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Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld
- pndy 3y ago#10 Greed is eternal.
- camillomiller 3y agoIs this post talking about hosted wordpress? Because it makes no sense at all otherwise (and even then…) Wordpress is fully customizable. Why would you need a plugin to make a menu sticky? Either I am missing something here or this OP was trying to much with its Star Trek references to actually understand how Wordpress works
- erellsworth 3y agoThey're talking about WordPress.com, not self-hosted WordPress. It's not a good comparison, in my opinion.
- mpol 3y agoNo, not wordpress.com, but a managed hosting provider. That means that wordpress core is managed by the hosting company, but you can install any plugin or theme. In the article they compared it to wordpress.com, so I'm sure it's not about that.
- erellsworth 3y agoWow, you're right. It looks like they are talking about some other managed service. That makes the post even more meaningless since they don't even say what managed service they are using. It seems they are complaining about what some unnamed managed service is charging them and framing it as criticism of WordPress.
- Gazoo101 3y agoThe point is to comment on vanilla Wordpress itself. I fail to see how the managed service I'm using is relevant? Where exactly in the article am I complaining about being charged for having someone manage my backend?
- camillomiller 3y agoWhat do you even mean by vanilla wordpress? Get a hosting service with a DB for a couple bucks a month, install wordpress, do whatever you want with it by following the wonderful documentation that is anywhere on the internet. What else is there to talk about?
- erellsworth 3y agoWell, if you're talking about vanilla WordPress, the article doesn't make any sense. Vanilla WordPress is completely free. There are no fees for adding different fonts or any of the other things you say you were charged for. So if it's not a managed service charging you those fees, where are they coming from?
- Gazoo101 3y agoThe fees are coming from turn-key solutions that offer to solve the issues I note in the article, e.g. paid themes or paid plug-ins. I've made sure to more explicitly motivate the intent of switching to Wordpress being to reduce custom code and on-going maintenance, in the article.
- MightyBuzzard 3y ago[dead]
- Gazoo101 3y agoI'm talking about using native Wordpress functionality on a managed service. Yes, Wordpress is customizable of course, but the goal was to consider the functionality provided in its basic form without payment, and which features required payment. Granted, changing the CSS is straight-forward, but not necessarily for everyone switching to Wordpress.
- erellsworth 3y ago> This post is the first in a three-part series about migrating from a self-built PHP-based Laravel backend to a managed WordPress backend. This seems like a setup for a lot of apples to oranges comparisons.
- sonicanatidae 3y agoLet's not forget the horrific number and level of vulns identified in WordPress.
- josefresco 3y agoI manage a network of 300+ WordPress sites. These vulnerabilities, are they in the room with you now? I'm joking of course but like Windows, WordPress is attacked because it's ubiquitous. Yet, here I am running a network of 300 sites with over 600 deferent plugins and hundreds of themes over a span of almost a decade without major issue. How is this possible? Should I pick some obscure CMS instead? (aka security through obscurity). WordPress has served my clients well despite being "riddled" with security holes.
- jshwlkr 3y agoSimilar experience. I just make sure I only put trustworthy plugins on the server and run updates in a timely manner and I have never had a problem.
- sonicanatidae 3y agoIt hasn't happened to mine, so it's all bullshit. FTFY. Quick, now tell us how secure Adobe products are.
- Aloha 3y agoI'd agree with you that wordpress core of 10+ years ago had constant security issues, now, its mostly in plugins, and even then, not as often.
- josefresco 3y ago"mine" That critique would be fair if I was talking about my one WordPress site but I'm talking about hundreds, maybe even a thousand if you count sites I've built that came and went. It's a pretty decent sample size (IMHO) both for the number of instances but also the time period (10+ years). And it's also not 300 clone sites, each one was built unique, and each has their own mix of plugins & themes.
- GartzenDeHaes 3y agoRule of acquisition number N+1, free things are too expensive.
- zzzeek 3y agoThis is cool, Wordpress should have you buy "latinum" up front and that's what you actually use to pay for your toolbar or custom color scheme.
- pndy 3y agoYou mean some kind of digitally "pressed" latinum currency?
- karaterobot 3y agoCounterpoint: I've had a Wordpress blog for almost 20 years, I've never paid anyone a dime. I don't know PHP, and I only use two plugins, both of them free. With a little bit of Googling you can just hack together whatever you need, because there is a lot of documentation for Wordpress. The author is a web dev, so I'm surprised their first thought was that they needed a plugin to load a font.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoIt's because customizing a Wordpress theme is a daunting task at first, especially if you try and use the builtin editor instead of taking a theme and stripping it down. WP's page layout and templating is... Different. Which is why it's turned into its own specialism / industry.
- gifmenger 3y agoYet using it as a headless CMS allows any dev to just circumvent it's theming dialect altogether. I think that really illustrates Wordpress' versatility.
- lolinder 3y agoAgain, though, we're talking about a web dev who had previously been managing their own hand-rolled blogging solution. Something like sticky menus should be trivial for any web dev: find the menu you want to make sticky in the web inspector. Modify the styles inline until you make it work. Grep the theme for the selector that you modified. Copy your modifications.
- Gazoo101 3y agoDo you manage the Wordpress blog installation yourself? As part 2 will detail, the whole purpose of switching to Wordpress was to reduce the work load of building/maintaining the site. I fully agree, Wordpress is swimming in tutorials, docs, and sometimes guides disguised as advertisements for a paid theme. Re. changing fonts - My actual first thought was 'Surely I just need to find the settings in WP that let's me change the theme's font', and my experience was that Wordpress did not 'natively' support this.
- josefresco 3y agoClever title, not a lot of meat here. I have this same reaction whenever I try a new tool. How do I do this? Does it require an addon? What are the upgrades? All pretty basic 101 stuff for a new user. When I jump from WordPress to Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, I have all the same questions and frustrations.
- FireBeyond 3y agoPromising potential. > June 9, 2023 > This post is the first in a three-part series about migrating from a self-built PHP-based Laravel backend to a managed WordPress backend. Cool... > But it’s still worth it. Find out next week part two in this series, same bat-time, same bat-website… Excellent. Let's go find parts two and three! Oh. There is no part two. Or three.
- Gazoo101 3y agoA fair point - I had the intention of publishing them all together and got distracted. I thought I'd share the post here, as I now actually do have all the parts lined up and will have them ready within the next 2 weeks. Happy to ping you with them if you're still keen.
- FireBeyond 3y agoAwesome! I will keep watch! And thank you :)
- Gazoo101 3y agoPart 2 is available now: https://www.lasselaursen.com/post/the-virtue-of-selective-ignorance-and-why-i-finally-switched-to-wordpress/ https://www.lasselaursen.com/post/the-virtue-of-selective-ig...
- pacifika 3y agoWordpress core is quite secure, remove write access outside the upload folder. It contains sticky post now and the query block. A light box has varying requirements so there is not one solution but try the builtin gallery block. And as the article mentions it has a healthy ecosystem.
- lioeters 3y agoI hope the author goes more in detail about how the plugin "Loops & Logic" solved their need of listing the newest blog posts. Looks like it's a flexible templating system. https://loopsandlogic.com/ https://loopsandlogic.com/
- Gazoo101 3y agoI'll make a note of that for part 3 - thanks for the suggestion!
- _3u10 3y agoDeveloper time is of course, free.
- sovietmudkipz 3y agoI honestly like the Wordpress developer model. I’ve written themes and plugins. I’ve learned how to write tests for both. I like how they released the “wp-cli” so I can manage Wordpress outside the web GUI. It sometimes does feel a little janky in a lot of ways but it offers a lot of value as a framework. Wordpress gets a lot of undue hate, imo. It just works, at least for me and my workloads. I worry I’ll encounter some legendary source of friction that turns many devs off to Wordpress but so far I haven’t. YMMV.
- Vox_Leone 3y agoAllow me to note that you only get to using plugins after upgrading your tier. Strangely, their lower tier plan is called 'Premium'. Another fundamental thing requiring upgrade is access to the canonical address if you're using a custom domain. Control over canonical address configuration should be integral part of any paid plan, in any platform.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jrm4 3y agoTell me you don't understand the difficulty of maintaining a really useful and complex free tool without...you know. All the writer has done here is screamed their ignorance (which, to be fair, is not at all simple) of the complexities of using free/open source and also maintaining something huge and complex WITHOUT being huge jerks about it. I do wish there was a simpler way to essentially do two tiers of "service" -- but for now, "you either 'pay' in terms of digging in and learning or you 'pay' with real money" seems pretty reasonable.
- Gazoo101 3y agoI find Wordpress on the whole incredibly useful and the functionality it does offer is great, not complex. My issue is with the omission of what I perceive to be some basic and universally useful features. What's basic is - of course - subjective, and you're welcome to disagree. As noted in my article, I share your preference with a basic paid tier just to get in the door.
- scarecrowbob 3y agoAs someone who is on a, uh, "sabbatical" from programing after 10 years making WP work for gov, edu, and various businesses I have worked on many hundreds of WP sites. I still use it for my personal blog and for marketing my various projects. The article doesn't have a lot of meat, but I think the title alone was interesting. My primary issue with the WP ecosystem is how folks end up paying for GPL software. Leaving aside my opinions about the actual legal weight of commercial plugins in that ecosystem, having a bunch of systems with un-patchable software (until you pay for the latest release) has caused a whole lot of problems for the world. There are other problems with WP of course. I'm completely burned out on trying to fix things with it, so hopefully I can find some other work when I get done trying to be a musician. However, I find the community is quite unique in its lack of tolerance for the idea that GPL means GPL.
- jrm4 3y agoThat's kind of weird, the whole thing strikes me as a reasonable fudge around the GPL (which I agree is incredibly important.) Do your homework in the ecosystem and you can get that experience, or just pay to get around it seems reasonable, if definitely not ideal?
- scarecrowbob 3y agoYeah, that's a legitimate point of view. I've seen enough cases where folks have paid to "get around" some problem and it's ended very poorly, often require extensive work that could have been don correctly the first time with some bespoke code instead of many layers of kludges. Could just be a problem with low-rent software dev in general, but the plugin ecosystem doesn more harm than good in that area, at least IME.
- mdgrech23 3y agoI started my career on Wordpress. In a lot of ways it was where I learned to program. I'm surprised you stuck w/ it as long as you did, guessing the cash must of been pretty good. To me once you're deep into the internals and writing your own plug-ins you might as well just build something custom. I think it's a good middle ground for someone technical and willing to put in a lot of time but not the know how to truly make something custom.
- burnte 3y agoUser discovers paid plugins from third parties, blames first party, completely ignores the plethora of free plugins and the ability to also add it yourself, manufactured outrage ensues.
- oooyay 3y agoWhen I was younger and much more into PHP as a language WordPress was a great fit for me. WordPress templating was rather obtuse for what's supposed to be a view layer and plugins made use of some pretty exotic APIs that I found hard to understand when not being knee deep in WordPress-land. Recently I moved my static blog (what it's been since the WordPress days) to Django and Wagtail and my experience has been night and day. I think a big part of that is that Python is one of the languages I code in with some regular amount of frequency and that Django is one or two layers of abstraction below a thing like WordPress, which is much more appealing and intuitive for me as a programmer. That's to say, pick a platform in a language you like and an abstraction layer that ensures you'll continue to have fun.
- Gazoo101 3y agoGood advice. For me, I found that I would on occasion just have large blocks of time away from my site, meaning any sufficiently complex contextual understanding to maintain it withered away. Hence my move to Wordpress which I plan to detail next.
- RobotToaster 3y agoBasically my experience of it, I've never seen an open source project so hostile to open source. A huge amount of features that should be in core are locked behind the proprietary "jetpack" SAAS. The plugins repository is a hive of scum and freemium, with no way to search for only GPL compliant plugins.
- Gazoo101 3y agoI wonder if 'hostile' is the right word, but I certainly agree that very functional things felt oddly missing. It is definitely super subjective as to what's 'very functional' and part of a basic package, but I'd definitely prefer an entry level cost and then have a more expanded base version of Wordpress.
- mpol 3y agoHuh, all plugins in the plugin repository are GPL compliant. If you can find one that isn't, please notify the plugin team, they will deal with it. What you might mean is that there are GPL plugins that you can use with a third party service that you have to pay for. And yes, that is a grey middleground that is allowed at wordpress.org.
- dpkonofa 3y ago>As web developer myself, I couldn’t help but smirk >Plug-in time, or change the CSS, or somehow add it to the theme itself, which I never figured out how to do Ok, buddy… I think your definition of “web developer” and mine are quite different if you can’t figure out how to add a font via CSS or a theme. This makes the rest of this argument garbage.
- MightyBuzzard 3y ago[dead]
- ramesh31 3y ago>"For each of these design problems, I eventually found a fee-free solution:" Sticky – WordPress 6.2 (released in March this year) adds native sticky support. Non-standard font – Twentig plug-in. Latest 3 blog posts – Team Tangible‘s Loops & Logic plug-in. Gallery Lightbox – dFactory‘s responsive lightbox and gallery plug-in. And here's the problem with WordPress. That's literally 4 lines of CSS and two lines of PHP, for which the author has now exposed themselves to four seperate third party plugin developers that he must trust explicitly forever.
- Gazoo101 3y agoI'll grant you the sticky, the font, and heck, I'll even toss in the latest 3 blog posts too, but how in the heck is a gallery lightbox anywhere near 4 lines of CSS and two lines of PHP? And unless I'm missing something, doesn't injecting PHP either require a plug-in or actively building on to a wordpress component?
- ramesh31 3y ago>but how in the heck is a gallery lightbox anywhere near 4 lines of CSS and two lines of PHP? Most implementations are massively bloated as a legacy from the jQuery days when that was neccessary. CSS is incredibly powerful now, and the browsers are all evergreen, so it's pretty trivial to implement a pure CSS/HTML gallery: https://css-tricks.com/css-only-carousel/ https://css-tricks.com/css-only-carousel/ This is fully featured, with indexing, scrolling, animation, etc., but you could slim that down even further to just a few lines for a simple automated slider. Obviously doesn't work if you need managed control, but 99% of gallery use-cases are just flipping through a homepage hero like the OP.
- Gazoo101 3y agoAppreciate the link. I agree that CSS has come a long way. Not sure I agree this carousel covers 99% of the use cases, if that's what you meant? Regardless, my motivation was to implement as little as possible, as the whole motivation to switch to Wordpress was to not minimize what I'd have to build. I will make a note to detail that better in the future. Appreciate the candor.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoWet and rainy?