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I'm working on a WordPress site for a test campaign right now, and pretty much came to the conclusion that most themes/plugins send me down two rabbit holes: 1)

by fhd2 3y ago

I'm working on a WordPress site for a test campaign right now, and pretty much came to the conclusion that most themes/plugins send me down two rabbit holes: 1) Licensing / security issues 2) Getting them beyond 80% of what I need. Ended up using only a single third party plugin (Polylang), and doing the other stuff we need in a custom theme based on Automattic's (possibly a bit unmaintained) _s base theme. Feels like a good decision, only took me about a day more to fiddle with the CSS to make things look right and write a bit of PHP code for some functional requirements we had. Seems way more economical than dealing with a soup of plugins and some shady theme. Since you can nowadays just create custom blocks for all the site elements, it's a pretty OK development experience. But I also can't quite believe this is the state of the art... I use static site generators whenever I can, but for a bit more dynamic websites, it seems WordPress is one of the best out of what seems like only bad options. Also an interesting case: Automattic seems like a company that's set up to resist enshittification. But all those theme and plugin authors with profit motives are not, which has about the same effect as if Automattic was ruining the platform for short term profits.

zrn900 3y ago
> Also an interesting case: Automattic seems like a company that's set up to resist enshittification. But all those theme and plugin authors with profit motives are not, which has about the same effect as if Automattic was ruining the platform for short term profits. What??!? Automattic took VC money. Not those small time plugin and theme authors who are trying to make a living by doing open source. When those smaller plugin and theme authors want to exit the business, they sell their businesses to people who are inside the WP space instead of investment funds or VCs. They keep things inside the ecosystem. Whereas the 'not enshittifying' Automattic is trying to get money out of its entire ecosystem by doing a lot of shady things - from flooding google with plugin listing links that go to wordpress.com instead of wordpress.org so that those who want to use plugins will have to buy the $300/year Automattic hosting plan instead of being able to download the plugin from wordpress.org and use it at a $5 dollar hosting that they could get from anywhere. All the Automattic plugins are full of popups for upsells and upsold features too. Its amazing how people have a lot of grand-standing opinions without accompanying levels of information.
BehindBlueEyes 3y ago
Same experience, i’d go for static any time i get the chance but needed something easier to edit for non techies for a non profit’s site. Ended up going with squarespace because I was so over wordpress licensing issues and plugin bloat. Now squarespace has its own frustrations like their terrible events calendar but at least the budget is under control.

by fhd2 3y ago

zrn900 3y ago

> Also an interesting case: Automattic seems like a company that's set up to resist enshittification. But all those theme and plugin authors with profit motives are not, which has about the same effect as if Automattic was ruining the platform for short term profits. What??!? Automattic took VC money. Not those small time plugin and theme authors who are trying to make a living by doing open source. When those smaller plugin and theme authors want to exit the business, they sell their businesses to people who are inside the WP space instead of investment funds or VCs. They keep things inside the ecosystem. Whereas the 'not enshittifying' Automattic is trying to get money out of its entire ecosystem by doing a lot of shady things - from flooding google with plugin listing links that go to wordpress.com instead of wordpress.org so that those who want to use plugins will have to buy the $300/year Automattic hosting plan instead of being able to download the plugin from wordpress.org and use it at a $5 dollar hosting that they could get from anywhere. All the Automattic plugins are full of popups for upsells and upsold features too. Its amazing how people have a lot of grand-standing opinions without accompanying levels of information.

BehindBlueEyes 3y ago

Same experience, i’d go for static any time i get the chance but needed something easier to edit for non techies for a non profit’s site. Ended up going with squarespace because I was so over wordpress licensing issues and plugin bloat. Now squarespace has its own frustrations like their terrible events calendar but at least the budget is under control.