over everything else, and it's there that Wordpress continues to generally obliterate whatever workflow may qualify as "simple" to the average HN reader. If you've never used Wordpress' Gutenberg editor (or others based on the same model such as Medium or Squarespace), you should try it. The ability to not only change formatting but page structure and layout in a guided, template-driven way is simply not comparable to editing a Markdown file. I'm pretty ambivalent on Wordpress' technical merits and its plugin ecosystem is a terrible attractive nuisance for the uninitiated, but if you want to give content authors a robust tool for publishing, there's not much else like it.

vxNsr 6y ago
Pretty much this. I as an experiment decided to use GitHub pages for my personal website and used some random simple looking theme that appeared on its face easy to manage. It wasn’t. The whole process is annoying, making changes to the site is annoying, adding content isn’t straightforward and if this is how all Jekyll sites are I don’t understand why anyone bothers with this sort of set up

ehnto 6y ago

I have been thinking about what solution is for this. Do you think users would be happy with a WordPress backed headless app? The other issue is that visual content editing in WordPress is pretty tricky. Site owners want cool modern design, but editable in the WordPress admin, and meeting them in the middle has proven difficult using Gutenberg. They often find the new UI brittle and difficult to work with, even for core WP blocks. The developer experience is also pretty cumbersome. If anyone has found an idiomatic approach that works, I'd love to hear it!

marc_io 6y ago
> They often find the new UI brittle and difficult to work with, even for core WP blocks. There's a new (official) UI system in the works that aims to solve usability issues in WordPress components. https://g2-components.com/ https://g2-components.com/

draw_down 6y ago

I really love that you said this. It’s such a great example of what I keep saying, that “simplicity” is more about what one likes or prefers rather than describing some actual sort of elegance of design. “Simplicity” does not really refer to a property of the subject in question, it’s a reflection of one’s attitude toward the subject.

hmillison 6y ago

I built out a site using headless WP with Next.js as the frontend. With server side rendering of React, we still took advantage of caching the HTML in a CDN like you would with vanilla WP but it was much easier to build our own theme as desired with React. While configuring certain parts of Wordpress was tricky at times, especially because deploying it is at odds with the stateless nature of modern containerized infra. Particularly plug-in installation with WP cli requirng a DB connection which makes it tough to fully configure your installation at container build time. I still think it struck a balance between developer experience and a good experience for the content team.

dgb23 6y ago
Have you been using the preview feature of Next for this to allow for a fast feedback loop for content?
- hmillison 6y ago
  We didn't use it initially because the site was built before they launched that feature, but it definitely reduced some of the boilerplate that we had to write ourselves to wire up Next to WP. We had already setup a preview page that was wired up to the Wordpress Admin's Preview button that used the endpoint provided by WP to preview content in our UI.

StreamBright 6y ago

Nothing is stopping you from setting up a site in Hugo or something similar. I don't really understand why dynamic rendering or a huge amount of JS is required other than continue down the road of bloat.

mudlark 6y ago

They can just static dump a site, bar search, and most issues vanish.

antihero 6y ago

> different content/marketing teams, they hate it so much A refreshing change from them making everyone else's life hell then? :)

Zelphyr 6y ago

It’s true that Wordpress is very good at letting you modify content easily. That is, as you say, a major reason to use it. However. That assumes you are only needing to edit text with basic formatting (bold, underline, etc...) As soon as you get into anything more complex you pretty much have to understand HTML and CSS. I just ran into this with three different Wordpress installs. Two use Divi and the third uses WP Bakery. Those are really nice plugins and in 100% of the cases, the person using the site told me they don’t understand what’s going on and kept making a mess of something. I’m guessing that for The Whitehouse site they will mostly be doing minimal content editing. Then again, they have the resources to have a person who understands HTML and CSS manage the site when things get tricky. I’m not saying Wordpress is bad but it very quickly can become not as easy to use as most people make it out to be.

photomatt 6y ago
This is why we built Gutenberg, which is the new editor in WP that allows you to do rich layouts without using Divi or Bakery. Gutenberg is what the new White House site uses! You can do really advanced things with it.