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Every time there’s a WP post on HN, there’s the inevitable haters. The ones who say things like “just setup a static site with a CI pipeline”. The understanding

by dmje 5y ago

Every time there’s a WP post on HN, there’s the inevitable haters. The ones who say things like “just setup a static site with a CI pipeline”. The understanding of audience here is pretty bad. Your average business owner wants to focus on the important thing: their content. They want to type in a box and push publish. End. They don’t care about how crap (or not) the code is. They don’t care about performance too much. They do want to have the extensibility that is offered. They don’t want to get locked in (cough, Wix, Squarespace). The thing is, of course you can fk this up. Install Wordpress on crap hosting, install 100 plugins, fail to keep them updated - things are going to go badly. But now think about what happens if you do the same with literally any bit of software, even the hip jamstack stuff doing the rounds right now. There is good. There is bad. There are people who claim they “do Wordpress” when in fact they can just install plugins and a builder theme. There are people who do it well, with good deployment, repo management, backups, updates. But the end thing is always the same. Your site owners / editors just want something flexible where they can make content changes. They want familiar. They want flexible. There are times when Wordpress is the wrong solution. There are bad ways of doing it. But, really, you can’t argue with 40% of the web.

loloquwowndueo 5y ago
While I agree with this, careful with the “can’t argue with LARGE_PERCENTAGE of GROUP”. Windows is used by 95% of desktop computers and yet is really crap. Or - “eat crap - 75 billion flies can’t be wrong!”
- dmje 5y ago
  Yeh, sure - but two things come out of this "dominance". One: the enormous quantity of support online. Have a problem with littleknownbutcoolcms? You're stuffed. Have a problem with WP? 10 gazillion people have written about it. Then two: clients want it because it's familiar, they've used it before, they've got another site using it, etc etc. So yeh, I take your point, but it's the peripheral stuff that makes this important IMO.
- robjan 5y ago
  Windows is crap because of, not in spite of, it being used by 95% of people and therefore has to be compatible and backwards compatible with everything.
- dageshi 5y ago
  It's not crap, it's good enough. Like wordpress is good enough. That's really how life works, subject matter experts look for perfection while the average person is happy with good enough. Do you buy the best dishwasher or do you buy the good enough one?
- nolok 5y ago
  I actually quite like windows and use it on purpose on pretty much all of my computers, except my outdoor work laptop on debian/xfce. You're allowed to dislike it, but for me windows 10 is a great OS with a thin removable layer of crap sprayed on top, and more importantly it's just the right balance between osx and linux. To each his own, but you shouldn't be making such generalizations, especially in a message telling people not to make generalizations.
- johnnycerberus 5y ago
  Windows is crap compared to what? I've just switched recently to Windows 10 because I couldn't put up anymore with the lack of quality drivers for Ubuntu. Desktop Linux for me is a lost dream. Keep in mind that I was writing Vala apps not too long ago, I was that kind of a GNOME fan. For me, Linux is only a terminal, a deployment OS.
FriedrichN 5y ago
WordPress is awful, I have had the misfortune of having to write plugins and themes for it and having to immerse myself in the arcane knowledge of WP plugin writing (their docs are seriously crap, I have no idea if I did things 'the right way'). But! My company's website runs on WP nonetheless, mainly because I don't want to spend time on creating a website when I could work on our product. WP allows my less technical employees to tinker with the website and the marketing oriented folks to do whatever marketing oriented folks do. It runs conveniently on its own isolated VM where people can bikeshed it all day long. If your website is not your primary product, I don't see the point in writing your own stuff unless you got some leftover time you're willing to sacrifice to write it in.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I remember forking the social link plugin (#2 on wordpress plugin page), there was more dead code than code, it was magnificent
eloisant 5y ago
Your average business owner also wants his site not to be defaced, and security for Wordpress is pretty bad.
- bugmen0t 5y ago
  Why? It has auto updates for a long while now. Honestly, I've received auto update notification by emails more often before I see any blog posts or news article about the vulnerability itself. I agree it used to be worse, but this? This is awesome.
- LeonM 5y ago
  I think your comment just proved the OP's point. I've had customers using WP in the past, and defacement was just part of the routine. It's an annoyance for the business owner for sure, but so are personnel issues, finance, legislation changes, etc. For most businesses, there are more important issues than having a perfectly optimised and hardened website. WP, as bad as it is, is 'good enough' for most websites.
- dmje 5y ago
  That’s the trope. But it’s not true, provided you know what you’re doing, don’t use $50 a year hosting, don’t install a gazillion plugins, and keep stuff up to date. Which, as I say, is the same for Every Bit Of Software Ever. Like, consider this: your friends PC gets hacked and he loses everything. Turns out they were running ‘doze 95 and had failed to update or backup. Where is your sympathy? Right, you’re thinking “you’re a fool!”. And you’re right. They failed to look after their stuff, and it created a problem. Why is this any different with WordPress? Do it well, and the “security for Wordpress is pretty bad” trope just goes away.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    > it’s not true, provided you know what you’re doing, don’t use $50 a year hosting, don’t install a gazillion plugins, and keep stuff up to date. But... we started this thread with 'WordPress isn't for you, the alternative isn't a static site and a CI pipeline', so it's supposed to be for people who don't know what they're doing, often do use $50 a year hosting that comes with 'cPanel', keep installing different plugins until one kind of does what they want and then leave all the others, and never update anything until something breaks/they want something new and they start installing plugins again.
PinkPigeon 5y ago
I think WordPress is a fantastic piece of technology / achievement. Just like Windows is as well. And just like with Windows, as you say, the experience of the person setting up the system is what matters. So, of course there are some super easy to use, yet flexible, excellent and satisfying WordPress setups out there. And, for complicated, large sites, there is probably hardly anything that beats a good WordPress setup. But, then I look at my neighborhood and the 1,000 small-business WordPress sites, with blogs that have been abandoned in 2015, should be one-pagers and not seen an update since because their owners don't understand WordPress and also can't afford to pay someone for every small change and now they think the whole Internet is like that (40% as you say), and changing that is going to be one hell of an uphill battle. I don't have to hate WordPress or knock their efforts to see ways to improve things with more modern approaches.
- rambambram 5y ago
  I like your PinkPigeon website builder! Very nice with the visual themes and modularity. And the 'Special Thanks' document is a great idea, appreciative and humble. I'm missing a vertical scrollbar though (on Ubuntu Firefox). Edit: somewhere I can follow you, like Twitter or something?
  - PinkPigeon 5y ago
    Yup, Twitter: https://twitter.com/PinkPigeonDigi https://twitter.com/PinkPigeonDigi Or, if you send me a message via the contact form and tick 'submit', you can sign up to our newsletter at the same time. I'll split that out into a separate newsletter signup in the next few days. Thanks so much for the kind words, much appreciated!
- agumonkey 5y ago
  i'm not hating wp because good use of hate is scarce, but wp frailty is something even win95a is jealous of
- teh_klev 5y ago
  > But, then I look at my neighborhood and the 1,000 small-business WordPress sites, with blogs that have been abandoned in 2015,...etc That's not a failing of WordPress. That's: 1. A failure of how the business owner just couldn't be bothered. Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace, there's a fairly good chance they'd fail at all of these. They won't pay for the design, marketing etc etc, and the reason why? 2. their business doesn't need a website e.g. local plumber or the only game in town for a specific vertical. 3. They're on their local Facebook groups and don't need anything more. These folks also abandoned Yellow pages, Thomsons etc years ago but yet they survive through word of mouth. The internet and these other marketing services can't compete with that (especially outside certain confined bubbles). The local plumbing and heating guy in my area gets on fine without all the paraphernalia of "being on the web", as do all other trades. Not everyone needs a "website", especially if they've a well developed funnel of incoming business that, by now in 2021, they still get on ok without needing to be internetized. What does get these folks business without websites is other folks recommending them "on the internet", via local Facebook groups or whatever. Why would you waste time having a website when FB funnels the business to you, it's already job done.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>Every time there’s a WP post on HN, there’s the inevitable haters. The ones who say things like “just setup a static site with a CI pipeline”. The understanding of audience here is pretty bad. It's almost like HN has a large community of people who find setting up a static site simple and would find the technical constraints of WordPress offensive. People for whom WordPress is the wrong solution. So now the question is - what should those people say about WordPress? Obviously they have no reason to praise it, so they will damn it, if you say they should not damn it because it is not for them then this raises that old HN question - why is this here? It's here because it would be of interest to Hackers, but it seems hackers would be the people most likely to dislike it. It's here for the 15 minutes hate.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "It's here for the 15 minutes hate. " Most likely, but Hackers Spirit for me is also finding the right tool, for the right job. Meaning for me, I allmost use vanilla JS and html only, because that way everything is under my control behaving exactly like I want it. But I clearly see, that other people need a more convienient tool, to enable them to get things done, with their skillset. Why should I hate that? Oh, but about hate - I really do hate PHP, so I could probably chime in with the choir. But I know my hate comes from having to take over a half finished webproject, long ago, with badly written PHP and I was new to it. I never touched PHP ever since ... but I am aware, that other people get stuff done with it, so good for them.
  - mgkimsal 5y ago
    > with badly written PHP and I was new to it that's been a combination of my experiences with pretty much every other tech as well. I've done php, java, perl, python, javascript ruby, asp and poked at a small cold fusion project over the last 20+ years. Every one of those had baffling parts which, after some time, and after reviewing it with people far more proficient than me in that target stack, I learned it was "crap code". "Yeah, they didn't know what they were doing." "That's n00b code." "Garbage. How did they get hired?" I've also seen some good 'clean' projects in some languages, but not as many. I guess I can not, for the life of me, figure out how someone looks at some bad PHP projects and writes off the entire language, yet if I do the about Python, for example, I'm somehow close-minded, or a n00b, or... "just not ready for it yet" or... something. Have had conversations like this at tech conferences (back when those were a thing!). Seems like projection going on, but maybe there's something more. FWIW, it's often not specifically the language itself which is a stumbling block, but the entire ecosystem around a stack. If there's not a good, usable patterns and tools for easy testing, or integration between FE/BE, etc, I don't care how "tight" or "sleek" or "elegant" a specific language is; it's going to be a pain to deliver a full project with.
manigandham 5y ago
It's a fine product but it's obsolete in everything from tech to features. It's fine to say there are better options now when that's actually true. The comparable replacement for Wordpress isn't a static site but something like Ghost: https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
- Veen 5y ago
  Old and obsolete are not synonymous. WordPress will be obsolete when people no longer find it useful. There is little sign of that happening.
  - manigandham 5y ago
    Obsolete is not defined by people finding it useful. In fact I called it a fine product. But it is outdated and I offered a better alternative as an example of why Wordpress receives so many negative reactions at this point.
- the-dude 5y ago
  What is the suggested ecommerce play for Ghost? Are you aware WooCommerce is an ecosystem in itself?
- claudiulodro 5y ago
  Curious, when was the last time you used WordPress? The WordPress editor these days is a React SPA, and the new block editor is a leapfrog over traditional MS Word-style text editors.
corobo 5y ago
> “just setup a static site with a CI pipeline” Yeah I do do this.. for my personal site. If I did this for a client then they wouldn't be a client haha
- anto1984 5y ago
  Truer words.
dpwm 5y ago
As you rightly point out, WordPress has a sweet spot of providing control over content to the customer. The problem I see is that, in many instances, WP is pushed by dodgy developers running a template for what is a static site. This is easily the case for 90%+ of the small business sites I see. Many are never changed. WordPress is a much larger attack surface than static hosting. There are fairly obvious ways of automating using WordPress to generate a static site that will be faster and more secure. I believe this is generally referred to as headless WordPress. Why does this not happen more – or do I just not see it when it does?
- koonsolo 5y ago
  Did you ever do web development for customers? You build the website (10% of the work), and then the rest comes. "Can you put our holidays on the main page?", "Can you adapt this text?", "We have a new image of our main shop, can you update it?", ... I've seen plenty of people building a website for someone and thinking they made good money, but after all the requests that come afterwards, it's not worth the time.
  - herodoturtle 5y ago
    On the flip side, I've also seen Wordpress specialist consultancies grow large businesses out of this inevitable influx of change requests and the revenue that comes with it. These consultancies strike the right balance in terms of knowing their product, managing expectations, and knowing when to say "no". It's created lots of jobs in South Africa for what that's worth. Can't speak for other countries.
    - interestica 5y ago
      > It's created lots of jobs in South Africa for what that's worth. WooCommerce began as a plugin by a wordpress theme company in South Africa (WooThemes). And then they were aquired by WP/Automattic in ~2015. A really cool case of pivoting.
- jkoudys 5y ago
  Last two WP updates I did were essentially downloading the site with firefox's "save site as", running prettier on it, and setting up a basic netlify for what's now a static site. HN is quick to talk about "the right tool for the job" about WordPress, but WP also has great branding which often makes it the choice when it's _not_ the right tool. imho the best part of WP is the dashboard stuff, so headless WP is a good choice. It's also frequently hurt by PHP's heavy push on inheritance, which can be at-odds with what is actually a very good events-based architecture in WP. Sad part is that the very good events-based architecture is so overlooked, most people who have spent time developing in WP aren't even aware it has events.
creshal 5y ago
> Your average business owner wants to focus on the important thing: their content. They want to type in a box and push publish. End. They don’t care about how crap (or not) the code is. They don’t care about performance too much. They do want to have the extensibility that is offered. They don’t want to get locked in (cough, Wix, Squarespace). That's IMO just a wrong understanding of the average business owner. Wordpress is much more useful to web agencies with the necessary skill set to heavily customise it than to the average Joe SMB Owner. To them, Wordpress is just as much a black box as Wix or Squarespace is, and all the web agencies using Wordpress to make websites for that demographic modify it so much with so many mutually exclusive plugin pipelines that getting their website from one to another often involves a complete rewrite anyway, if you want meaningful changes done. And for a long time, it was just the cost of doing business. But now? Nowadays, Squarespace et al. are probably a much better fit for them. Effectively the same vendor lock in if you're not a web agency yourself, but with much less overhead involved.
- pembrook 5y ago
  I agree with both you and OP. That’s why I’ve completely changed my position on who should be using what tech to build sites. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. I now recommend clients three options, based on the type of business: 1) If they’re a local small business (eg. Restaurant, flower shop) or solo creative business like a photographer or videographer, just do Squarespace. Wordpress is way too complex for their needs and they will easily shoot themselves in the foot. 2) If it’s a Saas company, tech startup, design agency, or enterprise, I strongly strongly recommend Webflow for their marketing site even though they think they want JAMstack. When the marketing team starts pulling dev time to redesign parts of the site every week, they immediately will regret the JAMstack decision. 3) if it’s a media/content business, always go Wordpress. Their employees will already be familiar with it, and the collaborative editing and SEO experience cannot be beat for publishing content on a daily basis. Combine this with plugins for newsletters and social integrations and the extra hassle of Wordpress is worth it for them.
  - jaymzcampbell 5y ago
    We've recently switched out of Wordpress to Webflow and hit upon 3 snags that soured my opinion of it, though now we're "done" on it these are less of a big deal but I'd still probably have just stuck with WP with a reimagined and cleaned up theme/ACF for custom data: * Only one person can edit code at a time - this caused us to have to split who was doing what and we even ended up losing work when someone overwrote someone elses changes https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-39 https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-39 (this goes back to 2017) * Tracking changes in VCS easily (https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-381 https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-381) another from 2017, we tried out flowgater though in the end have just settled for exporting the code as is and then just committing it by hand. * A max limit of 10k characters (edit - as pointed out in comment, that's per file, I think IIRC we had all our JS in one single place which is how we hit this our side) in site code (https://forum.webflow.com/t/embed-html-10-000-characters/44399 https://forum.webflow.com/t/embed-html-10-000-characters/443...) - this caught us on doing some embedding, we worked around it in the end and not a massive deal but still felt a little annoying having to work around it.
mtberatwork 5y ago
> Every time there’s a WP post on HN, there’s the inevitable haters. To be fair, every time there is a WP post on HN, there is also always the inevitable comment complaining about the "haters" and to just think of the "business owners" tangent.
- akudha 5y ago
  And then there is comment (like yours) complaining about comments complaining about haters :P Then there is my comment - now it is like the movie inception :P It would be nice if we all just used those tools/software that works for us and simply ignore the rest.
azangru 5y ago
> There are people who do it well What are the best resources that describe how to "do it well" in Wordpress? I've made several attempts to google, but due to the enormous popularity of Wordpress, and the low technical level of most of the users, the signal-to-noise ratio is incredibly poor.
- rasso 5y ago
  Check out https://roots.io/ https://roots.io/
nr2x 5y ago
From an engineering perspective it is absolute garbage. There is practically no separation between View and controller layers, which is a big part of the reason otherwise simple cosmetic plugins are security and stability vectors.
- b0ner_t0ner 5y ago
  That's why a whole dev ecosystem on a modern stack exists: https://roots.io/ https://roots.io/
  - nr2x 5y ago
    At that point why not just make something properly designed to start with? At the end of the day, regardless of other usability and adoption merits, it’s just a really poorly designed architecture.
    - b0ner_t0ner 5y ago
      > At that point why not just make something properly designed to start with? Of course that would be ideal development-wise. Business-wise, I doubt most agencies or small teams are going to rewrite W3 Total Cache, Yoast, WooCommerce, Elementor, ACF, Gravity Forms and all the top popular plugins... not to mention all the battle-tested security options.
      - nr2x 5y ago
        This is classic sunken cost fallacy, the reason to stick with a platform shouldn't be it has the most bandaids covering deep, deep, problems and all the investment that has gone into bandaids can't be given up.
pkphilip 5y ago
My complaint about Wordpress is always about how frequently it gets attacked. I have had multiple wordpress websites hacked even after keeping them regularly updated and even after having special "security" plugins such as Wordfence installed, the application firewall installed etc. It puts too much of a burden on the site owner from a security perspective. Quite frankly, Wordpress leaks like a sieve. I wish this wasn't true because it is really one of the best/most accessible CMSs around. If they fix the security issues, it would just be wonderful.
- SadWebDeveloper 5y ago
  Stop using shady shared hosting companies, self-host everything and harden php/apache/mariadb deployment not just Wordpress. Wordpress is pretty secure but putting everything in a shared hosting with lax security like dreamhost or hostgator et al its asking for trouble.
  - bigth 5y ago
    I think that's the part most people overlook. I have many wordpress sites, some large, some small, and only 1 was ever hacked and it was on a shared host 10+ years ago. Today I have sites that I haven't updated in 5+ years, no hacks no problems. Good wp depends on good server config and good wp setup.
  - pkphilip 5y ago
    I am not using shared hosting. It was hosted on a Digital Ocean box using the recommended security updates, settings, file permissions etc and with as few plugins as I could get away with. I also had the "pro" version of Wordfence installed with active monitoring. Yet it was hacked.. multiple times.
Dah00n 5y ago
>really, you can’t argue with 40% of the web. This is because WordPress is the equivalent of PHP. Sure it can do the job but there's a very big BUT in there, always.
- splistud 5y ago
  There is no but. It can do the job period. And no, I don't use it either.
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    If you can see no BUT in WordPress or PHP I doubt you know much about them and their history (especially since you wrote you don't use them). There's a massive list to be written about their bad sides. Mind you I use PHP so this isn't coming from some hater BUT having used it in many versions I can definitely see many huge problems that mostly have not even been acknowledged until lately. As stated, it can do the job BUT.....
- FalconSensei 5y ago
  I used both Wordpress 'versions' - free on .com, self-hosted on Amazon. It's GREAT! The dashboard that gives you all information you want/need, how easy it is to edit posts and pages switching from desktop to mobile, having a widget on mobile to see visits, etc... The only reason I switched to Hugo is because I wanted custom domain + javascript (for adding some embeds that wordpress doesn't support by default), and I didn't want to pay 8 bucks (I think 10 CAD) for that on .com, and didn't want the hassle to host on Amazon anymore. But I surely miss being able to have all my drafts available everywhere, and publish with the click of a button. EDIT: I also miss that all other bloggers from my circle except another one, all use wordpress, and follow each other on the wordpress reader, and comment using wordpress comments. I'm likely missing a good chunk of views and comments because of that
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    I can totally understand where you are coming from but that doesn't mean I don't also see the big BUT there. I'm sure we can agree neither PHP or WP are perfect, especially historically.
jraph 5y ago
I have a few WordPress websites. Loading them is as fast as it can be thanks to a good caching plugin correctly set up, and this is what I care about. No JavaScript except for things that are faster with it. 100% on Page Speed tests. They are easy to maintain and people not into computers can post things. I'm attracted by static site generators essentially because I like the idea that no dynamic code is run when the website is visited, but WordPress almost gets you there after the first visit. Plus, you don't have to regenerate the whole website for each change, WordPress generates pages "lazily". So, maybe WordPress can be lighter in some cases than a statically generated website when considering everything if setup this way? It still requires a potentially stronger server than when everything is static.

by dmje 5y ago

loloquwowndueo 5y ago

While I agree with this, careful with the “can’t argue with LARGE_PERCENTAGE of GROUP”. Windows is used by 95% of desktop computers and yet is really crap. Or - “eat crap - 75 billion flies can’t be wrong!”

dmje 5y ago
Yeh, sure - but two things come out of this "dominance". One: the enormous quantity of support online. Have a problem with littleknownbutcoolcms? You're stuffed. Have a problem with WP? 10 gazillion people have written about it. Then two: clients want it because it's familiar, they've used it before, they've got another site using it, etc etc. So yeh, I take your point, but it's the peripheral stuff that makes this important IMO.
robjan 5y ago
Windows is crap because of, not in spite of, it being used by 95% of people and therefore has to be compatible and backwards compatible with everything.
dageshi 5y ago
It's not crap, it's good enough. Like wordpress is good enough. That's really how life works, subject matter experts look for perfection while the average person is happy with good enough. Do you buy the best dishwasher or do you buy the good enough one?
nolok 5y ago
I actually quite like windows and use it on purpose on pretty much all of my computers, except my outdoor work laptop on debian/xfce. You're allowed to dislike it, but for me windows 10 is a great OS with a thin removable layer of crap sprayed on top, and more importantly it's just the right balance between osx and linux. To each his own, but you shouldn't be making such generalizations, especially in a message telling people not to make generalizations.
johnnycerberus 5y ago
Windows is crap compared to what? I've just switched recently to Windows 10 because I couldn't put up anymore with the lack of quality drivers for Ubuntu. Desktop Linux for me is a lost dream. Keep in mind that I was writing Vala apps not too long ago, I was that kind of a GNOME fan. For me, Linux is only a terminal, a deployment OS.

FriedrichN 5y ago

WordPress is awful, I have had the misfortune of having to write plugins and themes for it and having to immerse myself in the arcane knowledge of WP plugin writing (their docs are seriously crap, I have no idea if I did things 'the right way'). But! My company's website runs on WP nonetheless, mainly because I don't want to spend time on creating a website when I could work on our product. WP allows my less technical employees to tinker with the website and the marketing oriented folks to do whatever marketing oriented folks do. It runs conveniently on its own isolated VM where people can bikeshed it all day long. If your website is not your primary product, I don't see the point in writing your own stuff unless you got some leftover time you're willing to sacrifice to write it in.

agumonkey 5y ago
I remember forking the social link plugin (#2 on wordpress plugin page), there was more dead code than code, it was magnificent

eloisant 5y ago

Your average business owner also wants his site not to be defaced, and security for Wordpress is pretty bad.

bugmen0t 5y ago
Why? It has auto updates for a long while now. Honestly, I've received auto update notification by emails more often before I see any blog posts or news article about the vulnerability itself. I agree it used to be worse, but this? This is awesome.
LeonM 5y ago
I think your comment just proved the OP's point. I've had customers using WP in the past, and defacement was just part of the routine. It's an annoyance for the business owner for sure, but so are personnel issues, finance, legislation changes, etc. For most businesses, there are more important issues than having a perfectly optimised and hardened website. WP, as bad as it is, is 'good enough' for most websites.
dmje 5y ago
That’s the trope. But it’s not true, provided you know what you’re doing, don’t use $50 a year hosting, don’t install a gazillion plugins, and keep stuff up to date. Which, as I say, is the same for Every Bit Of Software Ever. Like, consider this: your friends PC gets hacked and he loses everything. Turns out they were running ‘doze 95 and had failed to update or backup. Where is your sympathy? Right, you’re thinking “you’re a fool!”. And you’re right. They failed to look after their stuff, and it created a problem. Why is this any different with WordPress? Do it well, and the “security for Wordpress is pretty bad” trope just goes away.
- OJFord 5y ago
  > it’s not true, provided you know what you’re doing, don’t use $50 a year hosting, don’t install a gazillion plugins, and keep stuff up to date. But... we started this thread with 'WordPress isn't for you, the alternative isn't a static site and a CI pipeline', so it's supposed to be for people who don't know what they're doing, often do use $50 a year hosting that comes with 'cPanel', keep installing different plugins until one kind of does what they want and then leave all the others, and never update anything until something breaks/they want something new and they start installing plugins again.

PinkPigeon 5y ago

I think WordPress is a fantastic piece of technology / achievement. Just like Windows is as well. And just like with Windows, as you say, the experience of the person setting up the system is what matters. So, of course there are some super easy to use, yet flexible, excellent and satisfying WordPress setups out there. And, for complicated, large sites, there is probably hardly anything that beats a good WordPress setup. But, then I look at my neighborhood and the 1,000 small-business WordPress sites, with blogs that have been abandoned in 2015, should be one-pagers and not seen an update since because their owners don't understand WordPress and also can't afford to pay someone for every small change and now they think the whole Internet is like that (40% as you say), and changing that is going to be one hell of an uphill battle. I don't have to hate WordPress or knock their efforts to see ways to improve things with more modern approaches.

rambambram 5y ago
I like your PinkPigeon website builder! Very nice with the visual themes and modularity. And the 'Special Thanks' document is a great idea, appreciative and humble. I'm missing a vertical scrollbar though (on Ubuntu Firefox). Edit: somewhere I can follow you, like Twitter or something?
- PinkPigeon 5y ago
  Yup, Twitter: https://twitter.com/PinkPigeonDigi https://twitter.com/PinkPigeonDigi Or, if you send me a message via the contact form and tick 'submit', you can sign up to our newsletter at the same time. I'll split that out into a separate newsletter signup in the next few days. Thanks so much for the kind words, much appreciated!
agumonkey 5y ago
i'm not hating wp because good use of hate is scarce, but wp frailty is something even win95a is jealous of
teh_klev 5y ago
> But, then I look at my neighborhood and the 1,000 small-business WordPress sites, with blogs that have been abandoned in 2015,...etc That's not a failing of WordPress. That's: 1. A failure of how the business owner just couldn't be bothered. Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace, there's a fairly good chance they'd fail at all of these. They won't pay for the design, marketing etc etc, and the reason why? 2. their business doesn't need a website e.g. local plumber or the only game in town for a specific vertical. 3. They're on their local Facebook groups and don't need anything more. These folks also abandoned Yellow pages, Thomsons etc years ago but yet they survive through word of mouth. The internet and these other marketing services can't compete with that (especially outside certain confined bubbles). The local plumbing and heating guy in my area gets on fine without all the paraphernalia of "being on the web", as do all other trades. Not everyone needs a "website", especially if they've a well developed funnel of incoming business that, by now in 2021, they still get on ok without needing to be internetized. What does get these folks business without websites is other folks recommending them "on the internet", via local Facebook groups or whatever. Why would you waste time having a website when FB funnels the business to you, it's already job done.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

>Every time there’s a WP post on HN, there’s the inevitable haters. The ones who say things like “just setup a static site with a CI pipeline”. The understanding of audience here is pretty bad. It's almost like HN has a large community of people who find setting up a static site simple and would find the technical constraints of WordPress offensive. People for whom WordPress is the wrong solution. So now the question is - what should those people say about WordPress? Obviously they have no reason to praise it, so they will damn it, if you say they should not damn it because it is not for them then this raises that old HN question - why is this here? It's here because it would be of interest to Hackers, but it seems hackers would be the people most likely to dislike it. It's here for the 15 minutes hate.

hutzlibu 5y ago
"It's here for the 15 minutes hate. " Most likely, but Hackers Spirit for me is also finding the right tool, for the right job. Meaning for me, I allmost use vanilla JS and html only, because that way everything is under my control behaving exactly like I want it. But I clearly see, that other people need a more convienient tool, to enable them to get things done, with their skillset. Why should I hate that? Oh, but about hate - I really do hate PHP, so I could probably chime in with the choir. But I know my hate comes from having to take over a half finished webproject, long ago, with badly written PHP and I was new to it. I never touched PHP ever since ... but I am aware, that other people get stuff done with it, so good for them.
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  > with badly written PHP and I was new to it that's been a combination of my experiences with pretty much every other tech as well. I've done php, java, perl, python, javascript ruby, asp and poked at a small cold fusion project over the last 20+ years. Every one of those had baffling parts which, after some time, and after reviewing it with people far more proficient than me in that target stack, I learned it was "crap code". "Yeah, they didn't know what they were doing." "That's n00b code." "Garbage. How did they get hired?" I've also seen some good 'clean' projects in some languages, but not as many. I guess I can not, for the life of me, figure out how someone looks at some bad PHP projects and writes off the entire language, yet if I do the about Python, for example, I'm somehow close-minded, or a n00b, or... "just not ready for it yet" or... something. Have had conversations like this at tech conferences (back when those were a thing!). Seems like projection going on, but maybe there's something more. FWIW, it's often not specifically the language itself which is a stumbling block, but the entire ecosystem around a stack. If there's not a good, usable patterns and tools for easy testing, or integration between FE/BE, etc, I don't care how "tight" or "sleek" or "elegant" a specific language is; it's going to be a pain to deliver a full project with.

manigandham 5y ago

It's a fine product but it's obsolete in everything from tech to features. It's fine to say there are better options now when that's actually true. The comparable replacement for Wordpress isn't a static site but something like Ghost: https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/

Veen 5y ago
Old and obsolete are not synonymous. WordPress will be obsolete when people no longer find it useful. There is little sign of that happening.
- manigandham 5y ago
  Obsolete is not defined by people finding it useful. In fact I called it a fine product. But it is outdated and I offered a better alternative as an example of why Wordpress receives so many negative reactions at this point.
the-dude 5y ago
What is the suggested ecommerce play for Ghost? Are you aware WooCommerce is an ecosystem in itself?
claudiulodro 5y ago
Curious, when was the last time you used WordPress? The WordPress editor these days is a React SPA, and the new block editor is a leapfrog over traditional MS Word-style text editors.

corobo 5y ago

> “just setup a static site with a CI pipeline” Yeah I do do this.. for my personal site. If I did this for a client then they wouldn't be a client haha

anto1984 5y ago
Truer words.

dpwm 5y ago

As you rightly point out, WordPress has a sweet spot of providing control over content to the customer. The problem I see is that, in many instances, WP is pushed by dodgy developers running a template for what is a static site. This is easily the case for 90%+ of the small business sites I see. Many are never changed. WordPress is a much larger attack surface than static hosting. There are fairly obvious ways of automating using WordPress to generate a static site that will be faster and more secure. I believe this is generally referred to as headless WordPress. Why does this not happen more – or do I just not see it when it does?

koonsolo 5y ago
Did you ever do web development for customers? You build the website (10% of the work), and then the rest comes. "Can you put our holidays on the main page?", "Can you adapt this text?", "We have a new image of our main shop, can you update it?", ... I've seen plenty of people building a website for someone and thinking they made good money, but after all the requests that come afterwards, it's not worth the time.
- herodoturtle 5y ago
  On the flip side, I've also seen Wordpress specialist consultancies grow large businesses out of this inevitable influx of change requests and the revenue that comes with it. These consultancies strike the right balance in terms of knowing their product, managing expectations, and knowing when to say "no". It's created lots of jobs in South Africa for what that's worth. Can't speak for other countries.
  - interestica 5y ago
    > It's created lots of jobs in South Africa for what that's worth. WooCommerce began as a plugin by a wordpress theme company in South Africa (WooThemes). And then they were aquired by WP/Automattic in ~2015. A really cool case of pivoting.
jkoudys 5y ago
Last two WP updates I did were essentially downloading the site with firefox's "save site as", running prettier on it, and setting up a basic netlify for what's now a static site. HN is quick to talk about "the right tool for the job" about WordPress, but WP also has great branding which often makes it the choice when it's _not_ the right tool. imho the best part of WP is the dashboard stuff, so headless WP is a good choice. It's also frequently hurt by PHP's heavy push on inheritance, which can be at-odds with what is actually a very good events-based architecture in WP. Sad part is that the very good events-based architecture is so overlooked, most people who have spent time developing in WP aren't even aware it has events.

creshal 5y ago

> Your average business owner wants to focus on the important thing: their content. They want to type in a box and push publish. End. They don’t care about how crap (or not) the code is. They don’t care about performance too much. They do want to have the extensibility that is offered. They don’t want to get locked in (cough, Wix, Squarespace). That's IMO just a wrong understanding of the average business owner. Wordpress is much more useful to web agencies with the necessary skill set to heavily customise it than to the average Joe SMB Owner. To them, Wordpress is just as much a black box as Wix or Squarespace is, and all the web agencies using Wordpress to make websites for that demographic modify it so much with so many mutually exclusive plugin pipelines that getting their website from one to another often involves a complete rewrite anyway, if you want meaningful changes done. And for a long time, it was just the cost of doing business. But now? Nowadays, Squarespace et al. are probably a much better fit for them. Effectively the same vendor lock in if you're not a web agency yourself, but with much less overhead involved.

pembrook 5y ago
I agree with both you and OP. That’s why I’ve completely changed my position on who should be using what tech to build sites. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. I now recommend clients three options, based on the type of business: 1) If they’re a local small business (eg. Restaurant, flower shop) or solo creative business like a photographer or videographer, just do Squarespace. Wordpress is way too complex for their needs and they will easily shoot themselves in the foot. 2) If it’s a Saas company, tech startup, design agency, or enterprise, I strongly strongly recommend Webflow for their marketing site even though they think they want JAMstack. When the marketing team starts pulling dev time to redesign parts of the site every week, they immediately will regret the JAMstack decision. 3) if it’s a media/content business, always go Wordpress. Their employees will already be familiar with it, and the collaborative editing and SEO experience cannot be beat for publishing content on a daily basis. Combine this with plugins for newsletters and social integrations and the extra hassle of Wordpress is worth it for them.
- jaymzcampbell 5y ago
  We've recently switched out of Wordpress to Webflow and hit upon 3 snags that soured my opinion of it, though now we're "done" on it these are less of a big deal but I'd still probably have just stuck with WP with a reimagined and cleaned up theme/ACF for custom data: * Only one person can edit code at a time - this caused us to have to split who was doing what and we even ended up losing work when someone overwrote someone elses changes https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-39 https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-39 (this goes back to 2017) * Tracking changes in VCS easily (https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-381 https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-381) another from 2017, we tried out flowgater though in the end have just settled for exporting the code as is and then just committing it by hand. * A max limit of 10k characters (edit - as pointed out in comment, that's per file, I think IIRC we had all our JS in one single place which is how we hit this our side) in site code (https://forum.webflow.com/t/embed-html-10-000-characters/44399 https://forum.webflow.com/t/embed-html-10-000-characters/443...) - this caught us on doing some embedding, we worked around it in the end and not a massive deal but still felt a little annoying having to work around it.

mtberatwork 5y ago

> Every time there’s a WP post on HN, there’s the inevitable haters. To be fair, every time there is a WP post on HN, there is also always the inevitable comment complaining about the "haters" and to just think of the "business owners" tangent.

akudha 5y ago
And then there is comment (like yours) complaining about comments complaining about haters :P Then there is my comment - now it is like the movie inception :P It would be nice if we all just used those tools/software that works for us and simply ignore the rest.

azangru 5y ago

> There are people who do it well What are the best resources that describe how to "do it well" in Wordpress? I've made several attempts to google, but due to the enormous popularity of Wordpress, and the low technical level of most of the users, the signal-to-noise ratio is incredibly poor.

rasso 5y ago
Check out https://roots.io/ https://roots.io/

nr2x 5y ago

From an engineering perspective it is absolute garbage. There is practically no separation between View and controller layers, which is a big part of the reason otherwise simple cosmetic plugins are security and stability vectors.

b0ner_t0ner 5y ago
That's why a whole dev ecosystem on a modern stack exists: https://roots.io/ https://roots.io/
- nr2x 5y ago
  At that point why not just make something properly designed to start with? At the end of the day, regardless of other usability and adoption merits, it’s just a really poorly designed architecture.
  - b0ner_t0ner 5y ago
    > At that point why not just make something properly designed to start with? Of course that would be ideal development-wise. Business-wise, I doubt most agencies or small teams are going to rewrite W3 Total Cache, Yoast, WooCommerce, Elementor, ACF, Gravity Forms and all the top popular plugins... not to mention all the battle-tested security options.
    - nr2x 5y ago
      This is classic sunken cost fallacy, the reason to stick with a platform shouldn't be it has the most bandaids covering deep, deep, problems and all the investment that has gone into bandaids can't be given up.

pkphilip 5y ago

My complaint about Wordpress is always about how frequently it gets attacked. I have had multiple wordpress websites hacked even after keeping them regularly updated and even after having special "security" plugins such as Wordfence installed, the application firewall installed etc. It puts too much of a burden on the site owner from a security perspective. Quite frankly, Wordpress leaks like a sieve. I wish this wasn't true because it is really one of the best/most accessible CMSs around. If they fix the security issues, it would just be wonderful.

SadWebDeveloper 5y ago
Stop using shady shared hosting companies, self-host everything and harden php/apache/mariadb deployment not just Wordpress. Wordpress is pretty secure but putting everything in a shared hosting with lax security like dreamhost or hostgator et al its asking for trouble.
- bigth 5y ago
  I think that's the part most people overlook. I have many wordpress sites, some large, some small, and only 1 was ever hacked and it was on a shared host 10+ years ago. Today I have sites that I haven't updated in 5+ years, no hacks no problems. Good wp depends on good server config and good wp setup.
- pkphilip 5y ago
  I am not using shared hosting. It was hosted on a Digital Ocean box using the recommended security updates, settings, file permissions etc and with as few plugins as I could get away with. I also had the "pro" version of Wordfence installed with active monitoring. Yet it was hacked.. multiple times.

Dah00n 5y ago

>really, you can’t argue with 40% of the web. This is because WordPress is the equivalent of PHP. Sure it can do the job but there's a very big BUT in there, always.

splistud 5y ago
There is no but. It can do the job period. And no, I don't use it either.
- Dah00n 5y ago
  If you can see no BUT in WordPress or PHP I doubt you know much about them and their history (especially since you wrote you don't use them). There's a massive list to be written about their bad sides. Mind you I use PHP so this isn't coming from some hater BUT having used it in many versions I can definitely see many huge problems that mostly have not even been acknowledged until lately. As stated, it can do the job BUT.....
FalconSensei 5y ago
I used both Wordpress 'versions' - free on .com, self-hosted on Amazon. It's GREAT! The dashboard that gives you all information you want/need, how easy it is to edit posts and pages switching from desktop to mobile, having a widget on mobile to see visits, etc... The only reason I switched to Hugo is because I wanted custom domain + javascript (for adding some embeds that wordpress doesn't support by default), and I didn't want to pay 8 bucks (I think 10 CAD) for that on .com, and didn't want the hassle to host on Amazon anymore. But I surely miss being able to have all my drafts available everywhere, and publish with the click of a button. EDIT: I also miss that all other bloggers from my circle except another one, all use wordpress, and follow each other on the wordpress reader, and comment using wordpress comments. I'm likely missing a good chunk of views and comments because of that
- Dah00n 5y ago
  I can totally understand where you are coming from but that doesn't mean I don't also see the big BUT there. I'm sure we can agree neither PHP or WP are perfect, especially historically.

jraph 5y ago

I have a few WordPress websites. Loading them is as fast as it can be thanks to a good caching plugin correctly set up, and this is what I care about. No JavaScript except for things that are faster with it. 100% on Page Speed tests. They are easy to maintain and people not into computers can post things. I'm attracted by static site generators essentially because I like the idea that no dynamic code is run when the website is visited, but WordPress almost gets you there after the first visit. Plus, you don't have to regenerate the whole website for each change, WordPress generates pages "lazily". So, maybe WordPress can be lighter in some cases than a statically generated website when considering everything if setup this way? It still requires a potentially stronger server than when everything is static.