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WordPress has become an unwieldy mess of plugins and licensing nightmares. Until Automattic addresses the core technical debt, WordPress will continue disappoin

by nkko 3y ago

WordPress has become an unwieldy mess of plugins and licensing nightmares. Until Automattic addresses the core technical debt, WordPress will continue disappointing developers seeking a clean, modern CMS foundation.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
That is absolutely true. But if you're just blogging and only need the base install with Classic Editor and Akisment, it's actually quite nice and still better than most other platforms for self-hosting.
- keane 3y ago
  I appreciated this plugin inventory by Nick Simson: https://nicksimson.com/posts/plugin-inventory-2023/ https://nicksimson.com/posts/plugin-inventory-2023/ There are some high-quality GPL-spirited plugins and themes (like those by Anders Norén https://andersnoren.se/teman/ https://andersnoren.se/teman/ or Oliver Juhas https://www.webmandesign.eu https://www.webmandesign.eu) amid an utter avalanche of SEO cruft so you have to know where to look.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    Thanks a lot, didn't know about this one! Seems a lot more helpful than the default, full of very similar ones.
- joshstrange 3y ago
  It is _if_ you self-host. Paying wordpress.com has been a crappy experience IMHO. You don't get much for the base tier and you don't get plugins until you pay for a much more expensive tier. I just wanted a place to blog and was tired of managing my ghost self-hosted blog and didn't want to pay for ghost. I ended up having to move up a tier to do basic things (sunk cost) and I blog probably 1-2 times a year if that. Whatever, I've paid up for a year or two now and once that expires I'll re-evaluate.
j45 3y ago
Wordpress has been plugin integration brick wall city for a long time.
CharlesW 3y ago
It's not disappointing them now. Given the continuous improvements in every release, that seems unlikely to change any time soon. https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all/y https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma...
boznz 3y ago
luckily there is an AI-Powered WordPress Site Builder you can use :-)
zrn900 3y ago
> core technical debt These are us programmers' trappings. The users don't give two sh*ts about that. They care whether what they use is easy and it works. And Wordpress is both of them. None of the 'better coded' competitors have been able to eat into its market share ever - demonstrates the gigantic gap between what programmers think to be important and what users think to be important.
- BehindBlueEyes 3y ago
  Genuinely interested: which are the “better coded” competitors? An earlier post here on hn by dan about web bloat seemed to show wordpress was actually the best option in that category?
  - zrn900 3y ago
    Name your pick. Most of the competitors of WP back in the late mid-2000s went the way of 'better coding', busying themselves with MVC implementations, migrating everything to OOP because it was 'the way' and so on. WP went for ease of use, ease of modification and easy extensibility etc. At one point the disparage between it and its competitors was so high that in some wp competitors, you had to code an entire module just to add some text to a web form. With WP you just edited a file. > An earlier post here on hn by dan about web bloat seemed to show wordpress was actually the best option in that category? Yep, that's the irony. All the competitors kept adopting 'better coding paradigms' as their respective fads hit their maximum, ending up in bloated stuff. They occasionally had to break backward compatibility to get rid of the code that was adopted in that fashion too - doing much harm to their ecosystems. But WP went for ease of use, simplicity, and from another angle, having to protect backward compatibility that WP project gave so much importance helped it keep itself lean, mean and simple. So now WP is something you can just launch in a total of 2 second from zero to production-ready thanks to one-click installs, hosts and all the infra providers that offer it, with ridiculously low initial and ongoing costs. Also because it didn't buy into the recent frontend fads and stayed server-side rendered, it still remains very lightweight and renders in an average of ~1.5 seconds in any device/browser. Of course, some of the framework craze made its way to wp in the form of React and full site editing, but still, the general landscape remains lightweight especially if you use hybrid themes. (they allow all the fse and page builder functionalities by trading off only not being able to edit header & footer by dragging & dropping, so its a good trade-off). In a way, WP having to deal directly with the actual users whose priorities were always on the practical side helped it a LOT in getting the market share it has and the reliability, extensibility and ease of use it still excels in.

by nkko 3y ago

vouaobrasil 3y ago

That is absolutely true. But if you're just blogging and only need the base install with Classic Editor and Akisment, it's actually quite nice and still better than most other platforms for self-hosting.

keane 3y ago
I appreciated this plugin inventory by Nick Simson: https://nicksimson.com/posts/plugin-inventory-2023/ https://nicksimson.com/posts/plugin-inventory-2023/ There are some high-quality GPL-spirited plugins and themes (like those by Anders Norén https://andersnoren.se/teman/ https://andersnoren.se/teman/ or Oliver Juhas https://www.webmandesign.eu https://www.webmandesign.eu) amid an utter avalanche of SEO cruft so you have to know where to look.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Thanks a lot, didn't know about this one! Seems a lot more helpful than the default, full of very similar ones.
joshstrange 3y ago
It is _if_ you self-host. Paying wordpress.com has been a crappy experience IMHO. You don't get much for the base tier and you don't get plugins until you pay for a much more expensive tier. I just wanted a place to blog and was tired of managing my ghost self-hosted blog and didn't want to pay for ghost. I ended up having to move up a tier to do basic things (sunk cost) and I blog probably 1-2 times a year if that. Whatever, I've paid up for a year or two now and once that expires I'll re-evaluate.

j45 3y ago

Wordpress has been plugin integration brick wall city for a long time.

CharlesW 3y ago

It's not disappointing them now. Given the continuous improvements in every release, that seems unlikely to change any time soon. https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all/y https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma...

boznz 3y ago

luckily there is an AI-Powered WordPress Site Builder you can use :-)

zrn900 3y ago

> core technical debt These are us programmers' trappings. The users don't give two sh*ts about that. They care whether what they use is easy and it works. And Wordpress is both of them. None of the 'better coded' competitors have been able to eat into its market share ever - demonstrates the gigantic gap between what programmers think to be important and what users think to be important.

BehindBlueEyes 3y ago
Genuinely interested: which are the “better coded” competitors? An earlier post here on hn by dan about web bloat seemed to show wordpress was actually the best option in that category?
- zrn900 3y ago
  Name your pick. Most of the competitors of WP back in the late mid-2000s went the way of 'better coding', busying themselves with MVC implementations, migrating everything to OOP because it was 'the way' and so on. WP went for ease of use, ease of modification and easy extensibility etc. At one point the disparage between it and its competitors was so high that in some wp competitors, you had to code an entire module just to add some text to a web form. With WP you just edited a file. > An earlier post here on hn by dan about web bloat seemed to show wordpress was actually the best option in that category? Yep, that's the irony. All the competitors kept adopting 'better coding paradigms' as their respective fads hit their maximum, ending up in bloated stuff. They occasionally had to break backward compatibility to get rid of the code that was adopted in that fashion too - doing much harm to their ecosystems. But WP went for ease of use, simplicity, and from another angle, having to protect backward compatibility that WP project gave so much importance helped it keep itself lean, mean and simple. So now WP is something you can just launch in a total of 2 second from zero to production-ready thanks to one-click installs, hosts and all the infra providers that offer it, with ridiculously low initial and ongoing costs. Also because it didn't buy into the recent frontend fads and stayed server-side rendered, it still remains very lightweight and renders in an average of ~1.5 seconds in any device/browser. Of course, some of the framework craze made its way to wp in the form of React and full site editing, but still, the general landscape remains lightweight especially if you use hybrid themes. (they allow all the fse and page builder functionalities by trading off only not being able to edit header & footer by dragging & dropping, so its a good trade-off). In a way, WP having to deal directly with the actual users whose priorities were always on the practical side helped it a LOT in getting the market share it has and the reliability, extensibility and ease of use it still excels in.