5 ms·

We can make assumptions all day but for me, the worst thing about WordPress is EASILY Plugin Hell. I can update all plugins this morning and they all want upda

by dpcan 4y ago

We can make assumptions all day but for me, the worst thing about WordPress is EASILY Plugin Hell. I can update all plugins this morning and they all want updates by the end of the day. And then when they break it’s a disaster. WordPress itself needs to take a chill pill too. Leave a version out for a year or more, and only small security patches. In the last year, I think we’ve seen block widgets, JQuery migrate nightmares, that new blocks theme thing, and more. I just want them to back off already. It’s a nightmare keeping hundreds of clients up to date.

albatrosstrophy 4y ago
I host a hobby website and use WordPress for everything. Even as an entry level user, I agree the amount of plugins are ridiculous. But it's free and I only pay for hosting. Anyone knows what are the alternatives for someone like me?
- marc_io 4y ago
  Publii is an alternative to publish a simple blog for free without paying for hosting from your own computer. It's much, much more simple and limited than WordPress, but this is its strength for some people.
- hrbf 4y ago
  Recently, I’ve come to appreciate Kirby (https://getkirby.com/ https://getkirby.com/). It’s commercial but reasonably priced. Clean, powerful and relaxed with updates.
  - manuelmoreale 4y ago
    As someone with probably 30+ sites built with Kirby I’d agree that it’s better than WP in many ways but it’s very developers oriented and it’s not really a replacement for WP for the average user. And when I say developers oriented I mean it in a good way.
    - hrbf 4y ago
      Entirely agree with that assessment. All my clients love the Kirby backend and as a developer it’s a pleasure to work with the system. Documentation for first-time users could be better though. The YAML page structure took some time to wrap my head around. Also, as it’s flat-file, backups are trivial – just copy the folder or commit everything to a VCS.
      - errnesto 4y ago
        I can second that. Customers really love the very simple and clean UI and I love the Developer experience :-) But yes it would not be a replacement for WordPress if you want to click together a site with themes and plugins
- gwd 4y ago
  I've been looking at replacing my project's website with Hugo (https://gohugo.io https://gohugo.io). Rather than generating a web page dynamically every time someone comes to your site, you generate the entire website statically whenever you change something. That means hosting can be entirely a "dumb" web server (or a "dumb" web server + apis which feed info to javascript, if you really need it). It also means: * you can keep everything in version control to roll things back * content can be fed to it programmatically * project members can send pull request to post content, rather than requiring a special account I've only gone through some examples from a book so far, but it looks pretty powerful, and is has good recommendations from others in the community. I don't (yet) have a personal web presence, but if I do, it will definitely be something like Hugo.
  - Theizestooke 4y ago
    There's also a plugin for Wordpress (SimplyStatic, I believe) that creates a static copy of your site. I use it in conjuction with bitbucket and netlify, and it works quite well.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    And the dumb web server can be Firebase Hosting, Netlify, Vercel, CloudFlare Pages, with extremely generous free tiers and practically zero maintenance.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  Last time I looked, Hugo + GitHub + Netlify is free and fast, within fairly generous limits. Hugo is great… once you work out how it works.
- nhumrich 4y ago
  Web flow
NGRhodes 4y ago
I pay a small amount extra a month for my host to manage upgrades of my own WordPress sites and common plugins, I keep things simple on purpose to minimise the plugin hell you mention. As much as I can do this myself, I can't guarantee timely updates as a private individual. I've migrated 2 WP sites (one for work, one for a local club) to github pages to reduce the maintenance pain of WordPress.
lucideer 4y ago
These are the symptoms but the cause is deeper. The WordPress codebase is a disaster, and the problem is self-compounding. The founders / core have found success writing disastrous code, and as such have no impetus to be aware of the benefits of higher quality - this is largely because (as you point out) the model of development shifts the burden to small individual website makers deploying (& maintaining / firefighting) WordPress. Since it's open-source, a disastrous codebase could be "fixed" over time if experienced engineers were willing to join and contribute to the project over time, but the culture of QA-ignorance among existing core contributors has a tendency to exasperate experienced engineers. I'm not saying it's a "toxic" culture per se - it's very open, and especially welcoming of new / inexperienced / beginner contributors, which is certainly cool for learning. But once contributors gain a little knowledge they go one of either two ways: knowledge-stagnation (enough to contribute but not to improve), or exasperation (enough to know how to improve but lacking motivation to make that uphill battle). The culture from core extends to the plugins, not only because there's overlap in devs, but also because the APIs the plugin community have to use are garbage. This means many of the popular plugins - while they may have high-quality UX and design - have very poor code behind that. All the above means that WordPress needs constant small fixes contributed by an army of devs to prevent it falling over / getting hacked, which massively increases the update frequency: there's nothing preventative within it's architecture, it's all reactive patches. It also means it'll only be a viable platform as long as its extremely popular: once popularity decreases a little, the maintenance burden will be far too high for the smaller community to sustain, and existing installs are going to be even more vulnerable than ever.
- hattmall 4y ago
  WordPress backend code is insane, but it is one of the few systems in widespread usage where you can reliably reverse engineer your way to solving bugs or making changes with minimal knowledge and effort. There are so many JavaScript first systems in use today that are practically impossible to debug / modify without complete intimate knowledge of the codebase.
  - lucideer 4y ago
    Yes and no. There's two ends to the spectrum: over-enginerring and spagetti. Basically overplanned layers of abstraction agreed by distributed committee vs unplanned mess. A bunch of modern frameworks have gone far too far over the abstraction cliff, but as bad as it gets for people wanting to contribute to those core libraries, the APIs provided for extension and integration are mostly sane, as is error logging. Most importantly of all, they tend to be reasonably stable and secure at their core: updates are less mandatory and LTS cycles are longer for past library versions. So while your complaints are valid, I think the pros and cons weigh heavily against WordPress. Yes, when something broke I could always dive into my WP install with a quick fix, but I never had any way of being sure it worked everywhere (automated testing is nightmarish), never knew how long my fix would last; whether it would be an editor contribution or a plug-in update that would break it, etc. etc. Side effects in WordPress are absolutely out of control.
billpg 4y ago
Here's a plugin that does the thing you need. 50% of the code is the thing you need. The other 50% of code is stuff promoting the pro version.
XCSme 4y ago
I have been running a few WordPress sites for like 10 years now and never had any of them randomly break, I just use a few core plugins and two premium themes and update them once in a while.

by dpcan 4y ago

albatrosstrophy 4y ago

I host a hobby website and use WordPress for everything. Even as an entry level user, I agree the amount of plugins are ridiculous. But it's free and I only pay for hosting. Anyone knows what are the alternatives for someone like me?

marc_io 4y ago
Publii is an alternative to publish a simple blog for free without paying for hosting from your own computer. It's much, much more simple and limited than WordPress, but this is its strength for some people.
hrbf 4y ago
Recently, I’ve come to appreciate Kirby (https://getkirby.com/ https://getkirby.com/). It’s commercial but reasonably priced. Clean, powerful and relaxed with updates.
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  As someone with probably 30+ sites built with Kirby I’d agree that it’s better than WP in many ways but it’s very developers oriented and it’s not really a replacement for WP for the average user. And when I say developers oriented I mean it in a good way.
  - hrbf 4y ago
    Entirely agree with that assessment. All my clients love the Kirby backend and as a developer it’s a pleasure to work with the system. Documentation for first-time users could be better though. The YAML page structure took some time to wrap my head around. Also, as it’s flat-file, backups are trivial – just copy the folder or commit everything to a VCS.
    - errnesto 4y ago
      I can second that. Customers really love the very simple and clean UI and I love the Developer experience :-) But yes it would not be a replacement for WordPress if you want to click together a site with themes and plugins
gwd 4y ago
I've been looking at replacing my project's website with Hugo (https://gohugo.io https://gohugo.io). Rather than generating a web page dynamically every time someone comes to your site, you generate the entire website statically whenever you change something. That means hosting can be entirely a "dumb" web server (or a "dumb" web server + apis which feed info to javascript, if you really need it). It also means: * you can keep everything in version control to roll things back * content can be fed to it programmatically * project members can send pull request to post content, rather than requiring a special account I've only gone through some examples from a book so far, but it looks pretty powerful, and is has good recommendations from others in the community. I don't (yet) have a personal web presence, but if I do, it will definitely be something like Hugo.
- Theizestooke 4y ago
  There's also a plugin for Wordpress (SimplyStatic, I believe) that creates a static copy of your site. I use it in conjuction with bitbucket and netlify, and it works quite well.
- sofixa 4y ago
  And the dumb web server can be Firebase Hosting, Netlify, Vercel, CloudFlare Pages, with extremely generous free tiers and practically zero maintenance.
doctor_eval 4y ago
Last time I looked, Hugo + GitHub + Netlify is free and fast, within fairly generous limits. Hugo is great… once you work out how it works.
nhumrich 4y ago
Web flow

NGRhodes 4y ago

I pay a small amount extra a month for my host to manage upgrades of my own WordPress sites and common plugins, I keep things simple on purpose to minimise the plugin hell you mention. As much as I can do this myself, I can't guarantee timely updates as a private individual. I've migrated 2 WP sites (one for work, one for a local club) to github pages to reduce the maintenance pain of WordPress.

lucideer 4y ago

These are the symptoms but the cause is deeper. The WordPress codebase is a disaster, and the problem is self-compounding. The founders / core have found success writing disastrous code, and as such have no impetus to be aware of the benefits of higher quality - this is largely because (as you point out) the model of development shifts the burden to small individual website makers deploying (& maintaining / firefighting) WordPress. Since it's open-source, a disastrous codebase could be "fixed" over time if experienced engineers were willing to join and contribute to the project over time, but the culture of QA-ignorance among existing core contributors has a tendency to exasperate experienced engineers. I'm not saying it's a "toxic" culture per se - it's very open, and especially welcoming of new / inexperienced / beginner contributors, which is certainly cool for learning. But once contributors gain a little knowledge they go one of either two ways: knowledge-stagnation (enough to contribute but not to improve), or exasperation (enough to know how to improve but lacking motivation to make that uphill battle). The culture from core extends to the plugins, not only because there's overlap in devs, but also because the APIs the plugin community have to use are garbage. This means many of the popular plugins - while they may have high-quality UX and design - have very poor code behind that. All the above means that WordPress needs constant small fixes contributed by an army of devs to prevent it falling over / getting hacked, which massively increases the update frequency: there's nothing preventative within it's architecture, it's all reactive patches. It also means it'll only be a viable platform as long as its extremely popular: once popularity decreases a little, the maintenance burden will be far too high for the smaller community to sustain, and existing installs are going to be even more vulnerable than ever.

hattmall 4y ago
WordPress backend code is insane, but it is one of the few systems in widespread usage where you can reliably reverse engineer your way to solving bugs or making changes with minimal knowledge and effort. There are so many JavaScript first systems in use today that are practically impossible to debug / modify without complete intimate knowledge of the codebase.
- lucideer 4y ago
  Yes and no. There's two ends to the spectrum: over-enginerring and spagetti. Basically overplanned layers of abstraction agreed by distributed committee vs unplanned mess. A bunch of modern frameworks have gone far too far over the abstraction cliff, but as bad as it gets for people wanting to contribute to those core libraries, the APIs provided for extension and integration are mostly sane, as is error logging. Most importantly of all, they tend to be reasonably stable and secure at their core: updates are less mandatory and LTS cycles are longer for past library versions. So while your complaints are valid, I think the pros and cons weigh heavily against WordPress. Yes, when something broke I could always dive into my WP install with a quick fix, but I never had any way of being sure it worked everywhere (automated testing is nightmarish), never knew how long my fix would last; whether it would be an editor contribution or a plug-in update that would break it, etc. etc. Side effects in WordPress are absolutely out of control.

billpg 4y ago

Here's a plugin that does the thing you need. 50% of the code is the thing you need. The other 50% of code is stuff promoting the pro version.

XCSme 4y ago

I have been running a few WordPress sites for like 10 years now and never had any of them randomly break, I just use a few core plugins and two premium themes and update them once in a while.