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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

by 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.
  - Karunamon 5y ago
    ...and face a fully justified user/dev revolt that makes Mozilla's worst day look like a single angry tweet. Remember that there's a massive paid ecosystem around WP plugins & themes, not to mention the stuff Automattic sells (hosting, their own plugins, etc.) They can't afford it, and most people don't want it. I think history shows that taking flexibility away from something popular because of its flexibility is not good business. At least you can install a plugin now and completely sidestep this awful 'site builder'. If that goes away, hoo boy.
    - BarryMilo 5y ago
      Death by a thousand cuts it is then.
    - aksss 5y ago
      Wish Microsoft put some thought into this before completely kneecapping the start menu customization and capability in Windows 11.
  - gwern 5y ago
    Yes, after 18 years of WordPress development, the architects' excuse of blaming bad actors in plugin ecosystem has begun to wear thin, especially when contemporaries or predecessors like Firefox or Debian never had remotely the same level of problems with their users being hacked constantly by plugins/packages.
    - JimDabell 5y ago
      “No Way To Prevent This,” Says Only CMS Where This Regularly Happens
    - lmm 5y ago
      Firefox has had the converse problem of constantly breaking all their plugins by changing their APIs etc..
      - kmeisthax 5y ago
- lmkg 5y ago
  It's fair to the extent that you're required to rely on 3rd-party products to get something done. If WordPress-the-Technology uses WordPress-the-Ecosystem as a main selling point, then its their choice to bundle their reputations together.
  - djhn 5y ago
    Interesting concept: reputation bundling. In this instance of the technology and its ecosystem, but potentially useful in describing other situations as well. Is this something you came up with on the spot? I haven't come across this idea in communications literature and a cursory search only brings up other types of bundling in economics/business/strategy.
sircastor 5y ago
I know there’s lots of noise about Gutenberg, but I love the block editor. It’s one of the reasons I stick with Wordpress rather than moving to a SSG.
- acomjean 5y ago
  Gutenberg is a bit of a pain to get started with, but it truly is kinda amazing page layout tool. I think Wordpress needs something like better defaults. You are so dependent on picking a good theme and it seems really hard to tell what’s going on in the theme world.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    I am an intense user of WP since 2016 and I wrote several plugins for my own purposes. The overhaul that came with Gutenberg was painful and it took almost two years to catch and fix all the bugs, for example with embedded videos. But as of 2022, I am happy with Gutenberg and it feels intuitive. I know a few guys who could never make the necessary switch in their heads and hate Gutenberg with a fury of thousand suns, though. All of them are over fifty. Now, Substack has even more intuitive and amateur-user-friendly editor, but a much more limited set of options.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  Gutenberg as a document content editor, is a good concept with truly awful execution (endless bugs).
DamnInteresting 5y ago
I am in almost exactly the same boat. I built my first Wordpress-based website in 2005, and it is still online today. I've had to employ a constellation of plugins (some third-party, some home-grown) to keep Gutenberg from mangling my content. Gutenberg could have (and in my opinion, should have) been just another official plugin. Instead it's trying to break my site's bones so they will re-heal in a new configuration. Begone unwelcome meddler!
taubek 5y ago
I love WordPress. It is kind of a universal tool: you can make simple web sites, you can use it to build complex systems. It is always better if you have developers that know what they are doing. WP development is not installing dozens od plugins to achieve some effect on your web. I guess that WP wants to become "one to rule them all". This means that they strive for even bigger adoption rate among users. FSE is the direction of that. I can totally understand that professional developers are feeling frustrated with the way things are going in WP ecosystem. When Gutenberg was introduced it produced more pain that good things that it has brought at that time. A lot o money is floating around WP and investors want to get their share of the cake. Did you notice all of the investments in WP or plugins that have changed their owners?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dgb23 5y ago
  The issue is that if you’re developing like this on WP you don’t gain much from it except the ability to use a select few plugins and an admin UI. At this point why not use a solid PHP framework like Laravel?
  - taubek 5y ago
    I was on the other side of the table, I was working for a company that was developing WP plugins bunt I'm not a developer. During my years there I've meet a lot of developers. I've seen different approaches. The most surprising thing to me was headless WP. I didn't get why do they even want WP. Take a look at WooCommerce. I guess that it is much easier to do some of the custom code than to reinvent a wheel. Not to mention learning users on how to do something in a totally different environment.
    - globalise83 5y ago
      Headless WooCommerce is actually pretty cool - you get free admin UI for managing the shop, and can build whatever frontend you like without the constraints of WordPress. Seems like a no-brainer for anyone who can do a bit of frontend development.
johnchristopher 5y ago
How does ClassicPress prevent the intern from painting the site yellow ? /s
cmccomas 5y ago
I feel your pain. We have a WordPress network pushing 600 sites and I'm kind of concerned about the future of WordPress and think daily about migrating over to Drupal (or even exploring CascadeCMS or something along those lines). When we picked WordPress back in ~2012 as our CMS it was because of how simple the editing of post/page content was compared to the alternatives. The majority of our content editors are student assistants, graduate assistants, least tenured faculty member, etc. People who aren't that technical and also have a dozen other things that are their actual job, unlike updating the departmental website which just got dumped on them. We've done a ton of work with our theme and in-house plugins to keep WordPress super simple/basic for them, overwriting and undoing a lot of what core has added over the years. Most of the site editors find Gutenberg too complicated, so we're running the Classic Editor plugin in a ton of our sites. Our content editors just want to come to a CMS, have a text box where they can add content, add heading tags, links, images, use some of our shortcodes (from custom TinyMCE buttons) to add some styled components to their page. They don't want a full-site editor, they're not remotely qualified from a UI/accessibility perspective to be messing with anything really than just the base content of the page.
- amanzi 5y ago
  Yep - great summary of my current position. I also use the Classic Editor plugin but still let users toggle the setting if they choose too.

by amanzi 5y ago

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.
- Karunamon 5y ago
  ...and face a fully justified user/dev revolt that makes Mozilla's worst day look like a single angry tweet. Remember that there's a massive paid ecosystem around WP plugins & themes, not to mention the stuff Automattic sells (hosting, their own plugins, etc.) They can't afford it, and most people don't want it. I think history shows that taking flexibility away from something popular because of its flexibility is not good business. At least you can install a plugin now and completely sidestep this awful 'site builder'. If that goes away, hoo boy.
  - BarryMilo 5y ago
    Death by a thousand cuts it is then.
  - aksss 5y ago
    Wish Microsoft put some thought into this before completely kneecapping the start menu customization and capability in Windows 11.
- gwern 5y ago
  Yes, after 18 years of WordPress development, the architects' excuse of blaming bad actors in plugin ecosystem has begun to wear thin, especially when contemporaries or predecessors like Firefox or Debian never had remotely the same level of problems with their users being hacked constantly by plugins/packages.
  - JimDabell 5y ago
    “No Way To Prevent This,” Says Only CMS Where This Regularly Happens
  - lmm 5y ago
    Firefox has had the converse problem of constantly breaking all their plugins by changing their APIs etc..
    - kmeisthax 5y ago
lmkg 5y ago
It's fair to the extent that you're required to rely on 3rd-party products to get something done. If WordPress-the-Technology uses WordPress-the-Ecosystem as a main selling point, then its their choice to bundle their reputations together.
- djhn 5y ago
  Interesting concept: reputation bundling. In this instance of the technology and its ecosystem, but potentially useful in describing other situations as well. Is this something you came up with on the spot? I haven't come across this idea in communications literature and a cursory search only brings up other types of bundling in economics/business/strategy.

sircastor 5y ago

I know there’s lots of noise about Gutenberg, but I love the block editor. It’s one of the reasons I stick with Wordpress rather than moving to a SSG.

acomjean 5y ago
Gutenberg is a bit of a pain to get started with, but it truly is kinda amazing page layout tool. I think Wordpress needs something like better defaults. You are so dependent on picking a good theme and it seems really hard to tell what’s going on in the theme world.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  I am an intense user of WP since 2016 and I wrote several plugins for my own purposes. The overhaul that came with Gutenberg was painful and it took almost two years to catch and fix all the bugs, for example with embedded videos. But as of 2022, I am happy with Gutenberg and it feels intuitive. I know a few guys who could never make the necessary switch in their heads and hate Gutenberg with a fury of thousand suns, though. All of them are over fifty. Now, Substack has even more intuitive and amateur-user-friendly editor, but a much more limited set of options.
nyanpasu64 5y ago
Gutenberg as a document content editor, is a good concept with truly awful execution (endless bugs).

DamnInteresting 5y ago

I am in almost exactly the same boat. I built my first Wordpress-based website in 2005, and it is still online today. I've had to employ a constellation of plugins (some third-party, some home-grown) to keep Gutenberg from mangling my content. Gutenberg could have (and in my opinion, should have) been just another official plugin. Instead it's trying to break my site's bones so they will re-heal in a new configuration. Begone unwelcome meddler!

taubek 5y ago

I love WordPress. It is kind of a universal tool: you can make simple web sites, you can use it to build complex systems. It is always better if you have developers that know what they are doing. WP development is not installing dozens od plugins to achieve some effect on your web. I guess that WP wants to become "one to rule them all". This means that they strive for even bigger adoption rate among users. FSE is the direction of that. I can totally understand that professional developers are feeling frustrated with the way things are going in WP ecosystem. When Gutenberg was introduced it produced more pain that good things that it has brought at that time. A lot o money is floating around WP and investors want to get their share of the cake. Did you notice all of the investments in WP or plugins that have changed their owners?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dgb23 5y ago
The issue is that if you’re developing like this on WP you don’t gain much from it except the ability to use a select few plugins and an admin UI. At this point why not use a solid PHP framework like Laravel?
- taubek 5y ago
  I was on the other side of the table, I was working for a company that was developing WP plugins bunt I'm not a developer. During my years there I've meet a lot of developers. I've seen different approaches. The most surprising thing to me was headless WP. I didn't get why do they even want WP. Take a look at WooCommerce. I guess that it is much easier to do some of the custom code than to reinvent a wheel. Not to mention learning users on how to do something in a totally different environment.
  - globalise83 5y ago
    Headless WooCommerce is actually pretty cool - you get free admin UI for managing the shop, and can build whatever frontend you like without the constraints of WordPress. Seems like a no-brainer for anyone who can do a bit of frontend development.

johnchristopher 5y ago

How does ClassicPress prevent the intern from painting the site yellow ? /s

cmccomas 5y ago

I feel your pain. We have a WordPress network pushing 600 sites and I'm kind of concerned about the future of WordPress and think daily about migrating over to Drupal (or even exploring CascadeCMS or something along those lines). When we picked WordPress back in ~2012 as our CMS it was because of how simple the editing of post/page content was compared to the alternatives. The majority of our content editors are student assistants, graduate assistants, least tenured faculty member, etc. People who aren't that technical and also have a dozen other things that are their actual job, unlike updating the departmental website which just got dumped on them. We've done a ton of work with our theme and in-house plugins to keep WordPress super simple/basic for them, overwriting and undoing a lot of what core has added over the years. Most of the site editors find Gutenberg too complicated, so we're running the Classic Editor plugin in a ton of our sites. Our content editors just want to come to a CMS, have a text box where they can add content, add heading tags, links, images, use some of our shortcodes (from custom TinyMCE buttons) to add some styled components to their page. They don't want a full-site editor, they're not remotely qualified from a UI/accessibility perspective to be messing with anything really than just the base content of the page.

amanzi 5y ago
Yep - great summary of my current position. I also use the Classic Editor plugin but still let users toggle the setting if they choose too.