14 ms·

WP21

426 points by joshbetz 2y ago

firefoxd 2y ago
Wordpress is the SMS of the Internet. There are hundreds of alternatives that came and went.
- deleted 2y ago
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- diego_sandoval 2y ago
  It's the PHP of the CMS world.
  - zelphirkalt 2y ago
    ... in PHP.
Swizec 2y ago
WordPress is my favorite example of "It doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to work" So many cool projects die because people over-complicate the first steps. You can always make it better later if people start using your thing, but first you gotta ship.
- hollerith 2y ago
  Isn't the fact that people started using WP about 25 years ago evidence against "you can always make it better"?
- 9dev 2y ago
  Funny, I think it proves the contrary. Wordpress effectively made their whole code base the public API, so now they’re stuck with the legacy code they have for eternity, unable to meaningfully improve it, as plugins may depend on the existing state. It’s so bad, the PHP language developers are unable to implement some features/fixes in the language, as the Wordpress team refuses to migrate their code, which makes for a huge chunk of PHP usage. Imagine that.
  - onli 2y ago
    This is stability. Stability is good. There is no need to change code that works just because it collides with modern taste. If WordPress has a stabilizing influence on php that's even better. All the breaking changes of the new versions are a nightmare for an established project I work on.
    - 9dev 2y ago
      Code is never just working. The environment it runs in changes, requiring refactoring things. We’re not talking about a showcase piece of artisan algorithm here, but bug-riddled legacy code reliant on outdated system packages, SQL queries that cannot use bound parameters for historic reasons and are ever-prone to injection attacks. Code that uses broken multibyte encoding, such that it is vulnerable to several attack classes. And that’s not even talking about performance. Are you seriously telling me software performance should not improved if the core functionality kinda, sorta, works?
      - onli 2y ago
        > Are you seriously telling me software performance should not improved if the core functionality kinda, sorta, works? I would not hesitate to take this position. Of course it depends, on how severe the bugs are, especially for the outer code (like plugins) calling it, and on how bad the performance is. But otherwise absolutely, never break user space. > The environment it runs in changes The web environment Wordpress runs in did not change all that much. The JS ecosystem simulates big changes, but that's all bullshit. Server code that worked 30 years ago still works - if projects like PHP don't go out of their way to break it.
        9dev 2y ago
        > But otherwise absolutely, never break user space. Neither the Linux kernel, nor OpenSSL, or any other reasonably complex project manages to do that over a given time frame. Sometimes you need to adapt, and things break in the process. Nobody would expect a house built 30 years ago to not require some maintenance and upgrades over time. > The web environment Wordpress runs in did not change all that much. The JS ecosystem simulates big changes, but that's all bullshit. Server code that worked 30 years ago still works - if projects like PHP don't go out of their way to break it. That sure sounds good, but is simply not true. We went from HTTP and FTP deployments to TLS and containers, from dialup to gigabit consumer uplink; the browser isn't a remote document viewer but a platform-agnostic virtual machine for fully-fledged applications; the web is centred around a few enormous platforms; people regularly stream GBs worth of video and expect services to deliver web apps on a variety of devices; they don't post on bulletin boards and in news groups, but use chat services; scammers distribute ransomware, steal your identity, remotely take compromising pictures from your webcam, or order stuff from your shopping accounts online. The modern web has almost nothing in common with the one from 30 years ago.
thisisjaymehta 2y ago
To be honest, I never found WordPress easy to use. It's all flowers and rainbows as long as I can find good themes and plugins. However, it starts going south as soon as I need to make a very small custom change.
- deleted 2y ago
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- thomasfromcdnjs 2y ago
  I've always considered myself an above average web developer, my friends would always have Wordpress websites, and ask me if I can just tweak a few things. Without hesitation, I'd proclaim I could easily make those changes! Then I'd load their site, load their plugin/theme code and css files, struggle for hours to get the desired effect, and even if I got it to work, I would break every other part of their site. --- Denigrating anecdote aside, good job Matt, loved the story at the end.
  - pests 2y ago
    I had the exact same thing happen years ago and I've never felt so helpless. Simple banner / color change. Ended up rebuilding the entire site from scratch it was easier. Once you spend some time in the codebase and understand a bit of its legacy history it gets easier over time. A lot of plugins and solutions are aimed towards non-technical users and a lot of overlap. Where we might just write up some custom HTML others might install 3 plugins to make it work.
    - kijin 2y ago
      The overlap between plugins is crazy. It looks like every plugin comes with an entire SEO toolkit, a performance optimizer, a firewall and the kitchen sink. Unless you're very careful, you quickly end up with an unusable house with 5 kitchen sinks, no fridge, and 1 3/4 ovens that are perpetually trying to burn one another.
      - 2y ago
muglug 2y ago
In a vertical where the barrier to entry is not high, being first to market with something simple that people can extend can create a decent-sized moat. The downside is that much of the code in WP core is effectively un-modernizable, given how much depends on things working a certain way. Key classes and functions haven’t been meaningfully updated in over a decade.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
henning 2y ago
WordPress is proof that clean code doesn't matter. Security doesn't matter. Out of the box performance doesn't matter. At least none of these matter if you are the 800 lb gorilla in the market and everyone else is trying to take a piece out of you.
- nikolay 2y ago
  The only things that matter are a decent admin UI and the illusion of choice of free plugins - most plugins are useless in 2024 because they have a pro version. When you add up the annual costs of all pro versions, the "free" WordPress (which requires a beefy hosting plan) becomes the most expensive and hardest to keep up publishing system nowadays!
  - bboygravity 2y ago
    From a business perspective the significant part of the website costs are man-hours for setup and maintenance. Got something to say about how WP compares to others when it comes to man-hours (assuming you can buy any and all plugins you want)? Honest question, because I have no idea about CMS.
    - nikolay 2y ago
      But they overprice and they forget people use multiple plugins, so I use a third-party service that leverages GPL to offer most premium themes and plugins for a low annual fee.
      - rafark 2y ago
        So basically you just want the functionality without paying for it. > they overprice and they forget people use multiple plugins People who complain about the prices also forget that a lot of these plugins take months or years to develop. You’re (we’ll not you since you made it clear you don’t pay the devs) literally getting thousands of man hours for like 60 bucks per year.
tambourine_man 2y ago
I like Wordpress and it’s the CMS of choice for almost every situation, but Gutenberg has been out for a long time and it’s still far from good enough. Both as an enduser and as a developer.
dotcoma 2y ago
> 1. Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible. Yeah. Like, for example, forcing users to install the "Classic Editor" plugin to use, well, a normal editor that is more than sufficient for a blog.
- nikolay 2y ago
  Or one plugin no working with another and having to try all permutations to see which breaks which - that's simple and intuitive!
fjuan 2y ago
Congrats Matt! WordPress enabled lots of people to push their own boundaries in the internet. Looking forward to celebrate the next 21!
tommica 2y ago
WordPress is special - though I don't work with it anymore, I have enjoyed seeing newer developers solve problems with it
graiz 2y ago
I wish wordpress did fewer things but did them better. There should be something that is a notch better Jekyll but doesn't get gross when you install a dozen plug-ins. Out of the box wordpress produces a very slow and bandwidth heavy site.
- throw5345346 2y ago
  If you need a simple site now you barely need any plugins at all. Something for a contact form, maybe. You do have to lean in slightly to how Gutenberg and Full Site Editing works -- I recommend this amazing documentation site: https://fullsiteediting.com https://fullsiteediting.com
- p4bl0 2y ago
  Have you given Dotclear a try?
  - joshstrange 2y ago
    * Google for “Dotclear”, get the first result with no description (“No information is available for this page. Learn why”) - not a good first impression * Dotclear website’s theme is ugly verging on purposefully ugly. At least WP default themes look decent * Click on “About” to see what this runs on (homepage doesn’t tell me), nothing loads. Oh! I have to click one of these header tabs/links, odd… “About” -> “Overview” still doesn’t tell me what language this is written in. Click “Pre-requisite” finally see it’s PHP+(MySQL/Postgres/SQLite) For software that’s been around since 2003 I kind of expect better and I expect have heard of it since back in 2009-2011-ish I was doing a fair bit of WP development.
stevesearer 2y ago
Would be interested to hear other people’s favorite paid WordPress plugins. A couple essential ones for me are Advanced Custom Fields Pro and Admin Columns Pro.
- huxflux 2y ago
  Gravity Forms - https://www.gravityforms.com https://www.gravityforms.com
nikolay 2y ago
WordPress is the biggest bowl of spaghetti code in production! 21 years of carbicide!
ssalat 2y ago
Quick judgments and strong opinions have unfortunately become part of the community. Having spent the last 2-3 months working excessively on WordPress development, I would like to say a word about the excellent isolation of code with blocks ("Gutenberg"). As standalone plugins or in combination with Advanced Custom Fields, these allow for perfect, modular websites and development flows (design system), where even the HTML is 100% in your own hands. I can recommend everyone to understand and learn WordPress properly. – no relation or connection to WordPress.
- wwweston 2y ago
  Can you recommend some of the better ways to understand and learn it properly? (Worked with it extensively 2009-2011, including authoring/modifying plugins, but never felt like I really understood it, only vaguely understood/appreciated it)
  - throw5345346 2y ago
    Not parent but: https://fullsiteediting.com https://fullsiteediting.com will help you. It's a great project.
- pbowyer 2y ago
  What's the best skeleton theme to build your own theme on in 2024, that supports Full site editing, Gutenberg etc? After a decade away from WP I wanted to set up a new site. The default 2024 theme doesn't meet my needs, and I couldn't find a modern skeleton theme where I could add in Tailwind and build what I wanted. I've used https://roots.io/sage/ https://roots.io/sage/ previously but they're moving further and further away from the WP way of doing things. Edit: or instead of a skeleton theme, a good free FSE theme to build on?
  - throw5345346 2y ago
    https://fullsiteediting.com/themes/ https://fullsiteediting.com/themes/ has a list, including one or two skeletons. I am tempted by Anders Norén's Björk, which is also FSE: https://andersnoren.se/teman/bjork-wordpress-theme/ https://andersnoren.se/teman/bjork-wordpress-theme/ I think I did most of my learning with Carolina's own Jace theme. (FWIW I have always thought the roots.io stuff is a mistake, conceptually.)
jaydeegee 2y ago
WP is the perfect tool for 95% of the job with the last 5% of tweaking being incredibly frustrating. I've used it extensively and it's longevity is a testament to its usefulness may it be around for another 21yrs.
todotask 2y ago
No matter how long it has been, on the one hand, WordPress can be seen as a victim of its success, as widespread adoption has led to various challenges such as security vulnerabilities and performance issues after maintining clients' website for the past 3 years. There are remaining security that is essentials and yet not many website does it correctly.
MangoCoffee 2y ago
WP is 21 years old, and people on HN still bishing and crying about it. How come no one has offered something that can beat WP in 21 years?
- todotask 2y ago
  It's more objective if you compare by carbon footprint among others and how you build your site.
  - todotask 2y ago
    Meaning there is always challenges is all software and everyone has different expectations, I don't see why I get downvoted.
- 9dev 2y ago
  Nah, that’s not how it works. People are also complaining about the quality of Google‘s search results, but has anyone come up with a something that can beat them? Technically, yes! But practically, Wordpress has such a velocity, it’s mostly impossible to stop at this point. There’s an ecosystem of millions of plugins, themes, entire agencies around Wordpress, that’s something you can’t really solve. So just because Wordpress sticks around doesn’t mean it’s the superior solution; it just happened to suck less than the competition a decade ago.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- ehnto 2y ago
  I think developers underestimate the ecosystem and community aspects. Software is definitely not a space where "if you build it, they will come". There is better codebases, but no one has held a candle to the ecosystem yet. I believe this is because the core users of WP are not it's developers, the users (admins, agency clients etc) hold a considerably larger stake in typical business engagements. I have been doing eComm agency work for years and even if the chosen eComm platform does have a CMS, we're very often asked to integrate a wordpress site for the company's marketing/content team to use.
JodieBenitez 2y ago
I love Wordpress. People install it on their own, install dozens of useless, unsecure and buggy plugins ("it's easy, just clic clic clic... I love my admin panel !") and after a while their websites break and then we can charge them for a more secure and resilient solution.
- eastbound 2y ago
  They sure made it enticing to install plugins, if not just by putting this UI to the forefront. Also, when images aren’t compressed by default, it’s a perfect alliance with the various SEO analyzers which mandate you to compress them…
- agumonkey 2y ago
  Back in 2011, I had the pleasure to take a peak at the sociable plugin (#2 on their plugin ladderboard) and it was one of the more brittle and bloated piece of code I ever saw. Felt like an unfinished weekend project that dragged too long and ended up published, 5 screens long for loops over massive globals, duplicated to then do whatever.
zubspace 2y ago
I avoided wordpress like a plague. Used stuff like django, flask, grav and who knows what. But recently I had to make a website with lots of unknowns which needed to be authored by dummy users and I just said ** it and went with wordpress. What I struggled with are: 1) Interesting site design, 2) custom functionality through plugins, 3) making it easy to add pages and blog posts with a nice editor. I'm glad open source solutions exist, but I swear, they always have drawbacks. Either they are code heavy, plugins are out of date, maintenance takes a lot of time or there is no way to easily design a page. So for Wordpress I bought Oxygen, for which you can still buy a lifetime license for, and oh my god, even I can make a nice, responsive website without touching code. It's such a game changer. I think lots of people avoid wordpress because of security. But that is not primarily a wordpress fault. Linux & PHP complicates it a lot. And I'm sure those other open source projects have severe bugs, too, but nobody knows or talks about them. What could bring down wordpress, imho, are expensive license fees for plugins. Who wants to spend 50 to 100 bucks per year and per page for a builder plugin? Everyone wants one, but no one wants to pay yearly. And it seems that all plugin makers are starting to go that way.
- throw5345346 2y ago
  I agree about builder plugins -- they are expensive mossy lock-in. WordPress now has a full-site editing system that lets you GUI edit the templates that are in the normal flow. It is not what I would call easy to master at the code level, but there is a global styles system and a way to use Gutenberg blocks to control layout outside the main content flow. So we are getting towards a point where page builder plugins won't be needed for skilled shops. But IMO until there are really easy to use themes based around FSE (there may be some), small design shops are still likely to use Elementor, which is a slow, frustrating experience (slower and more frustrating than Squarespace can be)
zwaps 2y ago
<< Static websites are fine, but dynamic ones are better.>> Nah
throw5345346 2y ago
One of the things that strikes me about WordPress is the way that web nerds expect to find it easy and are angered when it is not. Like everything, it takes learning. It has opinions. It has some crazy history (I really wish media items were not handled the way they are), but it also has methodology to it. If I said I know Go and JS and Perl and Java and Ruby and C, and I was enraged that Rust is so hard to learn, I'd be shot down for it, rightly. WordPress looks like it does a simple job, but actually it's a whole, quite broad platform. You might have to read some documentation for a bit. And if you've inherited a site using Elementor, ask the people who made it how to change the simple stuff, because they will be able to help. If you've inherited a site using Visual Composer or Divi... shoot the people who made it. If you think Gutenberg is bad (it is very much not, now!)... oh man, Divi was a time.
- orf 2y ago
  What’s the crazy history?
  - throw5345346 2y ago
    Well, maybe not crazy. Just heavily legacy. There are a few deeply frustrating things, if you ask me: All the media files are stored in a single uploads/year/month (maybe year/month/day) directory, which can mean some very big directories of file variations There's code that cannot be fun to support anymore, like the Pluggable functions (that still let you get Wordpress to check some external login system) There's still really not enough of a sense of a "model" anywhere. It still (AFAIK) stores some things in the database using PHP serialization (which is unambiguously the most annoying serialization format on earth, and means that search and replace tasks must be done in PHP) I mean... it's hard to blame them for not wanting to break stuff, and the commitment to backwards-compatibility is very nearly unprecedented. I think WordPress is great, and I am not judging. I'm just saying, there are decisions that might have gone better with a little more foresight. But some of them are literally twenty years old and hard to change now. Not that WP is alone in that -- FreeCAD is just getting through its "fix a two decade legacy problem" as we speak! Matt is right about zip uploads. I mean it's better than explaining to random users how to upload nested hierarchies over FTP, but still.
mattl 2y ago
I checked it out around the same time Mark Pilgrim moved to it. Movable Type came and went but to their credit they tried a GPL version but sadly OpenMelody never caught on.
NKosmatos 2y ago
I wish more companies would adopt the sabbatical policy that automattic has: https://automattic.com/benefits/sabbatical/ https://automattic.com/benefits/sabbatical/
- croisillon 2y ago
  note that in the US they have 2 weeks vacations per year, so even with 3 months sabbatical less than in Europe
  - gibrown 2y ago
    This isn't true at all. The vacation policy is "Our time off policy is short: take the time that you need" and "There is no minimum or maximum, but we encourage you to take at least 25 days of time off per year".
DrSiemer 2y ago
Haven't used it a lot in the last decade, but WordPress was great for quickly setting up a basic website that needs a nice beginner friendly CMS. Just make sure you stick to the base theme with a custom child theme and only use a select few plugins (like custom fields and contact form), that don't stab you in the back or begin to fight with each other later on. I just still don't understand how Gutenberg is an improvement. It's so clunky and confusing to get even the most basic things done with it.
karolist 2y ago
My gf has a WP ecommerce site that her business revolves around, it was built buy some local guys doing WP development who have an agency solving problems just with WP. She told me how fast they were able to iterate and solve all their problems. The site has a bunch of plugins integrating various social services, ad tracking, SEO and whatnot. The site generates PDF shipment labels for parcels, one day her sales got high enough to buy a label printer, one that spits out 10x15cm stickers. The problem - PDFs from the site come out as A4 and text gets tiny if squeezed to fit into that sticker. She asked her developers to fix it, they said it's impossible and refused. Now that's interesting, nothing is impossible I shouted with my nerd hat on. I'm in the tech space for a good few decades now, I have FAANG experience, complex systems are my thing! I spent 5 hours diving through tons of spaghetti code plugins masquerading as highly abstracted set of interfaces to arrive at the conclusion that these guys were right, the PDF blob comes from the shipment company's SOAP API, though it's obfuscated deep enough. In the end I solved it with a simple PyQT+fPDF UI utility to crop out the printable parts and project them onto the right sized canvas for printing, it took me 2h to complete with binary packaging and all, less time than it took to understand why the WordPress site can't do it natively, and much less than than it would have taken me to integrate this PDF modification into WordPress. These guys were basically right. Her site now backs up to 4GB zip with photo assets. I dread the day when her site goes down due to some "hack" but I have no idea how to replicate this functionality for this cost without WP. No way in hell I would say I can do it from scratch for her, my previous Web dev experience doesn't matter at this point. Shopify? Sigh.
- skilled 2y ago
  4GB? Those are rookie numbers. I have a site where /wp-content/ is 20GB. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of images that have been auto generated by WordPress because of how thumbnails and minifaction works, but also converting images to WebP. And if you delete old posts or any other content, the images stay. And it’s my understanding that there is no safe way to remove unused images. I have tried to do it using the in-built media manager but eventually I gave up because it’s tedious and I don’t want to risk leaving pages without images by accident.
  - 2y ago
p4bl0 2y ago
I remember a time when WordPress was "easy". Nowadays starting from a clean install and customizing the appearance and modules has actually become quite difficult. Even the usage workflow feels bloated. These days I prefer Dotclear as a blog engine. It also has grown in complexity over the years, but not quite as much and still feels like nothing is getting on your way. This is from the point of view of someone knowing how to program and the languages involved (PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS, etc.) but who's not a professional web developer and even less a professional WordPress-based developer (since this is now actually a thing).
askonomm 2y ago
I just wish WordPress actually adhered to development standards, not actively tried to break them. Using globals everywhere and encouraging spaghetti code with its classic themes, and with its new themes it evidently learned nothing and is encouraging JSON inside HTML comments which obviously has no editor support, is very prone to errors, besides being just plain stupid (like seriously, some senior engineers I assume decided to have templating inside HTML comments as JSON?). If I had my tinfoil hat on, it's almost as if they actively try to kill the freelancer or digital agency market and push everything to its WYSIWYG site builder on WP.com.
- benatkin 2y ago
  I agree that WordPress has often failed to live up to development standards, but those aren't them, those are ones that can legitimately vary between platforms.
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  They encourage lots and lots of bad practices. I mean, just look at themes and how they are built by default. Comments in a CSS file describe the theme metadata. Using concattenation instead of composition everywhere, so that parts of HTML are not reusable. CSS, inside JS inside HTML inside PHP ... Part of it is this implicit structure it defines, which file it loads adter ehich other file to make a whole page. It seems convenient at first, if only you know it, but it encourages people to not properly finish all their HTML elements on the same file, but split them up stupidly and end them in other files, never to be reused. It all seems very beginner-mistake like. But I guess they are stuck with this now, because thousands of themes rely on this, instead of having a structure based on composition. Contrast this for example with how one uses Jinja2 templates rendering blocks and macros.
  - Tijdreiziger 2y ago
    Their mantra of ‘never break backwards compatibility’ is a double-edged sword. It makes them extremely friendly to non-technical users, which I think is the majority of their userbase. However, it makes it impossible for them to change technical decisions made in the past.
zelphirkalt 2y ago
I have come across a situation, where an automatic Wordpress update (need to keep up to date, against vulnerabilities) made a site I maintain violate the law: I used a unicode symbol for something in text. Wordpress out of nowhere and by itself decided, that it would be better to replace that symbol with a bloody svg, that is loaded from some third party. At first I could not believe my eyes, then it dawned on me, how incredible reckless they acted with that update. They must really have no clue what they are doing. Then I scrambled to reverse this bs and tried various things, including editing the theme minimally, which originally I never wanted to do, because I do not want to maintain a theme in addition to the site. Well nothing worked, except for installing a plugin, whose sole purpose it is to reverse this stupidity. If I had not had functionality connected to the DOM structure around my unicode symbol, I might not have noticed it, because that functionality also broke. So there we go, WP automatically making the site violating the law by loading from third party without consent and also breaking my functionality and basically forcing me to install a plugin to correct WP core mistakes. Of course it is very clear now, that it is completely unfit for any business website, when the core developers make such bad decisions. It requires constant maintenance, even if you update nothing but WP itself. Alternatively you let it get outdated and get hacked due to vulnerabilities. Great.
- simonjgreen 2y ago
  Are you intentionally not mentioning which country and law?
  - selfmodruntime 2y ago
    They definitely are and I would bet money it's China.
    - addandsubtract 2y ago
      China has laws against loading content from third parties without consent? Sounds more like an EU thing.
      - 2y ago
smooc 2y ago
I'm getting old. I really thought for a moment that the title was about Word Perfect 2.1. Dann I miss the underwater screen.
TBurette 2y ago
What I find remarkable is that multiple people can say 'I am a Wordpress Developer' and it will translate into very different experiences and skillsets. For some it means clicking around installing theme, plugins then writing the content of pages through the Wordpress admin. For others it means old school php code to customize Wordpress behaviour with PHP template to write the HTML. This is called classic theme. For yet other people it means writing JS+React with docker, CI/CD,... This is the new block theme.
- DANmode 2y ago
  For yet others, it could be all of these, if they have chosen a diverse enough clientbase.
skibz 2y ago
Kudos, WordPress.
liampulles 2y ago
WordPress is not the blogging solution humanity deserves, but the one that was needed. Customising a base and installing plugins as opposed to devving a blogging platform allows a huge portion of people to create internet businesses who otherwise wouldn't. I get that there are supposed better solutions now, but this was not the case a few years ago. And there is a lot of WordPress content out there for novices to learn web dev. My sister co-owns a very basic architecting firm, and they have figured out WordPress based on online materials to design a website that suits them pretty well. Maybe that is not the long term solution for them, but it is a very productive place to start for a small business.
- sureIy 2y ago
  > better solutions now What better solution for self-hosted websites that can be jump started by anyone and provide the kind of flexibility that WP provides?
  - fastball 2y ago
    It really depends on your needs. Are there many alternatives more flexible than WP? No. But that is begging the question. The vast majority of people don't need the kitchen sink that is WP, and would be better served by utilizing one of the many products and platforms that have cropped up to fill more specific niches since the inception of WP. Just need a blog? Maybe want it to be a newsletter? Ghost, Medium, Substack, etc Want an online store? Shopify, Checkout Page, etc Need a sexy website that doesn't take coding? Squarespace, Framer, etc You get the idea.
    - sureIy 2y ago
      Out of all your examples, only Ghost is self hosted. Not everyone wants to or is able to afford a $20/month provider, especially small businesses outside the US.
      - fastball 2y ago
        Given that your previous comment said "can be jump started by anyone", self-hosted is definitely not a reasonable requirement. Self-hosted WP cannot be jump started by anyone, and in the limited cases it can (very, very limited WP), you're probably not spending much less than $20/m.
modernerd 2y ago
21! At this point WP is “boring technology” which makes it a great choice for many sites. It still does much that's hard to get anywhere else: - The core update process. It's long been one-click. Almost no other CMS or self-hosted framework offers as smooth an update process. (With Laravel, for example, I end up paying for Laravel Shift and even then it requires manual intervention that would be hard for a non-dev to handle.) For WP, services now exist to do automated updates with health checks and rollbacks to counter potential plugin incompatibility[1]. - The plugin ecosystem. WP went from "democratizing publishing" to "democratizing user-owned sites and businesses". From learning management systems to stores to paid newsletters, it's pretty cool what people with no programming experience can spin up. Things I'd love to see for WP in the next 21 years (that we'll probably get sooner if enough people contribute): - Built-in multilingual support. The web is global but WP isn't really, yet, except via third-party plugins. It's on the roadmap[2] but it's been a long time coming. - Improved education around Full Site Editing (FSE) and the new editor. The tools are getting good now, but there's still an education gap. Lots of people are helping to close this, though. Jamie Marsland's YouTube videos do a great job of showing what's possible with FSE, for example. [3] - Background batch processing/queues. These are only available via third-party solutions (and bundled with things like WooCommerce), but should probably be built into core. - SQLite support. Already pretty good but not officially supported in core yet. - Built-in site migrations. Also on the roadmap.[4] - Enhanced Playground tech. Distributing WP as a single binary for dependency-free local development (i.e. without Node.js) feels achievable and worthwhile. - Version control. It's too hard to store a WP site's state in a git repo and keep that synced with production and staging environments, especially when those with admin access can install and upgrade plugins independently of the repo. [1] Like Automattic's own scheduled updater on WP.com (https://wordpress.com/blog/2024/05/20/scheduled-plugin-updates/ https://wordpress.com/blog/2024/05/20/scheduled-plugin-updat...) and WP Engine's Smart Plugin Manager (https://wpengine.com/smart-plugin-manager/ https://wpengine.com/smart-plugin-manager/). [2] Current state of multilingual sites in WP: https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/wordpress/multilingual/ https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/word... [3] I like Jamie's videos showing how to recreate famous layouts with FSE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrdXCSIP578 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrdXCSIP578 [4] Site Transfer Protocol: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/60375 https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/60375
aussieguy1234 2y ago
I was on the team that built news.com.au, which, along with the other news sites we set up in a multi tenant WordPress setup, was at the time the largest commerical WordPress site in the world, getting something like 500 million monthly page views. We made extensive use of caching to say the least.
Pikamander2 2y ago
WordPress is simultaneously amazing and terrible. At its best, it's a highly extensible free and open source CMS that's incredibly easy to set up and customize. For that matter, its core has reasonably good security and performance before third-party themes and plugins are added into the mix. The problem comes in with how many basic GUI-based features it's still missing out of the box 21 years later. Take, for example, the curious case of the lack of post cloning; Why is there still no "Duplicate Post" button in the core after 21 years? Why are over 4 million websites being forced to keep a third-party "Yoast Duplicate Post" plugin active in order to access a very basic CMS feature? The same goes for other GUI-based tasks like logging outgoing emails (WP Mail Logging), or viewing the scheduled cron jobs (WP Crontrol), or letting an admin temporarily switch to another user's account (User Switching), or downloading a one-click backup of the site regardless of host (All In One WP Migration), or managing the SMTP settings (FluentSMTP), or managing URL redirects (Redirection), or enabling SVG uploads (SVG Support). The fact that many of those tasks can be accomplished through small code snippets in the child theme is great and all, but that doesn't help the average WordPress site owner who is barely tech literate and would be more likely to break the site than successfully copy a hook over to the correct file. It's not uncommon to find WordPress sites with 50+ plugins installed, a good chunk of which are abandoned and have multiple code vulnerabilities, yet still find the time to clog up the dashboard with useless "notices", AKA advertisements for their other products. I could understand a lot of the missing functionality if WordPress was still a small FOSS project with no real funding and a few irregular volunteers, but the fact that's it's grown into what it is without any real plan to address those issues is just so frustrating. I've made a few small contributions to the core and read through a bunch of tickets for longstanding issues, and it's clear that time or funding aren't the problem; it's that the maintainers have an attitude of "We don't personally need that feature ourselves, therefore it can just be a third-party plugin", which might sound fine on paper, but... Ever clicked on a Google link, only to catch a quick glimpse of the real site before being redirected to an "UPDATE CHROME NOW" or "CRITICAL MICROSOFT ALERT" or "CHEAP PHARMA PILLS" website? There's a 99% chance that site is running WordPress and has dozens of plugins and got hacked at some point, and if you try to message the site's owner to tell them what's happening and how they can fix it, they'll think you're crazy or a scammer and leave the malware there because it intentionally hides itself to logged in users. I'm not exaggerating about that percentage, either; WordPress runs a massive chunk of the modern web (excluding major social media websites), and the failure to quash the need for so many common plugins has made them a goldmine for bad actors to inject redirects and SEO spam.
Raed667 2y ago
I will always fondly remember that time i was in college (~2011), and created a fully working social network for my classmates using WordPress and ungodly amount of Plugins, and ducktape code I barely understood. A user profile display was ~30 SQL queries (who needs cache), and my poor 5$ VPS was sweating ... learned a lot on what not to do! fun times !
- debesyla 2y ago
  30 SQL queries are basically normally functioning WordPress, it's a bit more unusual when it gets to 150+ queries zone :)
  - Raed667 2y ago
    I remember laughing because one of the plugins was storing the HEX color value of a small banner in a DB and for every page load it needed to fetch it again even if the banner was nowhere on the page. Suddenly it changed my look on all all those "easy" knobs and fields from the admin panel and they looked very costly
dep_b 2y ago
I prefer something like Django to build more complex websites against for clients, or just pure PHP for blog style stuff for myself. WP level sites wouldn’t hire me as two days of my work is as expensive as years of WP hosting. But I admire the way the web was democratized with these CMS’es.
Kye 2y ago
>> "Almost every site would be improved by having a great blog." Unfortunately, WordPress seems to move further and further from this every year. I've used WordPress from near the start, and the editor is so top-heavy now that I get anxiety opening it. Switching to Ghost (with a nice little $4/month managed host[0,1]) was a breath of fresh air. It doesn't do all the things WordPress does, but it does the things it does do better. Especially newsletters and pay gating. [0] Referral link: https://magicpages.co?aff=9fLJierQBpnV https://magicpages.co?aff=9fLJierQBpnV [1] Non-referral link: https://magicpages.co https://magicpages.co
rob74 2y ago
Do you know what makes you feel old? When you read "WP" and think not of WordPress (which would now apparently be accepted as an adult in even the most conservative countries), but of WordPerfect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect - which is now at "midlife crisis" age).
- atonse 2y ago
  I still miss WordPerfect. I used to prefer it to MS Word. And it's been 25 years since I last used it.
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k3vinw 2y ago
My first computer software related job was creating Wordpress powered web sites from photoshop documents. Thank you to the creators for making that possible!

WP21

426 points by joshbetz 2y ago

firefoxd 2y ago

Wordpress is the SMS of the Internet. There are hundreds of alternatives that came and went.

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diego_sandoval 2y ago
It's the PHP of the CMS world.
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  ... in PHP.

Swizec 2y ago

WordPress is my favorite example of "It doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to work" So many cool projects die because people over-complicate the first steps. You can always make it better later if people start using your thing, but first you gotta ship.

hollerith 2y ago
Isn't the fact that people started using WP about 25 years ago evidence against "you can always make it better"?
9dev 2y ago
Funny, I think it proves the contrary. Wordpress effectively made their whole code base the public API, so now they’re stuck with the legacy code they have for eternity, unable to meaningfully improve it, as plugins may depend on the existing state. It’s so bad, the PHP language developers are unable to implement some features/fixes in the language, as the Wordpress team refuses to migrate their code, which makes for a huge chunk of PHP usage. Imagine that.
- onli 2y ago
  This is stability. Stability is good. There is no need to change code that works just because it collides with modern taste. If WordPress has a stabilizing influence on php that's even better. All the breaking changes of the new versions are a nightmare for an established project I work on.
  - 9dev 2y ago
    Code is never just working. The environment it runs in changes, requiring refactoring things. We’re not talking about a showcase piece of artisan algorithm here, but bug-riddled legacy code reliant on outdated system packages, SQL queries that cannot use bound parameters for historic reasons and are ever-prone to injection attacks. Code that uses broken multibyte encoding, such that it is vulnerable to several attack classes. And that’s not even talking about performance. Are you seriously telling me software performance should not improved if the core functionality kinda, sorta, works?
    - onli 2y ago
      > Are you seriously telling me software performance should not improved if the core functionality kinda, sorta, works? I would not hesitate to take this position. Of course it depends, on how severe the bugs are, especially for the outer code (like plugins) calling it, and on how bad the performance is. But otherwise absolutely, never break user space. > The environment it runs in changes The web environment Wordpress runs in did not change all that much. The JS ecosystem simulates big changes, but that's all bullshit. Server code that worked 30 years ago still works - if projects like PHP don't go out of their way to break it.
      - 9dev 2y ago
        > But otherwise absolutely, never break user space. Neither the Linux kernel, nor OpenSSL, or any other reasonably complex project manages to do that over a given time frame. Sometimes you need to adapt, and things break in the process. Nobody would expect a house built 30 years ago to not require some maintenance and upgrades over time. > The web environment Wordpress runs in did not change all that much. The JS ecosystem simulates big changes, but that's all bullshit. Server code that worked 30 years ago still works - if projects like PHP don't go out of their way to break it. That sure sounds good, but is simply not true. We went from HTTP and FTP deployments to TLS and containers, from dialup to gigabit consumer uplink; the browser isn't a remote document viewer but a platform-agnostic virtual machine for fully-fledged applications; the web is centred around a few enormous platforms; people regularly stream GBs worth of video and expect services to deliver web apps on a variety of devices; they don't post on bulletin boards and in news groups, but use chat services; scammers distribute ransomware, steal your identity, remotely take compromising pictures from your webcam, or order stuff from your shopping accounts online. The modern web has almost nothing in common with the one from 30 years ago.

thisisjaymehta 2y ago

To be honest, I never found WordPress easy to use. It's all flowers and rainbows as long as I can find good themes and plugins. However, it starts going south as soon as I need to make a very small custom change.

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thomasfromcdnjs 2y ago
I've always considered myself an above average web developer, my friends would always have Wordpress websites, and ask me if I can just tweak a few things. Without hesitation, I'd proclaim I could easily make those changes! Then I'd load their site, load their plugin/theme code and css files, struggle for hours to get the desired effect, and even if I got it to work, I would break every other part of their site. --- Denigrating anecdote aside, good job Matt, loved the story at the end.
- pests 2y ago
  I had the exact same thing happen years ago and I've never felt so helpless. Simple banner / color change. Ended up rebuilding the entire site from scratch it was easier. Once you spend some time in the codebase and understand a bit of its legacy history it gets easier over time. A lot of plugins and solutions are aimed towards non-technical users and a lot of overlap. Where we might just write up some custom HTML others might install 3 plugins to make it work.
  - kijin 2y ago
    The overlap between plugins is crazy. It looks like every plugin comes with an entire SEO toolkit, a performance optimizer, a firewall and the kitchen sink. Unless you're very careful, you quickly end up with an unusable house with 5 kitchen sinks, no fridge, and 1 3/4 ovens that are perpetually trying to burn one another.
    - 2y ago

muglug 2y ago

In a vertical where the barrier to entry is not high, being first to market with something simple that people can extend can create a decent-sized moat. The downside is that much of the code in WP core is effectively un-modernizable, given how much depends on things working a certain way. Key classes and functions haven’t been meaningfully updated in over a decade.

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henning 2y ago

WordPress is proof that clean code doesn't matter. Security doesn't matter. Out of the box performance doesn't matter. At least none of these matter if you are the 800 lb gorilla in the market and everyone else is trying to take a piece out of you.

nikolay 2y ago
The only things that matter are a decent admin UI and the illusion of choice of free plugins - most plugins are useless in 2024 because they have a pro version. When you add up the annual costs of all pro versions, the "free" WordPress (which requires a beefy hosting plan) becomes the most expensive and hardest to keep up publishing system nowadays!
- bboygravity 2y ago
  From a business perspective the significant part of the website costs are man-hours for setup and maintenance. Got something to say about how WP compares to others when it comes to man-hours (assuming you can buy any and all plugins you want)? Honest question, because I have no idea about CMS.
  - nikolay 2y ago
    But they overprice and they forget people use multiple plugins, so I use a third-party service that leverages GPL to offer most premium themes and plugins for a low annual fee.
    - rafark 2y ago
      So basically you just want the functionality without paying for it. > they overprice and they forget people use multiple plugins People who complain about the prices also forget that a lot of these plugins take months or years to develop. You’re (we’ll not you since you made it clear you don’t pay the devs) literally getting thousands of man hours for like 60 bucks per year.

tambourine_man 2y ago

I like Wordpress and it’s the CMS of choice for almost every situation, but Gutenberg has been out for a long time and it’s still far from good enough. Both as an enduser and as a developer.

dotcoma 2y ago

> 1. Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible. Yeah. Like, for example, forcing users to install the "Classic Editor" plugin to use, well, a normal editor that is more than sufficient for a blog.

nikolay 2y ago
Or one plugin no working with another and having to try all permutations to see which breaks which - that's simple and intuitive!

fjuan 2y ago

Congrats Matt! WordPress enabled lots of people to push their own boundaries in the internet. Looking forward to celebrate the next 21!

tommica 2y ago

WordPress is special - though I don't work with it anymore, I have enjoyed seeing newer developers solve problems with it

graiz 2y ago

I wish wordpress did fewer things but did them better. There should be something that is a notch better Jekyll but doesn't get gross when you install a dozen plug-ins. Out of the box wordpress produces a very slow and bandwidth heavy site.

throw5345346 2y ago
If you need a simple site now you barely need any plugins at all. Something for a contact form, maybe. You do have to lean in slightly to how Gutenberg and Full Site Editing works -- I recommend this amazing documentation site: https://fullsiteediting.com https://fullsiteediting.com
p4bl0 2y ago
Have you given Dotclear a try?
- joshstrange 2y ago
  * Google for “Dotclear”, get the first result with no description (“No information is available for this page. Learn why”) - not a good first impression * Dotclear website’s theme is ugly verging on purposefully ugly. At least WP default themes look decent * Click on “About” to see what this runs on (homepage doesn’t tell me), nothing loads. Oh! I have to click one of these header tabs/links, odd… “About” -> “Overview” still doesn’t tell me what language this is written in. Click “Pre-requisite” finally see it’s PHP+(MySQL/Postgres/SQLite) For software that’s been around since 2003 I kind of expect better and I expect have heard of it since back in 2009-2011-ish I was doing a fair bit of WP development.

stevesearer 2y ago

Would be interested to hear other people’s favorite paid WordPress plugins. A couple essential ones for me are Advanced Custom Fields Pro and Admin Columns Pro.

huxflux 2y ago
Gravity Forms - https://www.gravityforms.com https://www.gravityforms.com

nikolay 2y ago

WordPress is the biggest bowl of spaghetti code in production! 21 years of carbicide!

ssalat 2y ago

Quick judgments and strong opinions have unfortunately become part of the community. Having spent the last 2-3 months working excessively on WordPress development, I would like to say a word about the excellent isolation of code with blocks ("Gutenberg"). As standalone plugins or in combination with Advanced Custom Fields, these allow for perfect, modular websites and development flows (design system), where even the HTML is 100% in your own hands. I can recommend everyone to understand and learn WordPress properly. – no relation or connection to WordPress.

wwweston 2y ago
Can you recommend some of the better ways to understand and learn it properly? (Worked with it extensively 2009-2011, including authoring/modifying plugins, but never felt like I really understood it, only vaguely understood/appreciated it)
- throw5345346 2y ago
  Not parent but: https://fullsiteediting.com https://fullsiteediting.com will help you. It's a great project.
pbowyer 2y ago
What's the best skeleton theme to build your own theme on in 2024, that supports Full site editing, Gutenberg etc? After a decade away from WP I wanted to set up a new site. The default 2024 theme doesn't meet my needs, and I couldn't find a modern skeleton theme where I could add in Tailwind and build what I wanted. I've used https://roots.io/sage/ https://roots.io/sage/ previously but they're moving further and further away from the WP way of doing things. Edit: or instead of a skeleton theme, a good free FSE theme to build on?
- throw5345346 2y ago
  https://fullsiteediting.com/themes/ https://fullsiteediting.com/themes/ has a list, including one or two skeletons. I am tempted by Anders Norén's Björk, which is also FSE: https://andersnoren.se/teman/bjork-wordpress-theme/ https://andersnoren.se/teman/bjork-wordpress-theme/ I think I did most of my learning with Carolina's own Jace theme. (FWIW I have always thought the roots.io stuff is a mistake, conceptually.)

jaydeegee 2y ago

WP is the perfect tool for 95% of the job with the last 5% of tweaking being incredibly frustrating. I've used it extensively and it's longevity is a testament to its usefulness may it be around for another 21yrs.

todotask 2y ago

No matter how long it has been, on the one hand, WordPress can be seen as a victim of its success, as widespread adoption has led to various challenges such as security vulnerabilities and performance issues after maintining clients' website for the past 3 years. There are remaining security that is essentials and yet not many website does it correctly.

MangoCoffee 2y ago

WP is 21 years old, and people on HN still bishing and crying about it. How come no one has offered something that can beat WP in 21 years?

todotask 2y ago
It's more objective if you compare by carbon footprint among others and how you build your site.
- todotask 2y ago
  Meaning there is always challenges is all software and everyone has different expectations, I don't see why I get downvoted.
9dev 2y ago
Nah, that’s not how it works. People are also complaining about the quality of Google‘s search results, but has anyone come up with a something that can beat them? Technically, yes! But practically, Wordpress has such a velocity, it’s mostly impossible to stop at this point. There’s an ecosystem of millions of plugins, themes, entire agencies around Wordpress, that’s something you can’t really solve. So just because Wordpress sticks around doesn’t mean it’s the superior solution; it just happened to suck less than the competition a decade ago.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ehnto 2y ago
I think developers underestimate the ecosystem and community aspects. Software is definitely not a space where "if you build it, they will come". There is better codebases, but no one has held a candle to the ecosystem yet. I believe this is because the core users of WP are not it's developers, the users (admins, agency clients etc) hold a considerably larger stake in typical business engagements. I have been doing eComm agency work for years and even if the chosen eComm platform does have a CMS, we're very often asked to integrate a wordpress site for the company's marketing/content team to use.

JodieBenitez 2y ago

I love Wordpress. People install it on their own, install dozens of useless, unsecure and buggy plugins ("it's easy, just clic clic clic... I love my admin panel !") and after a while their websites break and then we can charge them for a more secure and resilient solution.

eastbound 2y ago
They sure made it enticing to install plugins, if not just by putting this UI to the forefront. Also, when images aren’t compressed by default, it’s a perfect alliance with the various SEO analyzers which mandate you to compress them…
agumonkey 2y ago
Back in 2011, I had the pleasure to take a peak at the sociable plugin (#2 on their plugin ladderboard) and it was one of the more brittle and bloated piece of code I ever saw. Felt like an unfinished weekend project that dragged too long and ended up published, 5 screens long for loops over massive globals, duplicated to then do whatever.

zubspace 2y ago

I avoided wordpress like a plague. Used stuff like django, flask, grav and who knows what. But recently I had to make a website with lots of unknowns which needed to be authored by dummy users and I just said ** it and went with wordpress. What I struggled with are: 1) Interesting site design, 2) custom functionality through plugins, 3) making it easy to add pages and blog posts with a nice editor. I'm glad open source solutions exist, but I swear, they always have drawbacks. Either they are code heavy, plugins are out of date, maintenance takes a lot of time or there is no way to easily design a page. So for Wordpress I bought Oxygen, for which you can still buy a lifetime license for, and oh my god, even I can make a nice, responsive website without touching code. It's such a game changer. I think lots of people avoid wordpress because of security. But that is not primarily a wordpress fault. Linux & PHP complicates it a lot. And I'm sure those other open source projects have severe bugs, too, but nobody knows or talks about them. What could bring down wordpress, imho, are expensive license fees for plugins. Who wants to spend 50 to 100 bucks per year and per page for a builder plugin? Everyone wants one, but no one wants to pay yearly. And it seems that all plugin makers are starting to go that way.

throw5345346 2y ago
I agree about builder plugins -- they are expensive mossy lock-in. WordPress now has a full-site editing system that lets you GUI edit the templates that are in the normal flow. It is not what I would call easy to master at the code level, but there is a global styles system and a way to use Gutenberg blocks to control layout outside the main content flow. So we are getting towards a point where page builder plugins won't be needed for skilled shops. But IMO until there are really easy to use themes based around FSE (there may be some), small design shops are still likely to use Elementor, which is a slow, frustrating experience (slower and more frustrating than Squarespace can be)

zwaps 2y ago

<< Static websites are fine, but dynamic ones are better.>> Nah

throw5345346 2y ago

One of the things that strikes me about WordPress is the way that web nerds expect to find it easy and are angered when it is not. Like everything, it takes learning. It has opinions. It has some crazy history (I really wish media items were not handled the way they are), but it also has methodology to it. If I said I know Go and JS and Perl and Java and Ruby and C, and I was enraged that Rust is so hard to learn, I'd be shot down for it, rightly. WordPress looks like it does a simple job, but actually it's a whole, quite broad platform. You might have to read some documentation for a bit. And if you've inherited a site using Elementor, ask the people who made it how to change the simple stuff, because they will be able to help. If you've inherited a site using Visual Composer or Divi... shoot the people who made it. If you think Gutenberg is bad (it is very much not, now!)... oh man, Divi was a time.

orf 2y ago
What’s the crazy history?
- throw5345346 2y ago
  Well, maybe not crazy. Just heavily legacy. There are a few deeply frustrating things, if you ask me: All the media files are stored in a single uploads/year/month (maybe year/month/day) directory, which can mean some very big directories of file variations There's code that cannot be fun to support anymore, like the Pluggable functions (that still let you get Wordpress to check some external login system) There's still really not enough of a sense of a "model" anywhere. It still (AFAIK) stores some things in the database using PHP serialization (which is unambiguously the most annoying serialization format on earth, and means that search and replace tasks must be done in PHP) I mean... it's hard to blame them for not wanting to break stuff, and the commitment to backwards-compatibility is very nearly unprecedented. I think WordPress is great, and I am not judging. I'm just saying, there are decisions that might have gone better with a little more foresight. But some of them are literally twenty years old and hard to change now. Not that WP is alone in that -- FreeCAD is just getting through its "fix a two decade legacy problem" as we speak! Matt is right about zip uploads. I mean it's better than explaining to random users how to upload nested hierarchies over FTP, but still.

mattl 2y ago

I checked it out around the same time Mark Pilgrim moved to it. Movable Type came and went but to their credit they tried a GPL version but sadly OpenMelody never caught on.

NKosmatos 2y ago

I wish more companies would adopt the sabbatical policy that automattic has: https://automattic.com/benefits/sabbatical/ https://automattic.com/benefits/sabbatical/

croisillon 2y ago
note that in the US they have 2 weeks vacations per year, so even with 3 months sabbatical less than in Europe
- gibrown 2y ago
  This isn't true at all. The vacation policy is "Our time off policy is short: take the time that you need" and "There is no minimum or maximum, but we encourage you to take at least 25 days of time off per year".

DrSiemer 2y ago

Haven't used it a lot in the last decade, but WordPress was great for quickly setting up a basic website that needs a nice beginner friendly CMS. Just make sure you stick to the base theme with a custom child theme and only use a select few plugins (like custom fields and contact form), that don't stab you in the back or begin to fight with each other later on. I just still don't understand how Gutenberg is an improvement. It's so clunky and confusing to get even the most basic things done with it.

karolist 2y ago

My gf has a WP ecommerce site that her business revolves around, it was built buy some local guys doing WP development who have an agency solving problems just with WP. She told me how fast they were able to iterate and solve all their problems. The site has a bunch of plugins integrating various social services, ad tracking, SEO and whatnot. The site generates PDF shipment labels for parcels, one day her sales got high enough to buy a label printer, one that spits out 10x15cm stickers. The problem - PDFs from the site come out as A4 and text gets tiny if squeezed to fit into that sticker. She asked her developers to fix it, they said it's impossible and refused. Now that's interesting, nothing is impossible I shouted with my nerd hat on. I'm in the tech space for a good few decades now, I have FAANG experience, complex systems are my thing! I spent 5 hours diving through tons of spaghetti code plugins masquerading as highly abstracted set of interfaces to arrive at the conclusion that these guys were right, the PDF blob comes from the shipment company's SOAP API, though it's obfuscated deep enough. In the end I solved it with a simple PyQT+fPDF UI utility to crop out the printable parts and project them onto the right sized canvas for printing, it took me 2h to complete with binary packaging and all, less time than it took to understand why the WordPress site can't do it natively, and much less than than it would have taken me to integrate this PDF modification into WordPress. These guys were basically right. Her site now backs up to 4GB zip with photo assets. I dread the day when her site goes down due to some "hack" but I have no idea how to replicate this functionality for this cost without WP. No way in hell I would say I can do it from scratch for her, my previous Web dev experience doesn't matter at this point. Shopify? Sigh.

skilled 2y ago
4GB? Those are rookie numbers. I have a site where /wp-content/ is 20GB. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of images that have been auto generated by WordPress because of how thumbnails and minifaction works, but also converting images to WebP. And if you delete old posts or any other content, the images stay. And it’s my understanding that there is no safe way to remove unused images. I have tried to do it using the in-built media manager but eventually I gave up because it’s tedious and I don’t want to risk leaving pages without images by accident.
- 2y ago

p4bl0 2y ago

I remember a time when WordPress was "easy". Nowadays starting from a clean install and customizing the appearance and modules has actually become quite difficult. Even the usage workflow feels bloated. These days I prefer Dotclear as a blog engine. It also has grown in complexity over the years, but not quite as much and still feels like nothing is getting on your way. This is from the point of view of someone knowing how to program and the languages involved (PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS, etc.) but who's not a professional web developer and even less a professional WordPress-based developer (since this is now actually a thing).

askonomm 2y ago

I just wish WordPress actually adhered to development standards, not actively tried to break them. Using globals everywhere and encouraging spaghetti code with its classic themes, and with its new themes it evidently learned nothing and is encouraging JSON inside HTML comments which obviously has no editor support, is very prone to errors, besides being just plain stupid (like seriously, some senior engineers I assume decided to have templating inside HTML comments as JSON?). If I had my tinfoil hat on, it's almost as if they actively try to kill the freelancer or digital agency market and push everything to its WYSIWYG site builder on WP.com.

benatkin 2y ago
I agree that WordPress has often failed to live up to development standards, but those aren't them, those are ones that can legitimately vary between platforms.
zelphirkalt 2y ago
They encourage lots and lots of bad practices. I mean, just look at themes and how they are built by default. Comments in a CSS file describe the theme metadata. Using concattenation instead of composition everywhere, so that parts of HTML are not reusable. CSS, inside JS inside HTML inside PHP ... Part of it is this implicit structure it defines, which file it loads adter ehich other file to make a whole page. It seems convenient at first, if only you know it, but it encourages people to not properly finish all their HTML elements on the same file, but split them up stupidly and end them in other files, never to be reused. It all seems very beginner-mistake like. But I guess they are stuck with this now, because thousands of themes rely on this, instead of having a structure based on composition. Contrast this for example with how one uses Jinja2 templates rendering blocks and macros.
- Tijdreiziger 2y ago
  Their mantra of ‘never break backwards compatibility’ is a double-edged sword. It makes them extremely friendly to non-technical users, which I think is the majority of their userbase. However, it makes it impossible for them to change technical decisions made in the past.

zelphirkalt 2y ago

I have come across a situation, where an automatic Wordpress update (need to keep up to date, against vulnerabilities) made a site I maintain violate the law: I used a unicode symbol for something in text. Wordpress out of nowhere and by itself decided, that it would be better to replace that symbol with a bloody svg, that is loaded from some third party. At first I could not believe my eyes, then it dawned on me, how incredible reckless they acted with that update. They must really have no clue what they are doing. Then I scrambled to reverse this bs and tried various things, including editing the theme minimally, which originally I never wanted to do, because I do not want to maintain a theme in addition to the site. Well nothing worked, except for installing a plugin, whose sole purpose it is to reverse this stupidity. If I had not had functionality connected to the DOM structure around my unicode symbol, I might not have noticed it, because that functionality also broke. So there we go, WP automatically making the site violating the law by loading from third party without consent and also breaking my functionality and basically forcing me to install a plugin to correct WP core mistakes. Of course it is very clear now, that it is completely unfit for any business website, when the core developers make such bad decisions. It requires constant maintenance, even if you update nothing but WP itself. Alternatively you let it get outdated and get hacked due to vulnerabilities. Great.

simonjgreen 2y ago
Are you intentionally not mentioning which country and law?
- selfmodruntime 2y ago
  They definitely are and I would bet money it's China.
  - addandsubtract 2y ago
    China has laws against loading content from third parties without consent? Sounds more like an EU thing.
    - 2y ago

smooc 2y ago

I'm getting old. I really thought for a moment that the title was about Word Perfect 2.1. Dann I miss the underwater screen.

TBurette 2y ago

What I find remarkable is that multiple people can say 'I am a Wordpress Developer' and it will translate into very different experiences and skillsets. For some it means clicking around installing theme, plugins then writing the content of pages through the Wordpress admin. For others it means old school php code to customize Wordpress behaviour with PHP template to write the HTML. This is called classic theme. For yet other people it means writing JS+React with docker, CI/CD,... This is the new block theme.

DANmode 2y ago
For yet others, it could be all of these, if they have chosen a diverse enough clientbase.

skibz 2y ago

Kudos, WordPress.

liampulles 2y ago

WordPress is not the blogging solution humanity deserves, but the one that was needed. Customising a base and installing plugins as opposed to devving a blogging platform allows a huge portion of people to create internet businesses who otherwise wouldn't. I get that there are supposed better solutions now, but this was not the case a few years ago. And there is a lot of WordPress content out there for novices to learn web dev. My sister co-owns a very basic architecting firm, and they have figured out WordPress based on online materials to design a website that suits them pretty well. Maybe that is not the long term solution for them, but it is a very productive place to start for a small business.

sureIy 2y ago
> better solutions now What better solution for self-hosted websites that can be jump started by anyone and provide the kind of flexibility that WP provides?
- fastball 2y ago
  It really depends on your needs. Are there many alternatives more flexible than WP? No. But that is begging the question. The vast majority of people don't need the kitchen sink that is WP, and would be better served by utilizing one of the many products and platforms that have cropped up to fill more specific niches since the inception of WP. Just need a blog? Maybe want it to be a newsletter? Ghost, Medium, Substack, etc Want an online store? Shopify, Checkout Page, etc Need a sexy website that doesn't take coding? Squarespace, Framer, etc You get the idea.
  - sureIy 2y ago
    Out of all your examples, only Ghost is self hosted. Not everyone wants to or is able to afford a $20/month provider, especially small businesses outside the US.
    - fastball 2y ago
      Given that your previous comment said "can be jump started by anyone", self-hosted is definitely not a reasonable requirement. Self-hosted WP cannot be jump started by anyone, and in the limited cases it can (very, very limited WP), you're probably not spending much less than $20/m.

modernerd 2y ago

21! At this point WP is “boring technology” which makes it a great choice for many sites. It still does much that's hard to get anywhere else: - The core update process. It's long been one-click. Almost no other CMS or self-hosted framework offers as smooth an update process. (With Laravel, for example, I end up paying for Laravel Shift and even then it requires manual intervention that would be hard for a non-dev to handle.) For WP, services now exist to do automated updates with health checks and rollbacks to counter potential plugin incompatibility[1]. - The plugin ecosystem. WP went from "democratizing publishing" to "democratizing user-owned sites and businesses". From learning management systems to stores to paid newsletters, it's pretty cool what people with no programming experience can spin up. Things I'd love to see for WP in the next 21 years (that we'll probably get sooner if enough people contribute): - Built-in multilingual support. The web is global but WP isn't really, yet, except via third-party plugins. It's on the roadmap[2] but it's been a long time coming. - Improved education around Full Site Editing (FSE) and the new editor. The tools are getting good now, but there's still an education gap. Lots of people are helping to close this, though. Jamie Marsland's YouTube videos do a great job of showing what's possible with FSE, for example. [3] - Background batch processing/queues. These are only available via third-party solutions (and bundled with things like WooCommerce), but should probably be built into core. - SQLite support. Already pretty good but not officially supported in core yet. - Built-in site migrations. Also on the roadmap.[4] - Enhanced Playground tech. Distributing WP as a single binary for dependency-free local development (i.e. without Node.js) feels achievable and worthwhile. - Version control. It's too hard to store a WP site's state in a git repo and keep that synced with production and staging environments, especially when those with admin access can install and upgrade plugins independently of the repo. [1] Like Automattic's own scheduled updater on WP.com (https://wordpress.com/blog/2024/05/20/scheduled-plugin-updates/ https://wordpress.com/blog/2024/05/20/scheduled-plugin-updat...) and WP Engine's Smart Plugin Manager (https://wpengine.com/smart-plugin-manager/ https://wpengine.com/smart-plugin-manager/). [2] Current state of multilingual sites in WP: https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/wordpress/multilingual/ https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/word... [3] I like Jamie's videos showing how to recreate famous layouts with FSE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrdXCSIP578 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrdXCSIP578 [4] Site Transfer Protocol: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/60375 https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/60375

aussieguy1234 2y ago

I was on the team that built news.com.au, which, along with the other news sites we set up in a multi tenant WordPress setup, was at the time the largest commerical WordPress site in the world, getting something like 500 million monthly page views. We made extensive use of caching to say the least.

Pikamander2 2y ago

WordPress is simultaneously amazing and terrible. At its best, it's a highly extensible free and open source CMS that's incredibly easy to set up and customize. For that matter, its core has reasonably good security and performance before third-party themes and plugins are added into the mix. The problem comes in with how many basic GUI-based features it's still missing out of the box 21 years later. Take, for example, the curious case of the lack of post cloning; Why is there still no "Duplicate Post" button in the core after 21 years? Why are over 4 million websites being forced to keep a third-party "Yoast Duplicate Post" plugin active in order to access a very basic CMS feature? The same goes for other GUI-based tasks like logging outgoing emails (WP Mail Logging), or viewing the scheduled cron jobs (WP Crontrol), or letting an admin temporarily switch to another user's account (User Switching), or downloading a one-click backup of the site regardless of host (All In One WP Migration), or managing the SMTP settings (FluentSMTP), or managing URL redirects (Redirection), or enabling SVG uploads (SVG Support). The fact that many of those tasks can be accomplished through small code snippets in the child theme is great and all, but that doesn't help the average WordPress site owner who is barely tech literate and would be more likely to break the site than successfully copy a hook over to the correct file. It's not uncommon to find WordPress sites with 50+ plugins installed, a good chunk of which are abandoned and have multiple code vulnerabilities, yet still find the time to clog up the dashboard with useless "notices", AKA advertisements for their other products. I could understand a lot of the missing functionality if WordPress was still a small FOSS project with no real funding and a few irregular volunteers, but the fact that's it's grown into what it is without any real plan to address those issues is just so frustrating. I've made a few small contributions to the core and read through a bunch of tickets for longstanding issues, and it's clear that time or funding aren't the problem; it's that the maintainers have an attitude of "We don't personally need that feature ourselves, therefore it can just be a third-party plugin", which might sound fine on paper, but... Ever clicked on a Google link, only to catch a quick glimpse of the real site before being redirected to an "UPDATE CHROME NOW" or "CRITICAL MICROSOFT ALERT" or "CHEAP PHARMA PILLS" website? There's a 99% chance that site is running WordPress and has dozens of plugins and got hacked at some point, and if you try to message the site's owner to tell them what's happening and how they can fix it, they'll think you're crazy or a scammer and leave the malware there because it intentionally hides itself to logged in users. I'm not exaggerating about that percentage, either; WordPress runs a massive chunk of the modern web (excluding major social media websites), and the failure to quash the need for so many common plugins has made them a goldmine for bad actors to inject redirects and SEO spam.

Raed667 2y ago

I will always fondly remember that time i was in college (~2011), and created a fully working social network for my classmates using WordPress and ungodly amount of Plugins, and ducktape code I barely understood. A user profile display was ~30 SQL queries (who needs cache), and my poor 5$ VPS was sweating ... learned a lot on what not to do! fun times !

debesyla 2y ago
30 SQL queries are basically normally functioning WordPress, it's a bit more unusual when it gets to 150+ queries zone :)
- Raed667 2y ago
  I remember laughing because one of the plugins was storing the HEX color value of a small banner in a DB and for every page load it needed to fetch it again even if the banner was nowhere on the page. Suddenly it changed my look on all all those "easy" knobs and fields from the admin panel and they looked very costly

dep_b 2y ago

I prefer something like Django to build more complex websites against for clients, or just pure PHP for blog style stuff for myself. WP level sites wouldn’t hire me as two days of my work is as expensive as years of WP hosting. But I admire the way the web was democratized with these CMS’es.

Kye 2y ago

>> "Almost every site would be improved by having a great blog." Unfortunately, WordPress seems to move further and further from this every year. I've used WordPress from near the start, and the editor is so top-heavy now that I get anxiety opening it. Switching to Ghost (with a nice little $4/month managed host[0,1]) was a breath of fresh air. It doesn't do all the things WordPress does, but it does the things it does do better. Especially newsletters and pay gating. [0] Referral link: https://magicpages.co?aff=9fLJierQBpnV https://magicpages.co?aff=9fLJierQBpnV [1] Non-referral link: https://magicpages.co https://magicpages.co

rob74 2y ago

Do you know what makes you feel old? When you read "WP" and think not of WordPress (which would now apparently be accepted as an adult in even the most conservative countries), but of WordPerfect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect - which is now at "midlife crisis" age).

atonse 2y ago
I still miss WordPerfect. I used to prefer it to MS Word. And it's been 25 years since I last used it.

deleted 2y ago

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k3vinw 2y ago

My first computer software related job was creating Wordpress powered web sites from photoshop documents. Thank you to the creators for making that possible!