21 ms·

The complicated futility of WordPress

251 points by ddevine 5y ago

cmsguy2000 5y ago
The blog author complains about the loss of control over the editing experience with the recent changes to WordPress. Personally I found Drupal to be a much better system for their use case, to provide client 'content editing' that does not disrupt the front end design (allowing user to edit content but limit novice users changing styles or branding). Drupal has got quite a lot better over the past few years but gets overlooked as it has a bigger learning curve.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  But funny enough, Drupal has also adopted Gutenberg. https://www.drupal.org/project/gutenberg https://www.drupal.org/project/gutenberg
  - calibas 5y ago
    That's kind of misleading, it's like saying Drupal has adopted NFTs because someone created this module: https://www.drupal.org/project/nft https://www.drupal.org/project/nft Anybody can create any kind of module for Drupal, but in the case of the Gutenberg and NFT modules, only a small minority of sites are actually using them.
anon23anon 5y ago
I was recently doing some electrical work on my house. The past owner had really jacked things up. I couldn't figure out and had to call an electrician. I'd imagine the majority of their work is DIY'ers who've f'ed up and had to call a pro. To me that's what going to happen here - marketing will continually screw and tinker w/ shit till it's broke and then they'll call you to fix it. I also want to add this is a good example of why marketing should probably just be using tools like Insta, Twitter, FB etc to get their message out. Now if you actually have a good company blog w/ good resources than that's different but I think that's more the exception than the norm.
- openknot 5y ago
  >I also want to add this is a good example of why marketing should probably just be using tools like Insta, Twitter, FB etc to get their message out. Now if you actually have a good company blog w/ good resources than that's different but I think that's more the exception than the norm. Would you be willing to elaborate this position? I disagree that only being on social media is sufficient for marketing a service/product/organization. Social media channels can be used to link content to a website, where there is far more control over how the information is presented (e.g. with embedded documents, testimonials, contact forms, and more pictures that can't be added as easily to sical media). You also have more control over the content on your website, on the low but real chance that you lose control of your company's social media accounts due to an unexpected reason.
- zrobotics 5y ago
  Question-if marketing is solely restricted to social media, then what is the point of having a website at all? In the original article the author indicated they develop sites for medium-large industrial corps; and that most of these sites are brochure sites. So if the marketing team at acme co want to sell customers on their new line of coyote-seeking anvils, what is the point of having a website if they can't update the site with all the features of the new anvils? If they can only put the updated copy on Facebook and Instagram, then they will actively avoid linking to the site, since the copy there talks about the v2 anvils that don't have the new vision based coyote acquisition targeting system. I've worked in similar roles, and I don't like having to always be involved every time marketing needs to tweak the copy on a page. However, that led me to improve the site infra so they could make those changes themselves rather than wait for a developer to do it for them. And unsurprisingly, removing the forced delay and friction allowed them to vastly improve the page, sales noticed that they were getting more inbound leads. Turns out that having to reach out to another department was causing marketing to delay or cancel minor changes since "it didn't seem like a big enough difference to bother IT with". Telling marketing that they should only be using social platforms sounds like a good way for a developer to talk themselves out of a job, since then accounting will start thinking "why are we even paying this expensive salary if our customers aren't even visiting the site?" Sure I have the engineers typical disdain for marketing, but I do realize that it is a useful function and a necessary evil.
amiircoal 5y ago
I’ve been a WordPress dev since 3.0. It is a tool. And a very good one. Its market share dominance it not because it is proprietary (it is not) or because of vendor lock in (there is none). It is because it works very well, it is lightweight, it runs pretty much on any host, and is friendly to devs and end users. Part of being a good dev is knowing which tool to use (and when to not use a tool) and how to get the most out of the tool.
- theteapot 5y ago
  Wordpress is lightweight? 5.9 download is +19.7M zipped and that's without any plugins. The lock in to the Wordpress framework. Not sure whether that qualifies as "vendor" lock in but it's pretty big dep that's impossible to break out of if you go beyond simple blog.
  - 1over137 5y ago
    Everything is relative. I just downloaded a Xerox firmware update that was almost 500 MB.
  - mgkimsal 5y ago
    You can easily get locked in to some theme builder or UI toolkit. half the WP folks I know swear by X (genesis theme, etc) and will just rewrite everything in theme X if they take over a project. You're not 'locked in' to WP, you're 'locked in' to themes and plugins.
  - ghostly_s 5y ago
    Do they even offer VPS storage in units smaller than a GB these days? No one cares about a 20MB binary.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      For what it's worth, I'm running the absolute cheapest DigitalOcean droplet money can buy ($5/mo) and that comes with 25GB of NVME storage as standard.
egypturnash 5y ago
I feel like the intent of the Gutenberg editor and all the 'blocks' is basically "we want to make the specialization of 'bespoke website developer' obsolete". Whether it's there or not, I have no idea; I only use WP for my personal site, which runs on templates I kludged up myself years ago. But my less-technical friends? If they have a site it's usually something built with some kind of sitebuilder. Gutenberg's trying to serve their needs.
wzy 5y ago
This must explain why WordPress has been losing market share every year for more than a decade, right?
- dragosmocrii 5y ago
  Sarcasm? Because the opposite is true
indymike 5y ago
It looks like the chief complaint is that full site editing will make it so you don't have to call in a developer - or a WordPress power user to change something in the footer. This has really been needed for a long time. At the same time, it's kind of amazing that WordPress is the best we can do for making publishing to the web easy for everyone. It's really good, but is sure seems like something better should be possible...
- rtpg 5y ago
  In defense of Wordpress, even getting to what Wordpress is requires having a decently designed system allowing for the flexibility that allows people to ship like... recipe maker plugins or the like. I think a lot of CMS stuff start at first principles of "OK you need posts, and all this other stuff" but really Wordpress seems to be currently structured around the realization that the hard stuff is all the things that aren't shared between WP instances.
- camillomiller 5y ago
  I don't agree. I'm exactly in the position of the author with my clients. The real problem is with the Wordpress makes your client think it can outsmart you. I don't care about billing random hours to fix a footer. If anything, I program all my sites so that global options like these are ALWAYS easily editable by the customer. That's not my business model. It's just frustrating when the user wipes an entire section, because they decided that "oh, I can change that font here". Despite recent changes, Wordpress remains the best choice for the type of websites OP and I are building, I believe. That said, I would absolutely pay for a Dev version of Wordpress mantained by Automattic that would get rid of all the "easy to use" fluff by default.
  - wila 5y ago
    Exactly this. With a user that has more power than what they understand, they will break the layout and blame the developer. You then have to go look at what they did.. and as it is in a GUI and not in code, it will be much harder to troubleshoot and thus fix for a reasonable price.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
I hope more people stop building bespoke websites and start building tools for regular people to just make things. It's 2021. It should not be this hard for a regular person to update a website. If you can make a powerpoint presentation with MS PowerPoint, why can't you make a website that way?
- thombles 5y ago
  It's funny you invoke PowerPoint - MS FrontPage was exactly this tool and it worked reasonably well, as did iWeb. Publishing WYSIWYG websites from the desktop was given up in the 00s, and now we have Squarespace and Facebook Pages.
  - senko 5y ago
    I was there. It was horrible. FrontPage output was an unholy mess and god help you if you ever needed to dive in that codebase by hand. Current solutions are far from perfect but I never want to go back to that.
    - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
      Do you ever dive into a PowerPoint file by hand?
      - senko 5y ago
        No. Do you ever publish your web content as PPT? Written a web app using PPTX?
        0xbadcafebee 5y ago
        No, but my point is, why don't we? I mean, we've gone to the moon, we're going to Mars, we can now delicately land a rocket on a platform floating in the middle of the ocean, and we can turn vaccines around in a year. Maybe we can make websites as easy as powerpoint? If we can't make it work with HTML and CSS, maybe they need to go?
amanzi 5y ago
I've been working with WordPress for a long time and have run a blogging network built on Wordpress since 2005-ish. Over the last few years, it's felt like I've been swimming upstream fighting against WordPress as they have tried to morph into a general website publishing tool (in order to compete with Wix, SquareSpace, etc) rather than their initial blogging roots. Security has never been a WordPress strong point and things are still terrible today with a constant stream of backdoored plugins and themes being available. The Gutenberg editor has been a disaster and now the full-site editing looks like it will generate the same type of spaghetti-HTML that the other page builders have been doing for years. It's all too much for me now and I'm keen to get out of the Automattic/WordPress ecosystem. One option is ClassicPress which has forked v4 of WordPress but I'm not 100% confident that they will stick around. Apart from that, there are limited options out there that can replace the multisite features of WordPress. All I know is that the future of WordPress will be what Automattic want to do with it and I don't think they'll care if nobody outside of wordpress dot com uses it.
- jshwlkr 5y ago
  I'm not entirely sure it's fair to blame WordPress directly for the quality of 3rd-party products (and their security).
  - justinator 5y ago
    All these 3rd party products still have to use the WordPress Way (tm) hooks into the app.
  - Groxx 5y ago
    Not directly, but their API and security design absolutely does influence how normal plugins behave (i.e. common bugs), and how well they can limit the damage of abnormal ones.
  - TimTheTinker 5y ago
    Third-party plugins are subject to WordPress's security model and implementation. Automattic could create a PluginV2 system with tightened security and new requirements for plugin developers, then put a plan in place to deprecate and remove support for v1.
bsder 5y ago
> Sites that have been painstakingly, designed and built, reviewed and refined to the last detail And this misses the point. Many/most businesses gain zero business value from a website. Most businesses don't need a bespoke website. They need a website that looks like every other business website, allows marketing to throw a new whitepaper up every couple of months, and maybe allows people to send marketing/sales an email from a form. That's it. Nothing more. Most businesses don't need a $100,000 website. They don't need an optimized UX experience. They simply need a "good enough" web experience because not having a web experience is considered a faux pas even if your web experience is a gigantic waste of your time and brings no value to the business. A Wordpress hosting company is perfect for this.
- scarecrowbob 5y ago
  I do a lot of WordPress hosting. I more or less agree with you: I really don't think most orgs are served by having custom theming. I've done several websites at the low 6 figure range. I've seen a lot of work go into fine details. To me that's fair: good design is just a lot of tiny tweaks iterating toward something simple, and that's what the designer I work with does well. If that makes the people we're working for feel good, then yay. If it helps, most of that cost actually goes into data modeling, migrating/ cleaning the data, training users on the admin system, or connecting the site to an ERP and writing functionality to render that data. Or requirements gathering, process documentation, publication strategies, or whatever. Another side is that most of the off-the-shelf stuff I see won't pass our a11y audit. Which is important to me not just from an ass-covering direction but because I really think that blind folks ought to be able to use the web. As to the author's point, just locking down what users can do should be good enough. I've been crapping out WP sites in an hour for my musician friends, and my hope is that full site editing gets good enough that I don't need a theme, just a good plugin. But yeah, in general you're right. I tell folks that they should concentrate on finding some good content, and then the rest of the crap doesn't matter.
- danjac 5y ago
  I suspect Wordpress developers make bank from the Everest-sized amount of bikeshedding from non-developers that goes the average bog-standard corporate website.
smitty1e 5y ago
> No doubt we could work up a system to prevent this, we can restrict access and force use of the classic editor etc, but that’s where the ‘complicated futility’ comes in. It’s one thing to find a way to cherry pick aspects of the software to serve your purpose, it’s another thing entirely to try to build in complete opposition to it. Please do not invoke the Amazon Godz, who will take this open source stack, spread it across a score of services, shoot it full of IAM, and give us AWS ProwDress.
seanwilson 5y ago
Are there any good options for an open source headless CMS that works with a static site generator that has a page builder that has quick and accurate live previews before you deploy? E.g. so you can build new landing pages from header, testimonial and contact form blocks. There's lots of options if you just want Markdown but this isn't enough for heavily branded business websites where you need to check how complex pages will look before they go live, like if the h1 text in the header line wraps weird or is hard to read against the header background image. Edit: I get that CMS projects need to make money by the way but the lack of vendor lock-in is a big upside to WordPress. Netlify CMS might be an option (https://www.manuelkruisz.com/blog/posts/custom-previews-nextjs-netlifycms https://www.manuelkruisz.com/blog/posts/custom-previews-next...)?
- jawngee 5y ago
  +1 Directus
- hunterb123 5y ago
  Yes, Strapi (https://strapi.io/ https://strapi.io/) though I'm not sure about previews. https://www.sanity.io/studio https://www.sanity.io/studio is open source, but some parts of the CMS aren't I don't think. Possibly there could be an adapter to use Sanity Studio w/ Strapi?
  - seanwilson 5y ago
    Looks like Strapi has paid only features. Are these significant to most sites? https://strapi.io/pricing-self-hosted https://strapi.io/pricing-self-hosted "Free...Up to 3 default roles" https://strapi.io/blog/introducing-strapi-enterprise-edition-beta-and-plans https://strapi.io/blog/introducing-strapi-enterprise-edition... Sanity.io doesn't seem to be fully open source: https://github.com/sanity-io/sanity/issues/978 https://github.com/sanity-io/sanity/issues/978 "You can only run the Studio connected to the Sanity hosted backend. There is no option for connecting the Studio to another backend."
    - lucas_codes 5y ago
jrm4 5y ago
I trust Nassim Taleb's "Lindy" concept more than any new tool in this space. It works because it has worked very well for most things for a long time and I don't need any other explanation. (My best guess is that -- content management systems inherently suck, and that Wordpress is one of the few successful ones precisely because it did not set out to be a content management system.)
- lioeters 5y ago
  From Taleb's 2012 book _Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder_ > Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life! "The Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, it is also likely to have a longer remaining life expectancy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
dinkleberg 5y ago
Just today I was looking for a quick way to build a marketing site for my startup that would allow my not super technical co-founder to do the majority of the building. It has been a while since I had used WordPress regularly so maybe there are new sources out there, but I defaulted to checking out ThemeForest to find a decent theme to start with. I consider myself fairly decent at design (though I'm far from an expert), and I was amazed to see how at odds virtually every theme on there was with what I consider good design, particular from the UX perspective. Most of them are so bloated they take forever to load and they have an absurd amount of animations. I've just given up on the idea of taking the easy route here, I can't in good conscience have the first look that people have of my business be a bloated, over-animated mess. Gonna have to build it from scratch. If anyone has found themselves in a similar situation I'd love to hear what you did.
- JimDabell 5y ago
  Carrd and Webflow are popular for non-technical founders who want a basic marketing site these days. WordPress or DIY are not even close to your only choices, there are a huge amount of platforms out there for this. Developing a marketing site by hand is almost never the right choice for an early-stage startup. Pretty much everything else on your to-do list is a more useful thing to spend your time on than hand-crafting a marketing site.
  - sdze 5y ago
    Why would I choose these niche alternatives, when I have an huge wordpress developer ecosystem at my fingertips? At least here in Europe Webflow is virtually unknown.
    - JimDabell 5y ago
      Niche? They are both well-known successful unicorns. As for why you would choose them over WordPress, please just read the conversation. I was replying to somebody who had already tried to start with WordPress and gave up on it.
    - 5y ago
eric4smith 5y ago
I absolutely hate Wordpress, but I completely understand why it's popular. The reason why it's bigger than other publishing tools, is because there's almost nothing out there that has the deep network of plugins that can do almost anything. Sure, the backend of spaghetti PHP, HTML, MySql and endless backdoors and security issues are a nightmare, but there are really not that many alternatives to what Wordpress can do. And that's why Automattic is doing such a good business by basically hosting Wordpress and cleaning up and whitelisting more and more plugins. It makes perfect sense.
- ivanmontillam 5y ago
  My business partner and I hit a wall when we tried to automate WordPress. We tried to implement a plugin where Events in WordPress would be triggered, evaluate Conditions and then execute Actions (Send email, Trigger Webhook at Zapier, Update fields over the triggered record, etc.) Turns out, WordPress is not architecturally ready for this much evolution. And that's when we got disenchanted from WordPress and went to hunt on anything else.
  - jawngee 5y ago
    This doesn't make any sense or you are explaining it badly. You are basically describing how every WordPress plugin already works via filters and actions (collectively referred to as hooks).
    - camillomiller 5y ago
      Oh it makes a lot of sense! What OP is describing is the experienced programmer approach to Wordpress. Should I check what's already in place for event handling? Absolutely not, I should put my very opinionated layer on top instead of understanding how the system works and go with it. I had major arguments with developers in my team in the past about this, as they would completely miss the point (let's ship) spending time instead reinventing the wheel all the time. They would also be extremely annoyed when I would easily point to the documentation page about how wordpress does exactly what they tried to re-write forcing the system's philosophy.
askbill 5y ago
We’re a custom dev shop with expertise in WordPress. Our biggest clients are ones that built a substantial business on WordPress then outgrew their site / dev / hosting and came looking for us. Gutenberg will never stop that evolution. I’m thrilled they’re lowering the bar to manage sites and stay competitive in the marketplace. It’s enabling new businesses and filling a fresh pipeline for us. WP isn’t limiting us at all. Build pipelines, bundlers, edge workers, js frameworks. It’s all the same. I don’t have to try to sell the advantages of a new CMS. And as a bonus, we already speak the same language as I’m building them a tailor fit WP that they’re already familiar with.
muglug 5y ago
For at least the last 10 years WordPress has been an OSS tool whose serverside internals make hardened software engineers recoil in horror, but which nevertheless continues to deliver incredible value for the majority of its customer base. It's a reminder that if you build something that people really want, how you build it doesn't matter, as long as you have plenty of duck tape at the ready.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  Only for interesting definitions of "doesn't matter." The number of security exploits for WordPress websites seems to differ. https://www.cvedetails.com/product/4096/Wordpress-Wordpress.html?vendor_id=2337 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/4096/Wordpress-Wordpress....
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    You'd probably find just as many exploits in Windows, and people use that every day without a hitch. Just for what it's worth, I haven't experienced any intrusions at all on my WordPress site since moving away from a free shared host 3 years ago (and even then, I don't even think WordPress was the culprit there).
  - bdlowery 5y ago
    That’s awesome, now can you find one that points to all the plugins that cause these security exploits? Because none of those are from the default WordPress install with the Standard plugins (ACF Pro, CPT UI, etc).
    - camillomiller 5y ago
      THIS. Impressive how experienced developers and professionals fall for this fallacy all the time because, wait, they don't actually KNOW A THING about wordpress.
      - ironmagma 5y ago
        It’s an interesting semantic game, but ultimately not very revealing. The platform is what gave you the vulnerability; whether it was core, a theme, or a plug-in is a matter of trivia. Especially considering the plug-in “store” is curated. Contrary to your assessment I’ve deployed quite a few things with Wordpress before.
weird-eye-issue 5y ago
Full site editing has to be explicitly enabled by the theme. By default it is off. I recently upgraded my WP sites to 5.9 and nothing really changed at all. Because the theme I'm using does not opt-in to full site editing. This whole post seems to be a knee jerk reaction that isn't based in reality. TLDR: Nothing has actually changed for this person or their clients
raylus 5y ago
Django [https://www.djangoproject.com/ https://www.djangoproject.com/] + Wagtail CMS [https://wagtail.org/ https://wagtail.org/] have been great alternatives for our team.
- sdze 5y ago
  Why did you choose this over WP? Or was WP not even considered as a candidate? I mean the ecosystem of WP seems to be a magnitude greater.
  - modo_mario 5y ago
    Not OP but what equivalent ecosystem do you expect from something like django that you can compare to wordpress? If someone at work told me "yeah you could write an ERP in C# ...but excels ecosystem is just so much greater" then I'd be a bit confused.
  - dgb23 5y ago
    If you’re a dev or have access to devs then the ecosystem is exactly what you’re trying to avoid with few exceptions. You simply don’t gain anything over a solid web framework with decent CRUD editing on top, except familiarity. It’s a malleable tool, but at some relatively early point you’re fighting against it more than you benefit from it over something like GP suggests. Just slows you down and erodes confidence. WP is best if you have no or limited dev resources.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    I would never want to host or be responsible for a WP site just because of the security vulnerabilities and potential for abuse (it could start serving spam/malware/etc), but especially not under my/my company's domain and put my reputation and users on the line.
  - raylus 5y ago
    I've used WP for years and still have stores and sites humming along just fine with my own theme and minimal plugins (pre-gutenberg), it had been my tool of choice throughout the start of my professional career. Those WP sites proudly filled my resume and PHP was my go to backend language until around 6 years ago. Honestly, I was skeptical of Wagtail before developing blocks to work with their StreamField concept and diving into how clean and clear the Python models can be written as well as how all the data is clearly typed. Our team has decoupled implementations where we use Wagtail's GraphQL API and a modern Javascript frontend, along with traditional Django template driven sites. The ecosystem for Wagtail and Django is larger than you may think, but you are correct it that may take a few weeks to build out some integration that could have been plug-and-play in the WP plugin ecosystem, I usually take weeks to vet any off-the-shelf plugin and look into all of its code anyways.
marc_io 5y ago
> The Gutenberg editor has been a disaster and now the full-site editing looks like it will generate the same type of spaghetti-HTML that the other page builders have been doing for years. This is not the case at all. The HTML generated by the core blocks is much cleaner than what is generated by most page builders out there, and the new (site) editor just makes use of them.
akerr 5y ago
WordPress keeps getting better and 5.9 was a big leap forward. The OP should try using a vanilla WP install, use or build a (child) theme that supports blocks, add WP Super Cache to get static site level performance and stop worrying about complex layers of third-party cruft. If you're worried about 'marketing interns' messing with the site, don't give them 'Administrator' roles!
- camillomiller 5y ago
  This is a well know issue though. For client work there's just no way that clients don't want to have an Admin user for themselves, in case you part ways etc... Which is absolutely fair. The problem is when the intern forgets its password and instead of resetting it, they get the admin credentials from their boss (been there, done that!).
  - chris_wot 5y ago
    Well, that’s not a Wordpress failure, that’s an organisational failure.
- liveoneggs 5y ago
  The middle ground I use is DISALLOW_FILE_MODS set to true.
Krasnol 5y ago
I tried to find a local web developer for a friends small company last year and wasn't able to find anybody in his region who would work with anything else. Even though I needed a mostly static page with a news module. We ended up hiring a student who just typed the solution himself...
pupppet 5y ago
I’ve easily built hundreds of WP sites and Gutenberg makes me sad. Anyone raving about the block editor has clearly never used one of WP’s paid page builder plugins like Beaver Builder and Elementor, they’re in a whole different league. You of course can continue using these plugins, but the absolute chasm in quality separating these plugins and Gutenberg highlights Automattic doesn’t have the technical or design know-how to push WP forward. And with WP being my bread and butter, that’s a little scary.
- bdlowery 5y ago
  Why use elementor when you can get far better Google Core Web Vitals, and actually write semantic html all with ACF? Writing PHP isn’t that hard!
  - pupppet 5y ago
    A drag and drop page builder can churn out a page in a fraction of the time and many plugins generate fairly decent HTML, it’s rarely worth coding from scratch any more.
    - bdlowery 5y ago
      This is such a terrible take. Drag and drop page builders produce terrible HTML. Completely unsemantic, and they will always fail Google's core web vital metrics.
- SquareWheel 5y ago
  I've used most of them: FusionBuilder, WPBakery/Visual Composer, Elementor. I honestly despise these page editors. They are so incredibly slow, and the markup they produce is indecipherable. I've been pretty happy with Gutenberg. It has some pain points - notably around block recovery - but it produces sane HTML, its CSS payload is minimal, and there's no frontend JS at all (at least in the default blocks). You don't get the millions of features of those other editors, but it's those same features that make them slow and cumbersome. I think Gutenberg strikes a good balance. It's the first page editor I don't hate.
MattieTK 5y ago
I used to work for a major multinational media company. A few years ago the CTO at that media company looked to slash costs. They have a bunch of newspapers all over the world, and they had just acquired an Indian software development agency with experience in WordPress. You can see where this is going. Soon, a programme to launch WordPress globally to every publisher as their CMS. But of course you would be allowed some flexibility. You could bring your own CDN if needed, you could bring your own frontend to read off the API, you could harness some identity management system for login, you could even build your own content store. At that point "using WordPress" just became modifying Gutenberg. I feel sorry for the staff still there who have to constantly fight against Automattic's clear direction in building a Squarespace competitor, to build a tightly locked down and limited editor against the frustrations of the rest of the WordPress ecosystem. WordPress is great, if you realise what WordPress wants to be, and don't fight that.
- chris_wot 5y ago
  In Australia, Nine’s publishing arm uses Wordpress in the backend. It works great! Curious how the changes will affect them.
skilled 5y ago
My only wish is that someone with deep technical prowess could explain to me why the Gutenberg back-end Editor is so slow. And, enlighten me as to why the core WordPress team aren’t doing much about it.
- modernerd 5y ago
  Riad's writeup here may be interesting to you on the “why it's slow” part: https://riad.blog/2020/02/14/a-journey-towards-a-performant-web-editor/ https://riad.blog/2020/02/14/a-journey-towards-a-performant-... I don't think it's fair to say the core team isn't doing much to improve or prevent degrading performance — they performance-test every PR: https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/contributors/code/testing-overview/#performance-testing https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/contributors/co... There's also a performance team (for general WP performance, but also covering the editor/JS) that meets regularly and posts minutes. https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/02/01/performance-team-meeting-summary-1-february-2022/ https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/02/01/performance-team-... Page performance from sites made with WP's block editor is pretty good compared to other editor plugins too, which probably matters more than editor performance (more people generally read a site than write it): https://wptavern.com/gutenbergs-faster-performance-is-eroding-page-builders-dominance https://wptavern.com/gutenbergs-faster-performance-is-erodin...
  - skilled 5y ago
    As someone who tries to use Gutenberg to make "rich" pages, I disagree. A few weeks ago I was on the verge of emailing Mullenweg directly to ask if he himself uses the editor to write blog posts. In 3 years they haven't fixed a simple issue like backspace jumping. For example, if you write a paragraph, then backspace to clear it - when the block is fully cleared you jump back to the top of the page rather than the block above it. In other words, Gutenberg is not native to the editing experience. It's actually laughable how bad it is if you look at something like Ghost[0]. It's day and night difference in editing experience. Another example is when you start adding "blocks" like CTA buttons and such. Why does the editor need to constantly render those elements in the editor itself? It completely bricks the writing experience. And I tried a lot of things, including switching browsers. Some of my problems were resolved by removing plugins, but overall I have just decided to use Classic Editor[1]. I can, at the very least, write out the entire article and then switch to Gutenberg to style it the way I like. It's stupid, but at least it works. [0]: https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ [1]: https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/
cblconfederate 5y ago
It's just great to see work on self-hosted cms, and PHP nevertheless, the easiest one to host. Open source has forgotten the art of making the web open to everyone, not just to BigTech employees.
mdrzn 5y ago
What's the quickest-to-learn alternative to Wordpress? Possibly with a CLI version so I could edit it via bash commands. Wordpress atm is the quickest way to whip up a website for any objective needed.
- adflux 5y ago
  >Wordpress atm is the quickest way to whip up a website for any objective needed. Bullshit. Static HTML template + Azure Static Web App/Netlify/... is definitively faster and cheaper to setup. I am a developer who runs multiple wordpress sites for small businesses.
  - mdrzn 5y ago
    Most hosting platforms offer to install Wordpress via 1-click. Once installed, it's really easy to use and edit even for a novice. Otherwise, downloading Wordpress.org and uploading the files via FTP is really easy. The most technical can edit via CLI if needed, but it's not mandatory to know how to use a shell. What about Netlify? I've seen and heard about generating static websites, but honestly I have no idea where to start, what technologies are needed, how easy or how hard it is to explain the customer how to edit their own websites once ready..
johnchristopher 5y ago
> The thought of client side marketing interns ‘play(ing) around with site-wide designs’ should make the blood of any professional run cold. Sites that have been painstakingly, designed and built, reviewed and refined to the last detail every step of the way with stakeholders on the client side, optimising UX, legibility, performance and upholding the client’s brand can now be squelched in an instant by someone 3 months into their job who prefers yellow. That's why you set the intern's role to editor.
jrochkind1 5y ago
I'm not a serious WordPress user, so this comes from a perspective of not quite understanding what OP is describing. But. "From the beginning [using wordpress for complicated non-blog sites] has felt like a hack – WordPress is, and always has been a blogging platform at heart," but once WordPress decides to "pull away from this use case completely" [wait, what use case?] to "move the platform to a fully fledged site builder"... that's the problem? Because it sounds like they're intending to be moving toward the OP's use case, not away from it? Can someone explain what i'm seeing as tension here?
- tyingq 5y ago
  It sounds like he's worried his customers will decide he's not needed anymore. Like, if their perception is that they only call him when layout and style changes are needed, and they can now (somewhat) do that themselves.
- dabernathy89 5y ago
  > wait, what use case? Blogging > toward the OP's use case No, they have moved toward general purpose site building, not focused on _blogging_
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    I thought OP was saying that they did not use WP for blogging, from the start, which always felt like a hack since WP was focused on blogging, but OP made it work anyway. Did I misunderstand? I don't think so. OP says: > I build websites for a living. Lots of them. These websites are designed by a team of designers who design complex, bespoke, heavily branded layouts. I take those designs and my team of developers and I turn them into corporate websites, generally for medium sized industrial clients. > Sometimes the websites are big brochures, sometimes they have complex functionality. Sometimes both. They run to hundreds of pages and posts, composed of multiple layouts, templates and using, typically, 20 or more discrete modules, each configurable in multiple ways by the end user when the sites are ultimately turned over for the marketing staff of these mid sized companies to edit. > Many of them use WordPress as a CMS. From the beginning this has felt like a hack OP does not describe what they do for a living as blogging or providing blogs. I see OP saying that they always used WP as a general "CMS", for "websites" that may be "big brochures" or "have complex functionality", which are not mainly blogs. Right?
hk1337 5y ago
Hubspot is a great option if you can do it. Keep your app and marketing site separated.
johnchristopher 5y ago
Author mentions Twill. https://demo.twill.io/ https://demo.twill.io/. Looks interesting, like a big shiny ACF front-end. I wonder what the back-end looks like for dev. edit: ah, it's a laravel package.
- omnimus 5y ago
  Its pretty great CMS but its mostly laravel you need to be comfortable with it or its going to be rough. I think it makes sense if your site requires advanced functionality. I think there are more productive alternatives for most people like Kirby CMS, Craft CMS that have great docs and focus on the CMS part very well.
pantulis 5y ago
"The thought of client side marketing interns ‘play(ing) around with site-wide designs’ should make the blood of any professional run cold." I cannot even begin to fathom the level of cringeness from this assertion. If you think like this you should not be doing client work.
devmor 5y ago
I always liked WordPress for what it is, but eventually I stopped recommending it to my clients because it made them dangerous. I had to severely lock down most of the functionality to keep them from shooting themselves in the foot and it reflecting bad on me.
benfrain 5y ago
My blog has been on Wordpress since about 2007. It works, and I appreciate that it’s free but I’ve always hated working with it. If someone made a node based equivalent (so I can at least use a modern templating language) that supported comments I would be all over it. The commenting system is the only real reason I stay. There’s nothing else I can find that doesn’t necessitate stitching multiple services together just to get commenting that I can find. And as for being able to spin up a local dev version for casual edits — horrid DX! I wonder whether a big reason social media has stolen our online interactions over the years is because there are few (no?) blogging platforms that support comments?!
- Hoefner 5y ago
  Try https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ (https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost)
  - benfrain 5y ago
    No commenting!
donohoe 5y ago
I've too have been working with WordPress a long time. I built Quartz (qz.com) and The New Yorker (newyokrer.com) and other sites on WP. However so much of what this author says resonates more than I care to admit. I have a good relationship with WP but I worry about the future.
- samtho 5y ago
  I’m actually surprised that there is not a popular news-oriented CMS (that I’m aware of). WP has survived so long despite the abysmal architecture and myriad of security issues because it’s just so damn flexible. It really has somehow both transcended blogging while being so stuck in it. I suppose it’s ubiquity, especially during the earlier days of corporate internet, allowed all walks of life to start a website with it. They made it super easy to find, install, buy, or build bespoke themes and plugins, which undoubtedly contributed to its widespread adoption. I remember doing a lot of work with customizations integrating WP and phpBB specifically, which ended up earning me an unreasonable amount money for a 16 year old. I have a certain fondness of WP but it’s heyday has long past coinciding with the abandonment of the independent internet. I greatly worry about its future mainly because it’s demise would represent the end of an era. Perhaps the backlash to centralized social media will provide an avenue for a platform like WP to see a resurgence, but Automattic would really need to make a conscious effort to pivot with the changing times if they want to ride that wave. It won’t be the Wordpress as we’ve known it but (hopefully) the ethos remains. I wish them all the luck.
  - yurishimo 5y ago
    You mention the security stuff, but for any site running at scale, it's not really an issue. They don't use a billion plugins and they usually run on infrastructure designed from the ground up to run WP. Heck, A8C's hosting platform (WP VIP) won't let you deploy code that doesn't pass a host of linting rules. I'm working on a site right now for a big company that's moving to VIP. We have 7 plugins, 2 of which are from VIP, and then 4 that the company I work for wrote and now maintains for use across all of our clients. Everything else is custom. The theme is 100% custom. When orgs choose WP, they do it because they want the interface to reduce training costs, and the platform to reduce dev costs because they can take that codebase to dozens of different consultancy agencies and have them pick up where the last people left off.
mgas 5y ago
> Drupal was, and still is, a clunking monster, unfriendly to developers and editors alike I feel like this is an unnecessary and inflammatory swipe, typical of coder-bro culture. Both Drupal and Wordpress are open source tools that have survived for years, are built on tested and long-lasting languages, and serve the people who both build and use them. Everyone is always crying about how nothing ever stays the same, and and the same time, how the-next-new-thing-ism is ruining the web. And then there is this comment thread with every other response trying to push some ostensibly better and easier thing that stands no chance of surviving more than a couple of years, because CMSs need communities to keep them alive. I am a proud member of the Drupal community. I struggle with it sometimes, but it is still amazing at how much you can accomplish with core and contrib modules. And don't forget, some organizations need a giant, clunky CMS. We're not all building websites for cutting edge, VC-backed, brochure-based unicorns. My clients need a framework that has legs to stand on for the next decade to come.
- leonk 5y ago
  Totally agree. I don’t understand why the author couldn’t just say that Drupal is for a different use case. Rather than label a whole framework, the people who build it, work with it, and use it, as basically “incorrect”.
dabernathy89 5y ago
> You would use ACF, especially its flexible content fields, to allow you to add repeatable and repositionable content in specific areas of your website. > Sites that have been painstakingly, designed and built, reviewed and refined to the last detail every step of the way with stakeholders on the client side, optimising UX, legibility, performance and upholding the client’s brand can now be squelched in an instant by someone 3 months into their job who prefers yellow. Completely agree. Back when I was building w/ WordPress, ACF was the best choice for building layouts because you could provide only as much flexibility as you wanted the client to have. You could give them lots of power to easily update their content but constrain their ability to ruin the design. I gave a short talk at a WordCamp about this exact benefit of ACF over page builders (at the time).
jasonshen 5y ago
Surprised no one has talked yet about Ghost, which feels like what Wordpress would have been had it been founded in 2013 instead of 2003. I recently converged from Substack, Convertkit and Wordpress down to just Ghost. It's not perfect but it's damn good. https://www.jasonshen.com/switching-to-ghost/ https://www.jasonshen.com/switching-to-ghost/
id02009 5y ago
This reminds me of late 2000s, when a WYSIWYG editor had a potential to completely brake the pages layout with a single unclosed tag. Two steps forward, one backwards.

251 points by ddevine 5y ago

cmsguy2000 5y ago

The blog author complains about the loss of control over the editing experience with the recent changes to WordPress. Personally I found Drupal to be a much better system for their use case, to provide client 'content editing' that does not disrupt the front end design (allowing user to edit content but limit novice users changing styles or branding). Drupal has got quite a lot better over the past few years but gets overlooked as it has a bigger learning curve.

chiefalchemist 5y ago
But funny enough, Drupal has also adopted Gutenberg. https://www.drupal.org/project/gutenberg https://www.drupal.org/project/gutenberg
- calibas 5y ago
  That's kind of misleading, it's like saying Drupal has adopted NFTs because someone created this module: https://www.drupal.org/project/nft https://www.drupal.org/project/nft Anybody can create any kind of module for Drupal, but in the case of the Gutenberg and NFT modules, only a small minority of sites are actually using them.

anon23anon 5y ago

I was recently doing some electrical work on my house. The past owner had really jacked things up. I couldn't figure out and had to call an electrician. I'd imagine the majority of their work is DIY'ers who've f'ed up and had to call a pro. To me that's what going to happen here - marketing will continually screw and tinker w/ shit till it's broke and then they'll call you to fix it. I also want to add this is a good example of why marketing should probably just be using tools like Insta, Twitter, FB etc to get their message out. Now if you actually have a good company blog w/ good resources than that's different but I think that's more the exception than the norm.

openknot 5y ago
>I also want to add this is a good example of why marketing should probably just be using tools like Insta, Twitter, FB etc to get their message out. Now if you actually have a good company blog w/ good resources than that's different but I think that's more the exception than the norm. Would you be willing to elaborate this position? I disagree that only being on social media is sufficient for marketing a service/product/organization. Social media channels can be used to link content to a website, where there is far more control over how the information is presented (e.g. with embedded documents, testimonials, contact forms, and more pictures that can't be added as easily to sical media). You also have more control over the content on your website, on the low but real chance that you lose control of your company's social media accounts due to an unexpected reason.
zrobotics 5y ago
Question-if marketing is solely restricted to social media, then what is the point of having a website at all? In the original article the author indicated they develop sites for medium-large industrial corps; and that most of these sites are brochure sites. So if the marketing team at acme co want to sell customers on their new line of coyote-seeking anvils, what is the point of having a website if they can't update the site with all the features of the new anvils? If they can only put the updated copy on Facebook and Instagram, then they will actively avoid linking to the site, since the copy there talks about the v2 anvils that don't have the new vision based coyote acquisition targeting system. I've worked in similar roles, and I don't like having to always be involved every time marketing needs to tweak the copy on a page. However, that led me to improve the site infra so they could make those changes themselves rather than wait for a developer to do it for them. And unsurprisingly, removing the forced delay and friction allowed them to vastly improve the page, sales noticed that they were getting more inbound leads. Turns out that having to reach out to another department was causing marketing to delay or cancel minor changes since "it didn't seem like a big enough difference to bother IT with". Telling marketing that they should only be using social platforms sounds like a good way for a developer to talk themselves out of a job, since then accounting will start thinking "why are we even paying this expensive salary if our customers aren't even visiting the site?" Sure I have the engineers typical disdain for marketing, but I do realize that it is a useful function and a necessary evil.

amiircoal 5y ago

I’ve been a WordPress dev since 3.0. It is a tool. And a very good one. Its market share dominance it not because it is proprietary (it is not) or because of vendor lock in (there is none). It is because it works very well, it is lightweight, it runs pretty much on any host, and is friendly to devs and end users. Part of being a good dev is knowing which tool to use (and when to not use a tool) and how to get the most out of the tool.

theteapot 5y ago
Wordpress is lightweight? 5.9 download is +19.7M zipped and that's without any plugins. The lock in to the Wordpress framework. Not sure whether that qualifies as "vendor" lock in but it's pretty big dep that's impossible to break out of if you go beyond simple blog.
- 1over137 5y ago
  Everything is relative. I just downloaded a Xerox firmware update that was almost 500 MB.
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  You can easily get locked in to some theme builder or UI toolkit. half the WP folks I know swear by X (genesis theme, etc) and will just rewrite everything in theme X if they take over a project. You're not 'locked in' to WP, you're 'locked in' to themes and plugins.
- ghostly_s 5y ago
  Do they even offer VPS storage in units smaller than a GB these days? No one cares about a 20MB binary.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    For what it's worth, I'm running the absolute cheapest DigitalOcean droplet money can buy ($5/mo) and that comes with 25GB of NVME storage as standard.

egypturnash 5y ago

I feel like the intent of the Gutenberg editor and all the 'blocks' is basically "we want to make the specialization of 'bespoke website developer' obsolete". Whether it's there or not, I have no idea; I only use WP for my personal site, which runs on templates I kludged up myself years ago. But my less-technical friends? If they have a site it's usually something built with some kind of sitebuilder. Gutenberg's trying to serve their needs.

wzy 5y ago

This must explain why WordPress has been losing market share every year for more than a decade, right?

dragosmocrii 5y ago
Sarcasm? Because the opposite is true

indymike 5y ago

It looks like the chief complaint is that full site editing will make it so you don't have to call in a developer - or a WordPress power user to change something in the footer. This has really been needed for a long time. At the same time, it's kind of amazing that WordPress is the best we can do for making publishing to the web easy for everyone. It's really good, but is sure seems like something better should be possible...

rtpg 5y ago
In defense of Wordpress, even getting to what Wordpress is requires having a decently designed system allowing for the flexibility that allows people to ship like... recipe maker plugins or the like. I think a lot of CMS stuff start at first principles of "OK you need posts, and all this other stuff" but really Wordpress seems to be currently structured around the realization that the hard stuff is all the things that aren't shared between WP instances.
camillomiller 5y ago
I don't agree. I'm exactly in the position of the author with my clients. The real problem is with the Wordpress makes your client think it can outsmart you. I don't care about billing random hours to fix a footer. If anything, I program all my sites so that global options like these are ALWAYS easily editable by the customer. That's not my business model. It's just frustrating when the user wipes an entire section, because they decided that "oh, I can change that font here". Despite recent changes, Wordpress remains the best choice for the type of websites OP and I are building, I believe. That said, I would absolutely pay for a Dev version of Wordpress mantained by Automattic that would get rid of all the "easy to use" fluff by default.
- wila 5y ago
  Exactly this. With a user that has more power than what they understand, they will break the layout and blame the developer. You then have to go look at what they did.. and as it is in a GUI and not in code, it will be much harder to troubleshoot and thus fix for a reasonable price.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

I hope more people stop building bespoke websites and start building tools for regular people to just make things. It's 2021. It should not be this hard for a regular person to update a website. If you can make a powerpoint presentation with MS PowerPoint, why can't you make a website that way?

thombles 5y ago
It's funny you invoke PowerPoint - MS FrontPage was exactly this tool and it worked reasonably well, as did iWeb. Publishing WYSIWYG websites from the desktop was given up in the 00s, and now we have Squarespace and Facebook Pages.
- senko 5y ago
  I was there. It was horrible. FrontPage output was an unholy mess and god help you if you ever needed to dive in that codebase by hand. Current solutions are far from perfect but I never want to go back to that.
  - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    Do you ever dive into a PowerPoint file by hand?
    - senko 5y ago
      No. Do you ever publish your web content as PPT? Written a web app using PPTX?
      - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
        No, but my point is, why don't we? I mean, we've gone to the moon, we're going to Mars, we can now delicately land a rocket on a platform floating in the middle of the ocean, and we can turn vaccines around in a year. Maybe we can make websites as easy as powerpoint? If we can't make it work with HTML and CSS, maybe they need to go?

amanzi 5y ago

I've been working with WordPress for a long time and have run a blogging network built on Wordpress since 2005-ish. Over the last few years, it's felt like I've been swimming upstream fighting against WordPress as they have tried to morph into a general website publishing tool (in order to compete with Wix, SquareSpace, etc) rather than their initial blogging roots. Security has never been a WordPress strong point and things are still terrible today with a constant stream of backdoored plugins and themes being available. The Gutenberg editor has been a disaster and now the full-site editing looks like it will generate the same type of spaghetti-HTML that the other page builders have been doing for years. It's all too much for me now and I'm keen to get out of the Automattic/WordPress ecosystem. One option is ClassicPress which has forked v4 of WordPress but I'm not 100% confident that they will stick around. Apart from that, there are limited options out there that can replace the multisite features of WordPress. All I know is that the future of WordPress will be what Automattic want to do with it and I don't think they'll care if nobody outside of wordpress dot com uses it.

jshwlkr 5y ago
I'm not entirely sure it's fair to blame WordPress directly for the quality of 3rd-party products (and their security).
- justinator 5y ago
  All these 3rd party products still have to use the WordPress Way (tm) hooks into the app.
- Groxx 5y ago
  Not directly, but their API and security design absolutely does influence how normal plugins behave (i.e. common bugs), and how well they can limit the damage of abnormal ones.
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  Third-party plugins are subject to WordPress's security model and implementation. Automattic could create a PluginV2 system with tightened security and new requirements for plugin developers, then put a plan in place to deprecate and remove support for v1.

bsder 5y ago

> Sites that have been painstakingly, designed and built, reviewed and refined to the last detail And this misses the point. Many/most businesses gain zero business value from a website. Most businesses don't need a bespoke website. They need a website that looks like every other business website, allows marketing to throw a new whitepaper up every couple of months, and maybe allows people to send marketing/sales an email from a form. That's it. Nothing more. Most businesses don't need a $100,000 website. They don't need an optimized UX experience. They simply need a "good enough" web experience because not having a web experience is considered a faux pas even if your web experience is a gigantic waste of your time and brings no value to the business. A Wordpress hosting company is perfect for this.

scarecrowbob 5y ago
I do a lot of WordPress hosting. I more or less agree with you: I really don't think most orgs are served by having custom theming. I've done several websites at the low 6 figure range. I've seen a lot of work go into fine details. To me that's fair: good design is just a lot of tiny tweaks iterating toward something simple, and that's what the designer I work with does well. If that makes the people we're working for feel good, then yay. If it helps, most of that cost actually goes into data modeling, migrating/ cleaning the data, training users on the admin system, or connecting the site to an ERP and writing functionality to render that data. Or requirements gathering, process documentation, publication strategies, or whatever. Another side is that most of the off-the-shelf stuff I see won't pass our a11y audit. Which is important to me not just from an ass-covering direction but because I really think that blind folks ought to be able to use the web. As to the author's point, just locking down what users can do should be good enough. I've been crapping out WP sites in an hour for my musician friends, and my hope is that full site editing gets good enough that I don't need a theme, just a good plugin. But yeah, in general you're right. I tell folks that they should concentrate on finding some good content, and then the rest of the crap doesn't matter.
danjac 5y ago
I suspect Wordpress developers make bank from the Everest-sized amount of bikeshedding from non-developers that goes the average bog-standard corporate website.

smitty1e 5y ago

> No doubt we could work up a system to prevent this, we can restrict access and force use of the classic editor etc, but that’s where the ‘complicated futility’ comes in. It’s one thing to find a way to cherry pick aspects of the software to serve your purpose, it’s another thing entirely to try to build in complete opposition to it. Please do not invoke the Amazon Godz, who will take this open source stack, spread it across a score of services, shoot it full of IAM, and give us AWS ProwDress.

seanwilson 5y ago

Are there any good options for an open source headless CMS that works with a static site generator that has a page builder that has quick and accurate live previews before you deploy? E.g. so you can build new landing pages from header, testimonial and contact form blocks. There's lots of options if you just want Markdown but this isn't enough for heavily branded business websites where you need to check how complex pages will look before they go live, like if the h1 text in the header line wraps weird or is hard to read against the header background image. Edit: I get that CMS projects need to make money by the way but the lack of vendor lock-in is a big upside to WordPress. Netlify CMS might be an option (https://www.manuelkruisz.com/blog/posts/custom-previews-nextjs-netlifycms https://www.manuelkruisz.com/blog/posts/custom-previews-next...)?

jawngee 5y ago
+1 Directus
hunterb123 5y ago
Yes, Strapi (https://strapi.io/ https://strapi.io/) though I'm not sure about previews. https://www.sanity.io/studio https://www.sanity.io/studio is open source, but some parts of the CMS aren't I don't think. Possibly there could be an adapter to use Sanity Studio w/ Strapi?
- seanwilson 5y ago
  Looks like Strapi has paid only features. Are these significant to most sites? https://strapi.io/pricing-self-hosted https://strapi.io/pricing-self-hosted "Free...Up to 3 default roles" https://strapi.io/blog/introducing-strapi-enterprise-edition-beta-and-plans https://strapi.io/blog/introducing-strapi-enterprise-edition... Sanity.io doesn't seem to be fully open source: https://github.com/sanity-io/sanity/issues/978 https://github.com/sanity-io/sanity/issues/978 "You can only run the Studio connected to the Sanity hosted backend. There is no option for connecting the Studio to another backend."
  - lucas_codes 5y ago

jrm4 5y ago

I trust Nassim Taleb's "Lindy" concept more than any new tool in this space. It works because it has worked very well for most things for a long time and I don't need any other explanation. (My best guess is that -- content management systems inherently suck, and that Wordpress is one of the few successful ones precisely because it did not set out to be a content management system.)

lioeters 5y ago
From Taleb's 2012 book _Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder_ > Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life! "The Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, it is also likely to have a longer remaining life expectancy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

dinkleberg 5y ago

Just today I was looking for a quick way to build a marketing site for my startup that would allow my not super technical co-founder to do the majority of the building. It has been a while since I had used WordPress regularly so maybe there are new sources out there, but I defaulted to checking out ThemeForest to find a decent theme to start with. I consider myself fairly decent at design (though I'm far from an expert), and I was amazed to see how at odds virtually every theme on there was with what I consider good design, particular from the UX perspective. Most of them are so bloated they take forever to load and they have an absurd amount of animations. I've just given up on the idea of taking the easy route here, I can't in good conscience have the first look that people have of my business be a bloated, over-animated mess. Gonna have to build it from scratch. If anyone has found themselves in a similar situation I'd love to hear what you did.

JimDabell 5y ago
Carrd and Webflow are popular for non-technical founders who want a basic marketing site these days. WordPress or DIY are not even close to your only choices, there are a huge amount of platforms out there for this. Developing a marketing site by hand is almost never the right choice for an early-stage startup. Pretty much everything else on your to-do list is a more useful thing to spend your time on than hand-crafting a marketing site.
- sdze 5y ago
  Why would I choose these niche alternatives, when I have an huge wordpress developer ecosystem at my fingertips? At least here in Europe Webflow is virtually unknown.
  - JimDabell 5y ago
    Niche? They are both well-known successful unicorns. As for why you would choose them over WordPress, please just read the conversation. I was replying to somebody who had already tried to start with WordPress and gave up on it.
  - 5y ago

eric4smith 5y ago

I absolutely hate Wordpress, but I completely understand why it's popular. The reason why it's bigger than other publishing tools, is because there's almost nothing out there that has the deep network of plugins that can do almost anything. Sure, the backend of spaghetti PHP, HTML, MySql and endless backdoors and security issues are a nightmare, but there are really not that many alternatives to what Wordpress can do. And that's why Automattic is doing such a good business by basically hosting Wordpress and cleaning up and whitelisting more and more plugins. It makes perfect sense.

ivanmontillam 5y ago
My business partner and I hit a wall when we tried to automate WordPress. We tried to implement a plugin where Events in WordPress would be triggered, evaluate Conditions and then execute Actions (Send email, Trigger Webhook at Zapier, Update fields over the triggered record, etc.) Turns out, WordPress is not architecturally ready for this much evolution. And that's when we got disenchanted from WordPress and went to hunt on anything else.
- jawngee 5y ago
  This doesn't make any sense or you are explaining it badly. You are basically describing how every WordPress plugin already works via filters and actions (collectively referred to as hooks).
  - camillomiller 5y ago
    Oh it makes a lot of sense! What OP is describing is the experienced programmer approach to Wordpress. Should I check what's already in place for event handling? Absolutely not, I should put my very opinionated layer on top instead of understanding how the system works and go with it. I had major arguments with developers in my team in the past about this, as they would completely miss the point (let's ship) spending time instead reinventing the wheel all the time. They would also be extremely annoyed when I would easily point to the documentation page about how wordpress does exactly what they tried to re-write forcing the system's philosophy.

askbill 5y ago

We’re a custom dev shop with expertise in WordPress. Our biggest clients are ones that built a substantial business on WordPress then outgrew their site / dev / hosting and came looking for us. Gutenberg will never stop that evolution. I’m thrilled they’re lowering the bar to manage sites and stay competitive in the marketplace. It’s enabling new businesses and filling a fresh pipeline for us. WP isn’t limiting us at all. Build pipelines, bundlers, edge workers, js frameworks. It’s all the same. I don’t have to try to sell the advantages of a new CMS. And as a bonus, we already speak the same language as I’m building them a tailor fit WP that they’re already familiar with.

muglug 5y ago

For at least the last 10 years WordPress has been an OSS tool whose serverside internals make hardened software engineers recoil in horror, but which nevertheless continues to deliver incredible value for the majority of its customer base. It's a reminder that if you build something that people really want, how you build it doesn't matter, as long as you have plenty of duck tape at the ready.

ironmagma 5y ago
Only for interesting definitions of "doesn't matter." The number of security exploits for WordPress websites seems to differ. https://www.cvedetails.com/product/4096/Wordpress-Wordpress.html?vendor_id=2337 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/4096/Wordpress-Wordpress....
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  You'd probably find just as many exploits in Windows, and people use that every day without a hitch. Just for what it's worth, I haven't experienced any intrusions at all on my WordPress site since moving away from a free shared host 3 years ago (and even then, I don't even think WordPress was the culprit there).
- bdlowery 5y ago
  That’s awesome, now can you find one that points to all the plugins that cause these security exploits? Because none of those are from the default WordPress install with the Standard plugins (ACF Pro, CPT UI, etc).
  - camillomiller 5y ago
    THIS. Impressive how experienced developers and professionals fall for this fallacy all the time because, wait, they don't actually KNOW A THING about wordpress.
    - ironmagma 5y ago
      It’s an interesting semantic game, but ultimately not very revealing. The platform is what gave you the vulnerability; whether it was core, a theme, or a plug-in is a matter of trivia. Especially considering the plug-in “store” is curated. Contrary to your assessment I’ve deployed quite a few things with Wordpress before.

weird-eye-issue 5y ago

Full site editing has to be explicitly enabled by the theme. By default it is off. I recently upgraded my WP sites to 5.9 and nothing really changed at all. Because the theme I'm using does not opt-in to full site editing. This whole post seems to be a knee jerk reaction that isn't based in reality. TLDR: Nothing has actually changed for this person or their clients

raylus 5y ago

Django [https://www.djangoproject.com/ https://www.djangoproject.com/] + Wagtail CMS [https://wagtail.org/ https://wagtail.org/] have been great alternatives for our team.

sdze 5y ago
Why did you choose this over WP? Or was WP not even considered as a candidate? I mean the ecosystem of WP seems to be a magnitude greater.
- modo_mario 5y ago
  Not OP but what equivalent ecosystem do you expect from something like django that you can compare to wordpress? If someone at work told me "yeah you could write an ERP in C# ...but excels ecosystem is just so much greater" then I'd be a bit confused.
- dgb23 5y ago
  If you’re a dev or have access to devs then the ecosystem is exactly what you’re trying to avoid with few exceptions. You simply don’t gain anything over a solid web framework with decent CRUD editing on top, except familiarity. It’s a malleable tool, but at some relatively early point you’re fighting against it more than you benefit from it over something like GP suggests. Just slows you down and erodes confidence. WP is best if you have no or limited dev resources.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  I would never want to host or be responsible for a WP site just because of the security vulnerabilities and potential for abuse (it could start serving spam/malware/etc), but especially not under my/my company's domain and put my reputation and users on the line.
- raylus 5y ago
  I've used WP for years and still have stores and sites humming along just fine with my own theme and minimal plugins (pre-gutenberg), it had been my tool of choice throughout the start of my professional career. Those WP sites proudly filled my resume and PHP was my go to backend language until around 6 years ago. Honestly, I was skeptical of Wagtail before developing blocks to work with their StreamField concept and diving into how clean and clear the Python models can be written as well as how all the data is clearly typed. Our team has decoupled implementations where we use Wagtail's GraphQL API and a modern Javascript frontend, along with traditional Django template driven sites. The ecosystem for Wagtail and Django is larger than you may think, but you are correct it that may take a few weeks to build out some integration that could have been plug-and-play in the WP plugin ecosystem, I usually take weeks to vet any off-the-shelf plugin and look into all of its code anyways.

marc_io 5y ago

> The Gutenberg editor has been a disaster and now the full-site editing looks like it will generate the same type of spaghetti-HTML that the other page builders have been doing for years. This is not the case at all. The HTML generated by the core blocks is much cleaner than what is generated by most page builders out there, and the new (site) editor just makes use of them.

akerr 5y ago

WordPress keeps getting better and 5.9 was a big leap forward. The OP should try using a vanilla WP install, use or build a (child) theme that supports blocks, add WP Super Cache to get static site level performance and stop worrying about complex layers of third-party cruft. If you're worried about 'marketing interns' messing with the site, don't give them 'Administrator' roles!

camillomiller 5y ago
This is a well know issue though. For client work there's just no way that clients don't want to have an Admin user for themselves, in case you part ways etc... Which is absolutely fair. The problem is when the intern forgets its password and instead of resetting it, they get the admin credentials from their boss (been there, done that!).
- chris_wot 5y ago
  Well, that’s not a Wordpress failure, that’s an organisational failure.
liveoneggs 5y ago
The middle ground I use is DISALLOW_FILE_MODS set to true.

Krasnol 5y ago

I tried to find a local web developer for a friends small company last year and wasn't able to find anybody in his region who would work with anything else. Even though I needed a mostly static page with a news module. We ended up hiring a student who just typed the solution himself...

pupppet 5y ago

I’ve easily built hundreds of WP sites and Gutenberg makes me sad. Anyone raving about the block editor has clearly never used one of WP’s paid page builder plugins like Beaver Builder and Elementor, they’re in a whole different league. You of course can continue using these plugins, but the absolute chasm in quality separating these plugins and Gutenberg highlights Automattic doesn’t have the technical or design know-how to push WP forward. And with WP being my bread and butter, that’s a little scary.

bdlowery 5y ago
Why use elementor when you can get far better Google Core Web Vitals, and actually write semantic html all with ACF? Writing PHP isn’t that hard!
- pupppet 5y ago
  A drag and drop page builder can churn out a page in a fraction of the time and many plugins generate fairly decent HTML, it’s rarely worth coding from scratch any more.
  - bdlowery 5y ago
    This is such a terrible take. Drag and drop page builders produce terrible HTML. Completely unsemantic, and they will always fail Google's core web vital metrics.
SquareWheel 5y ago
I've used most of them: FusionBuilder, WPBakery/Visual Composer, Elementor. I honestly despise these page editors. They are so incredibly slow, and the markup they produce is indecipherable. I've been pretty happy with Gutenberg. It has some pain points - notably around block recovery - but it produces sane HTML, its CSS payload is minimal, and there's no frontend JS at all (at least in the default blocks). You don't get the millions of features of those other editors, but it's those same features that make them slow and cumbersome. I think Gutenberg strikes a good balance. It's the first page editor I don't hate.

MattieTK 5y ago

I used to work for a major multinational media company. A few years ago the CTO at that media company looked to slash costs. They have a bunch of newspapers all over the world, and they had just acquired an Indian software development agency with experience in WordPress. You can see where this is going. Soon, a programme to launch WordPress globally to every publisher as their CMS. But of course you would be allowed some flexibility. You could bring your own CDN if needed, you could bring your own frontend to read off the API, you could harness some identity management system for login, you could even build your own content store. At that point "using WordPress" just became modifying Gutenberg. I feel sorry for the staff still there who have to constantly fight against Automattic's clear direction in building a Squarespace competitor, to build a tightly locked down and limited editor against the frustrations of the rest of the WordPress ecosystem. WordPress is great, if you realise what WordPress wants to be, and don't fight that.

chris_wot 5y ago
In Australia, Nine’s publishing arm uses Wordpress in the backend. It works great! Curious how the changes will affect them.

skilled 5y ago

My only wish is that someone with deep technical prowess could explain to me why the Gutenberg back-end Editor is so slow. And, enlighten me as to why the core WordPress team aren’t doing much about it.

modernerd 5y ago
Riad's writeup here may be interesting to you on the “why it's slow” part: https://riad.blog/2020/02/14/a-journey-towards-a-performant-web-editor/ https://riad.blog/2020/02/14/a-journey-towards-a-performant-... I don't think it's fair to say the core team isn't doing much to improve or prevent degrading performance — they performance-test every PR: https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/contributors/code/testing-overview/#performance-testing https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/contributors/co... There's also a performance team (for general WP performance, but also covering the editor/JS) that meets regularly and posts minutes. https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/02/01/performance-team-meeting-summary-1-february-2022/ https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/02/01/performance-team-... Page performance from sites made with WP's block editor is pretty good compared to other editor plugins too, which probably matters more than editor performance (more people generally read a site than write it): https://wptavern.com/gutenbergs-faster-performance-is-eroding-page-builders-dominance https://wptavern.com/gutenbergs-faster-performance-is-erodin...
- skilled 5y ago
  As someone who tries to use Gutenberg to make "rich" pages, I disagree. A few weeks ago I was on the verge of emailing Mullenweg directly to ask if he himself uses the editor to write blog posts. In 3 years they haven't fixed a simple issue like backspace jumping. For example, if you write a paragraph, then backspace to clear it - when the block is fully cleared you jump back to the top of the page rather than the block above it. In other words, Gutenberg is not native to the editing experience. It's actually laughable how bad it is if you look at something like Ghost[0]. It's day and night difference in editing experience. Another example is when you start adding "blocks" like CTA buttons and such. Why does the editor need to constantly render those elements in the editor itself? It completely bricks the writing experience. And I tried a lot of things, including switching browsers. Some of my problems were resolved by removing plugins, but overall I have just decided to use Classic Editor[1]. I can, at the very least, write out the entire article and then switch to Gutenberg to style it the way I like. It's stupid, but at least it works. [0]: https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ [1]: https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/

cblconfederate 5y ago

It's just great to see work on self-hosted cms, and PHP nevertheless, the easiest one to host. Open source has forgotten the art of making the web open to everyone, not just to BigTech employees.

mdrzn 5y ago

What's the quickest-to-learn alternative to Wordpress? Possibly with a CLI version so I could edit it via bash commands. Wordpress atm is the quickest way to whip up a website for any objective needed.

adflux 5y ago
>Wordpress atm is the quickest way to whip up a website for any objective needed. Bullshit. Static HTML template + Azure Static Web App/Netlify/... is definitively faster and cheaper to setup. I am a developer who runs multiple wordpress sites for small businesses.
- mdrzn 5y ago
  Most hosting platforms offer to install Wordpress via 1-click. Once installed, it's really easy to use and edit even for a novice. Otherwise, downloading Wordpress.org and uploading the files via FTP is really easy. The most technical can edit via CLI if needed, but it's not mandatory to know how to use a shell. What about Netlify? I've seen and heard about generating static websites, but honestly I have no idea where to start, what technologies are needed, how easy or how hard it is to explain the customer how to edit their own websites once ready..

johnchristopher 5y ago

> The thought of client side marketing interns ‘play(ing) around with site-wide designs’ should make the blood of any professional run cold. Sites that have been painstakingly, designed and built, reviewed and refined to the last detail every step of the way with stakeholders on the client side, optimising UX, legibility, performance and upholding the client’s brand can now be squelched in an instant by someone 3 months into their job who prefers yellow. That's why you set the intern's role to editor.

jrochkind1 5y ago

I'm not a serious WordPress user, so this comes from a perspective of not quite understanding what OP is describing. But. "From the beginning [using wordpress for complicated non-blog sites] has felt like a hack – WordPress is, and always has been a blogging platform at heart," but once WordPress decides to "pull away from this use case completely" [wait, what use case?] to "move the platform to a fully fledged site builder"... that's the problem? Because it sounds like they're intending to be moving toward the OP's use case, not away from it? Can someone explain what i'm seeing as tension here?

tyingq 5y ago
It sounds like he's worried his customers will decide he's not needed anymore. Like, if their perception is that they only call him when layout and style changes are needed, and they can now (somewhat) do that themselves.
dabernathy89 5y ago
> wait, what use case? Blogging > toward the OP's use case No, they have moved toward general purpose site building, not focused on _blogging_
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  I thought OP was saying that they did not use WP for blogging, from the start, which always felt like a hack since WP was focused on blogging, but OP made it work anyway. Did I misunderstand? I don't think so. OP says: > I build websites for a living. Lots of them. These websites are designed by a team of designers who design complex, bespoke, heavily branded layouts. I take those designs and my team of developers and I turn them into corporate websites, generally for medium sized industrial clients. > Sometimes the websites are big brochures, sometimes they have complex functionality. Sometimes both. They run to hundreds of pages and posts, composed of multiple layouts, templates and using, typically, 20 or more discrete modules, each configurable in multiple ways by the end user when the sites are ultimately turned over for the marketing staff of these mid sized companies to edit. > Many of them use WordPress as a CMS. From the beginning this has felt like a hack OP does not describe what they do for a living as blogging or providing blogs. I see OP saying that they always used WP as a general "CMS", for "websites" that may be "big brochures" or "have complex functionality", which are not mainly blogs. Right?

hk1337 5y ago

Hubspot is a great option if you can do it. Keep your app and marketing site separated.

johnchristopher 5y ago

Author mentions Twill. https://demo.twill.io/ https://demo.twill.io/. Looks interesting, like a big shiny ACF front-end. I wonder what the back-end looks like for dev. edit: ah, it's a laravel package.

omnimus 5y ago
Its pretty great CMS but its mostly laravel you need to be comfortable with it or its going to be rough. I think it makes sense if your site requires advanced functionality. I think there are more productive alternatives for most people like Kirby CMS, Craft CMS that have great docs and focus on the CMS part very well.

pantulis 5y ago

"The thought of client side marketing interns ‘play(ing) around with site-wide designs’ should make the blood of any professional run cold." I cannot even begin to fathom the level of cringeness from this assertion. If you think like this you should not be doing client work.

devmor 5y ago

I always liked WordPress for what it is, but eventually I stopped recommending it to my clients because it made them dangerous. I had to severely lock down most of the functionality to keep them from shooting themselves in the foot and it reflecting bad on me.

benfrain 5y ago

My blog has been on Wordpress since about 2007. It works, and I appreciate that it’s free but I’ve always hated working with it. If someone made a node based equivalent (so I can at least use a modern templating language) that supported comments I would be all over it. The commenting system is the only real reason I stay. There’s nothing else I can find that doesn’t necessitate stitching multiple services together just to get commenting that I can find. And as for being able to spin up a local dev version for casual edits — horrid DX! I wonder whether a big reason social media has stolen our online interactions over the years is because there are few (no?) blogging platforms that support comments?!

Hoefner 5y ago
Try https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ (https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost)
- benfrain 5y ago
  No commenting!

donohoe 5y ago

I've too have been working with WordPress a long time. I built Quartz (qz.com) and The New Yorker (newyokrer.com) and other sites on WP. However so much of what this author says resonates more than I care to admit. I have a good relationship with WP but I worry about the future.

samtho 5y ago
I’m actually surprised that there is not a popular news-oriented CMS (that I’m aware of). WP has survived so long despite the abysmal architecture and myriad of security issues because it’s just so damn flexible. It really has somehow both transcended blogging while being so stuck in it. I suppose it’s ubiquity, especially during the earlier days of corporate internet, allowed all walks of life to start a website with it. They made it super easy to find, install, buy, or build bespoke themes and plugins, which undoubtedly contributed to its widespread adoption. I remember doing a lot of work with customizations integrating WP and phpBB specifically, which ended up earning me an unreasonable amount money for a 16 year old. I have a certain fondness of WP but it’s heyday has long past coinciding with the abandonment of the independent internet. I greatly worry about its future mainly because it’s demise would represent the end of an era. Perhaps the backlash to centralized social media will provide an avenue for a platform like WP to see a resurgence, but Automattic would really need to make a conscious effort to pivot with the changing times if they want to ride that wave. It won’t be the Wordpress as we’ve known it but (hopefully) the ethos remains. I wish them all the luck.
- yurishimo 5y ago
  You mention the security stuff, but for any site running at scale, it's not really an issue. They don't use a billion plugins and they usually run on infrastructure designed from the ground up to run WP. Heck, A8C's hosting platform (WP VIP) won't let you deploy code that doesn't pass a host of linting rules. I'm working on a site right now for a big company that's moving to VIP. We have 7 plugins, 2 of which are from VIP, and then 4 that the company I work for wrote and now maintains for use across all of our clients. Everything else is custom. The theme is 100% custom. When orgs choose WP, they do it because they want the interface to reduce training costs, and the platform to reduce dev costs because they can take that codebase to dozens of different consultancy agencies and have them pick up where the last people left off.

mgas 5y ago

> Drupal was, and still is, a clunking monster, unfriendly to developers and editors alike I feel like this is an unnecessary and inflammatory swipe, typical of coder-bro culture. Both Drupal and Wordpress are open source tools that have survived for years, are built on tested and long-lasting languages, and serve the people who both build and use them. Everyone is always crying about how nothing ever stays the same, and and the same time, how the-next-new-thing-ism is ruining the web. And then there is this comment thread with every other response trying to push some ostensibly better and easier thing that stands no chance of surviving more than a couple of years, because CMSs need communities to keep them alive. I am a proud member of the Drupal community. I struggle with it sometimes, but it is still amazing at how much you can accomplish with core and contrib modules. And don't forget, some organizations need a giant, clunky CMS. We're not all building websites for cutting edge, VC-backed, brochure-based unicorns. My clients need a framework that has legs to stand on for the next decade to come.

leonk 5y ago
Totally agree. I don’t understand why the author couldn’t just say that Drupal is for a different use case. Rather than label a whole framework, the people who build it, work with it, and use it, as basically “incorrect”.

dabernathy89 5y ago

> You would use ACF, especially its flexible content fields, to allow you to add repeatable and repositionable content in specific areas of your website. > Sites that have been painstakingly, designed and built, reviewed and refined to the last detail every step of the way with stakeholders on the client side, optimising UX, legibility, performance and upholding the client’s brand can now be squelched in an instant by someone 3 months into their job who prefers yellow. Completely agree. Back when I was building w/ WordPress, ACF was the best choice for building layouts because you could provide only as much flexibility as you wanted the client to have. You could give them lots of power to easily update their content but constrain their ability to ruin the design. I gave a short talk at a WordCamp about this exact benefit of ACF over page builders (at the time).

jasonshen 5y ago

Surprised no one has talked yet about Ghost, which feels like what Wordpress would have been had it been founded in 2013 instead of 2003. I recently converged from Substack, Convertkit and Wordpress down to just Ghost. It's not perfect but it's damn good. https://www.jasonshen.com/switching-to-ghost/ https://www.jasonshen.com/switching-to-ghost/

id02009 5y ago

This reminds me of late 2000s, when a WYSIWYG editor had a potential to completely brake the pages layout with a single unclosed tag. Two steps forward, one backwards.