9 ms·

WordPress is like Craigslist in that software engineers hate it, but everyone else happily uses it, and both are thriving businesses providing a sustainable liv

WordPress is like Craigslist in that software engineers hate it, but everyone else happily uses it, and both are thriving businesses providing a sustainable livelihood to their employees and owners instead of trying to take over the world. You should be so lucky to invent something as well-loved and as useful as WordPress, and to stick to your principles for as long as Matt has.

musicnotwords 5y ago
The headaches are simply not worth it. No designer should be using WordPress for client websites in the age of squarespace/wix. It is just irresponsible to build something for a client that is going to break itself within 1-2 years max.
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  It completely depends. I think building a site on Squarespace/Wix can very easily be considered irresponsible. edit: For Wordpress only install reputable, necessary plugins. Turn on auto-update. Keep backups. Things should be just fine. Now you aren't locked into a single platform and you can extend your website as much as needed (unlike Squarespace/Wix which severely limit what you can do).
  - Hard_Space 5y ago
    > Turn on auto-update Having been paid quite well to migrate to and from WordPress, and to help maintain the WP sites of major publishers, I have to say that this is questionable advice. In most cases in my experience, the publisher has employed third-party providers (at huge cost) to develop frameworks and custom plugins that can easily be broken by automatic updates. Updates need evaluation and testing in staging sites before they can be rolled out. For publishers, the first install of WP is free - everything after that costs plenty.
    - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
      Like you said, "major publishers" will have those problems due to custom code. Not the sort of websites where Wix or Squarespace would have ever even entered the conversation. You need to keep context in mind.
      - Hard_Space 5y ago
        And not so major publishers, including hundreds, if not thousands in the top 10,000 sites. So it isn't just the Washington Post, et al. This is why I intervene on generalized advice to enable auto-updates on WordPress. I have seen it cause publishers a ton of money, and have lost a number of weekends when called in to perform damage limitation. 'Make sure you keep everything updated!' has a ton of caveats and pitfalls, that's just the reality.
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    How do you know if a plug-in is reputable without being neck deep in the ecosystem for a year talking to other devs?
    - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
      I just make sure the install count is something high (if it is lower than say 100k, then probably there is a better plugin out there to do the job) and it has been updated in the past couple months, and it is compatible with the latest version of Wordpress. All that info is directly visible while you are searching for plugins within Wordpress itself on the search page itself. And typically I'll also do a Google search for whatever problem I'm trying to solve and make sure it's recommended by at least two people. Btw, I'm a senior full stack software engineer. But for my digital media business I operate several Wordpress websites. I don't talk to any Wordpress devs and do any custom Wordpress theme or plugin development (aside from what is available in the GUI and extremely minor CSS tweaks).
      - gentleman11 5y ago
        Download count and reviews aren’t necessarily trustworthy though. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/using-fake-reviews-to-find-dangerous-extensions/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/using-fake-reviews-to-fi...
- ghego1 5y ago
  WordPress is an open source project, immensely supported, fully customizable to it's core and that let's you port your website to virtually any hosting service out there, that let's you export all your data however and wherever you want. Wix and alikes are proprietary software, that lock in users on their services, have limited customization options, don't allow you to edit code and have little to no export options. Whoever pays someone else to have it's website built on wix or alikes is getting a very bad deal, due to the above mentioned restrictions (compared to WP) they'll end up very dissatisfied in few years if things go well (meaning more traffic and more needs). Source: experience. As a developer I feel the frustration coding for WP, but at the same time it's the best compromise to provide a CMS that the average user can manage
  - lmm 5y ago
    Scaling is famously a good problem to have. Unmaintained wordpress instances are the internet equivalent of toxic waste dumped in the river. I agree that open standards are important, but IMO it's irresponsible to leave someone with a website hosting setup that doesn't have a qualified person responsible for ongoing maintenance. (Fully managed wordpress hosting from a reputable, established company is one possible answer, of course).
    - mavhc 5y ago
      Is it impossible to make a secure CMS? I'd think step 1 would be to not have the admin stuff with the same access as the public website, and step 2 would be to have a way to sandbox plugins, but are those things possible?
      - lmm 5y ago
        Step 1 is possible nowadays (with SNI) but was hard until recently, and I don't think practices have really caught up with that yet. Step 2 is difficult to even define properly. What is a plugin supposed to be able to do, and what is a plugin supposed to not be able to do? If you can answer that question precisely, then you can solve the problem, but if you can answer that question precisely then you probably don't need plugins in the first place.
- allenbrunson 5y ago
  i am going to strongly agree. i set up my first real blog over a decade ago. i picked wordpress, because that seems to be the default, and i didn't know any better. oh my god, i hated maintaining that thing so, so much. it pretty much killed my desire to blog, as a matter of fact. i recently started another blog, and this time i used a static site generator. i wouldn't recommend such a thing for non-technical people, but if you are willing to get your hands a little bit dirty, it is a hell of a lot easier to fix than wordpress ever was.
- dmje 5y ago
  That’s a pretty bad comparison. The entire reason WP is a better solution than SS and Wix is it’s extensibility, data portability and usability. Plus: what headaches? Do it well, keep it updated ( uh, yeh, like literally ALL the software, ever ) and it’ll work flawlessly for years.
  - musicnotwords 5y ago
    Who is paying me to keep their site updated?
PinkPigeon 5y ago
It's so interesting to see just how successful WordPress is. Among developers especially. I look at small business websites all around where I live and it's all WordPress and every single one was made by yet another wordpress-shop that does nothing but setup WordPress for people. It's a huge ecosystem. And you know what I have learned by talking to these businesses? It's that WordPress is still not easy enough to use for non techy people. Nobody wants to touch their website, out of fear of doing something wrong. So they have to go pay someone to do it every time. I'm running pinkpigeon.co.uk, which tries to actually make websites easy enough to use for everyone. But I am actually running into a problem where people expect all websites to be like WordPress and the first thing you hear is "oh I don't want to learn another thing". It's only when I show them the system, that they go "oh wow, that really is a lot easier". The problem is trying to convince anyone of this remotely via the Internet. Much easier to do in person. I have the utmost respect for WordPress and used it much myself, but at the moment it's challenging to have to be compared against it when simpler solutions exist.
- friendzis 5y ago
  What baffles me is that huge portion of those small business websites have absolutely no need for Wordpress or any backend altogether. At best they need some static site generator and a CI/CD pipeline maintained by the provider to rebuild the site if it is an actual blog, which is not that common.
  - pgsimp 5y ago
    How are the small businesses supposed to update their websites, if there is no backend? You can't expect them to write HTML. Not sure if suitable WYIWYG editors are still around, or if Word exports to HTML have become usable.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      " or if Word exports to HTML have become usable" I doubt there is beauty to be found. And websites are a lot about beauty.
    - 5y ago
ngold 5y ago
And here I am, making a website with an image and boxes around links.
unixhero 5y ago
I can attest to that the fundamentals of Wordpress are truly awful. Will never return and can not recommend it for anything business related. It is a damned fine blog software though.
- adflux 5y ago
  Define business though, most business do fine with wordpress alone. Then there's woocommerce with about a 20% market share iirc...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
codingclaws 5y ago
I hate WordPress because it has bad DX. But why would I hate CL, it's a simple, useful site with minimal JS.
- zapt02 5y ago
  What do you find bad about WordPress DX in particular?
  - codingclaws 5y ago
    I have not worked with it recently. I recall needing to rewrite a URL and it not being possible with .htaccess - which would have taken a couple minutes. Instead I had to learn the WordPress URL rewrite system.
JeremyNT 5y ago
> WordPress is like Craigslist in that software engineers hate it, but everyone else happily uses it Why would a software engineer hate Craigslist? It's one of the most streamlined, responsive web sites I interact with on a regular basis. No third party scripts. It's built to purpose and it works very well without any fuss. I suppose I have some minor gripes - with noscript it looks awful and they killed off their RSS feeds a while back. But hardly enough to inspire hate!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
okprod 5y ago
and to stick to your principles for as long as Matt has. Technically he subtly shifted from supporting free software to open source. Just pointing that out, not making a big deal about terminology or anything as WP is still GPL'ed.
baby 5y ago
I’m an engineer and I always recommend people to use wordpress if they want to blog.

musicnotwords 5y ago

The headaches are simply not worth it. No designer should be using WordPress for client websites in the age of squarespace/wix. It is just irresponsible to build something for a client that is going to break itself within 1-2 years max.

weird-eye-issue 5y ago
It completely depends. I think building a site on Squarespace/Wix can very easily be considered irresponsible. edit: For Wordpress only install reputable, necessary plugins. Turn on auto-update. Keep backups. Things should be just fine. Now you aren't locked into a single platform and you can extend your website as much as needed (unlike Squarespace/Wix which severely limit what you can do).
- Hard_Space 5y ago
  > Turn on auto-update Having been paid quite well to migrate to and from WordPress, and to help maintain the WP sites of major publishers, I have to say that this is questionable advice. In most cases in my experience, the publisher has employed third-party providers (at huge cost) to develop frameworks and custom plugins that can easily be broken by automatic updates. Updates need evaluation and testing in staging sites before they can be rolled out. For publishers, the first install of WP is free - everything after that costs plenty.
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    Like you said, "major publishers" will have those problems due to custom code. Not the sort of websites where Wix or Squarespace would have ever even entered the conversation. You need to keep context in mind.
    - Hard_Space 5y ago
      And not so major publishers, including hundreds, if not thousands in the top 10,000 sites. So it isn't just the Washington Post, et al. This is why I intervene on generalized advice to enable auto-updates on WordPress. I have seen it cause publishers a ton of money, and have lost a number of weekends when called in to perform damage limitation. 'Make sure you keep everything updated!' has a ton of caveats and pitfalls, that's just the reality.
- gentleman11 5y ago
  How do you know if a plug-in is reputable without being neck deep in the ecosystem for a year talking to other devs?
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    I just make sure the install count is something high (if it is lower than say 100k, then probably there is a better plugin out there to do the job) and it has been updated in the past couple months, and it is compatible with the latest version of Wordpress. All that info is directly visible while you are searching for plugins within Wordpress itself on the search page itself. And typically I'll also do a Google search for whatever problem I'm trying to solve and make sure it's recommended by at least two people. Btw, I'm a senior full stack software engineer. But for my digital media business I operate several Wordpress websites. I don't talk to any Wordpress devs and do any custom Wordpress theme or plugin development (aside from what is available in the GUI and extremely minor CSS tweaks).
    - gentleman11 5y ago
      Download count and reviews aren’t necessarily trustworthy though. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/using-fake-reviews-to-find-dangerous-extensions/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/using-fake-reviews-to-fi...
ghego1 5y ago
WordPress is an open source project, immensely supported, fully customizable to it's core and that let's you port your website to virtually any hosting service out there, that let's you export all your data however and wherever you want. Wix and alikes are proprietary software, that lock in users on their services, have limited customization options, don't allow you to edit code and have little to no export options. Whoever pays someone else to have it's website built on wix or alikes is getting a very bad deal, due to the above mentioned restrictions (compared to WP) they'll end up very dissatisfied in few years if things go well (meaning more traffic and more needs). Source: experience. As a developer I feel the frustration coding for WP, but at the same time it's the best compromise to provide a CMS that the average user can manage
- lmm 5y ago
  Scaling is famously a good problem to have. Unmaintained wordpress instances are the internet equivalent of toxic waste dumped in the river. I agree that open standards are important, but IMO it's irresponsible to leave someone with a website hosting setup that doesn't have a qualified person responsible for ongoing maintenance. (Fully managed wordpress hosting from a reputable, established company is one possible answer, of course).
  - mavhc 5y ago
    Is it impossible to make a secure CMS? I'd think step 1 would be to not have the admin stuff with the same access as the public website, and step 2 would be to have a way to sandbox plugins, but are those things possible?
    - lmm 5y ago
      Step 1 is possible nowadays (with SNI) but was hard until recently, and I don't think practices have really caught up with that yet. Step 2 is difficult to even define properly. What is a plugin supposed to be able to do, and what is a plugin supposed to not be able to do? If you can answer that question precisely, then you can solve the problem, but if you can answer that question precisely then you probably don't need plugins in the first place.
allenbrunson 5y ago
i am going to strongly agree. i set up my first real blog over a decade ago. i picked wordpress, because that seems to be the default, and i didn't know any better. oh my god, i hated maintaining that thing so, so much. it pretty much killed my desire to blog, as a matter of fact. i recently started another blog, and this time i used a static site generator. i wouldn't recommend such a thing for non-technical people, but if you are willing to get your hands a little bit dirty, it is a hell of a lot easier to fix than wordpress ever was.
dmje 5y ago
That’s a pretty bad comparison. The entire reason WP is a better solution than SS and Wix is it’s extensibility, data portability and usability. Plus: what headaches? Do it well, keep it updated ( uh, yeh, like literally ALL the software, ever ) and it’ll work flawlessly for years.
- musicnotwords 5y ago
  Who is paying me to keep their site updated?

PinkPigeon 5y ago

It's so interesting to see just how successful WordPress is. Among developers especially. I look at small business websites all around where I live and it's all WordPress and every single one was made by yet another wordpress-shop that does nothing but setup WordPress for people. It's a huge ecosystem. And you know what I have learned by talking to these businesses? It's that WordPress is still not easy enough to use for non techy people. Nobody wants to touch their website, out of fear of doing something wrong. So they have to go pay someone to do it every time. I'm running pinkpigeon.co.uk, which tries to actually make websites easy enough to use for everyone. But I am actually running into a problem where people expect all websites to be like WordPress and the first thing you hear is "oh I don't want to learn another thing". It's only when I show them the system, that they go "oh wow, that really is a lot easier". The problem is trying to convince anyone of this remotely via the Internet. Much easier to do in person. I have the utmost respect for WordPress and used it much myself, but at the moment it's challenging to have to be compared against it when simpler solutions exist.

friendzis 5y ago
What baffles me is that huge portion of those small business websites have absolutely no need for Wordpress or any backend altogether. At best they need some static site generator and a CI/CD pipeline maintained by the provider to rebuild the site if it is an actual blog, which is not that common.
- pgsimp 5y ago
  How are the small businesses supposed to update their websites, if there is no backend? You can't expect them to write HTML. Not sure if suitable WYIWYG editors are still around, or if Word exports to HTML have become usable.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    " or if Word exports to HTML have become usable" I doubt there is beauty to be found. And websites are a lot about beauty.
  - 5y ago

ngold 5y ago

And here I am, making a website with an image and boxes around links.

unixhero 5y ago

I can attest to that the fundamentals of Wordpress are truly awful. Will never return and can not recommend it for anything business related. It is a damned fine blog software though.

adflux 5y ago
Define business though, most business do fine with wordpress alone. Then there's woocommerce with about a 20% market share iirc...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

codingclaws 5y ago

I hate WordPress because it has bad DX. But why would I hate CL, it's a simple, useful site with minimal JS.

zapt02 5y ago
What do you find bad about WordPress DX in particular?
- codingclaws 5y ago
  I have not worked with it recently. I recall needing to rewrite a URL and it not being possible with .htaccess - which would have taken a couple minutes. Instead I had to learn the WordPress URL rewrite system.

JeremyNT 5y ago

> WordPress is like Craigslist in that software engineers hate it, but everyone else happily uses it Why would a software engineer hate Craigslist? It's one of the most streamlined, responsive web sites I interact with on a regular basis. No third party scripts. It's built to purpose and it works very well without any fuss. I suppose I have some minor gripes - with noscript it looks awful and they killed off their RSS feeds a while back. But hardly enough to inspire hate!

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

okprod 5y ago

and to stick to your principles for as long as Matt has. Technically he subtly shifted from supporting free software to open source. Just pointing that out, not making a big deal about terminology or anything as WP is still GPL'ed.

baby 5y ago

I’m an engineer and I always recommend people to use wordpress if they want to blog.