7 ms·

WordPress next, and beyond: breaking the technical enclosure

28 points by tdlx 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
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pacifika 2y ago
It’s fun to reinvent the wheel but I promise you all WordPress agencies have solved this already. For example look at VVV.
- jimmiles 2y ago
  But VVV is aimed at developers; the OP describes a different use case, in which he also eloquently explains my dilemma, and that I'm sure of many others: we want to write for our blog, not develop our blog. I am very interested in his project going forward...
  - sureIy 2y ago
    I don’t see that issue, really. If you don’t want to develop WP, then use a hosted platform or static builder. If you factor your time spent on tweaking this “simple” proposed setup, you’ll see that $20/month is actually a great deal. Even when I was a WP developer, none of my personal websites were in WP, they all lived on static hosts that needed zero maintenance.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- modernerd 2y ago
  wp-env is a good option too. https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/packages/packages-env/ https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guide...
- throw46365 2y ago
  Yeah -- though I think VVV has been thoroughly supplanted by Local: https://localwp.com https://localwp.com Which almost every serious WP designer-turned-theme-developer I know uses. (I personally use my own simplified Vagrant package management scripts with some ssh_config integration hooks because I work on more than WP and value standardisation across VM environments more than I value the features Local adds)
rob 2y ago
Hasn't roots.io been doing this for a while? Specifically, Bedrock: https://roots.io/bedrock/ https://roots.io/bedrock/ (They also have a bunch of other projects in this space, like plugin development based on Laravel.)
- throw46365 2y ago
  I am not fond of Bedrock. (Acorn maybe solves a problem though) Subverting the way WP works to make it work more like other environments is, in my long experience with WP, the cause of almost all unmaintainable, hacky sites, no matter how good the intentions. It’s entirely possible to use Composer and the autoloader within a plugin without doing stuff like this. I tend to wrap up every plugin I write using Composer, and enclose the plugin’s functionality in a singleton instance. If you are not then also targeting the WP plugin repository, you can make good use of PHP lambda functions to make tidier code. But generally, it’s just better not to assume the WP conventions are wrong; almost all the interoperability of WP comes from understanding its idiosyncratic way of doing things, and leaning on simplicity and the core whenever you can.
  - chuckadams 2y ago
    Don’t make the mistake of believing the default settings of WP come from any kind of informed wisdom instead of historical accident. WP was never designed, it was grown, it predates composer and every sensible modern PHP practice, and is still distributed the same way for compatibility reasons. For all its faults tho, WP does let you rearrange its half-dozen or so directories, and is designed to do so. Bedrock’s layout isn’t radically different from what many multi-user WP setups adopt. WP itself uses constants everywhere to refer to its directories, and as long as you set them, WP will work fine. Plugins that hardwire paths have to be fixed of course, but even the dumbest plugins still tend to use the constants, or are easily edited to do so. (BTW, I recommend cweagans/composer-patches for those plugins you do need to tweak by hand: much more maintainable than forking the plugin locally)
    - throw46365 2y ago
      > Don’t make the mistake of believing the default settings of WP come from any kind of informed wisdom instead of historical accident. I don't, thanks. To repeat myself, I just say it's better not to assume they are wrong. Almost every bit of bad WP development out there comes from people who work against the flow of what WP is doing, whether because they don't understand or do understand and feel they know better. They may, in fact, know better, but it's almost always wasted energy that leads to future unmaintainability when a WP site is handed to a new stakeholder for example. The WP sites I've had to maintain where someone has subverted the templates, or tried to superimpose some MVC scheme, or whatever, have always been the worst ones. There are good, official tools to manage most of the idiosyncrasies of WP (WP-CLI, for example) without just arbitrarily moving stuff around. Learning them helps.
camillomiller 2y ago
>> I did what most of us do in such situations. I went for WordPress, a not-too-crappy theme for which I might have even paid a few bucks, and cheap hosting. The recommended way to fetch WordPress is to download a zip file (scream), tweak it locally if you can, and then upload it to a server using FTP (more scream). You could use sFTP if you wish to make things less worse (still screaming). Oh, the national sport of criticizing a platform or tool without having used any of the many different options it offers, I see. Also… wow, this comes straight from the dept. of complicating easy things… for the only reason of not wanting to understand how the platform perfectly handles all the issues describe, not researching any of the good existing professional wordpress based solutions out there, which have been available for ages.
- tdlx 2y ago
  Thanks. I spent many many years with WordPress, and I loved it for many years. Once I started seriously leveling up with other tools, such as Symfony or Laravel, the standards enforced in WordPress were insufficient. I know WordPress future is still bright and getting better with every release. I love its community. But my personal decision is to move aside.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
neya 2y ago
I know this is controversial, but I was in his EXACT spot and I did something else that many of us at some point in our lives ended up doing - I wrote my own CMS. But, I wrote mine for the last 10 years. I iterated it with various different languages, frameworks and eventually settled for a Phoenix/Elixir based backend that is locally / cloud hostable, with a more or less similar UI to Wordpress. I actually wrote a lengthy article about it if you are interested to follow on its updates: https://medium.com/@ideatocode/what-i-learned-as-an-artist-writing-my-own-blog-engine-for-10-years-straight-0cb8297e7712 https://medium.com/@ideatocode/what-i-learned-as-an-artist-w... The thing that keeps people hooked with Wordpress is actually the UI. For most people, it is stupidly simple to use after they play around with it for a couple of days. In Singapore, I met this florist who was running her entire business based off of a shared hosting hosted Wordpress that wasn't updated in years. I asked her what kept her on the platform still as it was slow af and she said "it just works". She got hacked a couple of times, but no biggie, she was also back on track after just a support ticket to her hosting provider. That is the power of Wordpress from a user's POV. Thanks to Wordpress, almost my entire career was built on top of it, just detesting it (unknowingly).
- pixelmonkey 2y ago
  Obligatory meme: https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/ https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/ I'm personally in the top left corner and bottom right corner at the same time, which is sort of funny. I have used WordPress since 2004-2005, and I've also written a Python static site generator before using Flask, Frozen-Flask[1], and webpack. I've also made stops through tools like Sphinx, Hugo, Gatsby, and VitePress[2]. But my personal site continues to run WordPress[3]. I think I'd prefer something like VitePress these days for a technical documentation site. It has a lot going for it for that use case. Also, I recently learned that MediaWiki with a reasonable theme like Citizen[4] is a nice choice for an open source powered private wiki, although I do find the Mediawiki markup language a little cumbersome versus simpler markup languages like reST or Markdown/MyST in the Python community (or GitHub-Flavored Markdown or Asciidoc supported elsewhere). But Mediawiki has a lot of nice features (after all, Mediawiki powers Wikipedia). The theme makes it work properly on mobile and makes content editing a bit simpler. It still isn't nearly as polished as commercial wiki-like software (e.g. Notion) but it's better than open source wikis used to be. I do find it kind of amusing how many tools and frameworks developers have created for making it easier to edit HTML pages. Truly a foundational 21st century problem, I guess! [1]: https://frozen-flask.readthedocs.io/ https://frozen-flask.readthedocs.io/ [2]: https://vitepress.dev/ https://vitepress.dev/ [3]: https://amontalenti.com https://amontalenti.com [4]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Citizen https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Citizen
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
markx2 2y ago
Given the name chosen, was permission sought? https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/ https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
- throw46365 2y ago
  I almost made the same post. In the author's position I'd consider a different name or talking to the Foundation if he hasn't already.
  - tdlx 2y ago
    Thanks for the warning. I'll get in touch with them. If I have to rephrase the title, I'll go with "Why I'm leaving WordPress", because it is also the stage were I'm at on my (very long) journey with that CMS. I started web development with it.

28 points by tdlx 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

It’s fun to reinvent the wheel but I promise you all WordPress agencies have solved this already. For example look at VVV.

jimmiles 2y ago
But VVV is aimed at developers; the OP describes a different use case, in which he also eloquently explains my dilemma, and that I'm sure of many others: we want to write for our blog, not develop our blog. I am very interested in his project going forward...
- sureIy 2y ago
  I don’t see that issue, really. If you don’t want to develop WP, then use a hosted platform or static builder. If you factor your time spent on tweaking this “simple” proposed setup, you’ll see that $20/month is actually a great deal. Even when I was a WP developer, none of my personal websites were in WP, they all lived on static hosts that needed zero maintenance.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
modernerd 2y ago
wp-env is a good option too. https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/packages/packages-env/ https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guide...
throw46365 2y ago
Yeah -- though I think VVV has been thoroughly supplanted by Local: https://localwp.com https://localwp.com Which almost every serious WP designer-turned-theme-developer I know uses. (I personally use my own simplified Vagrant package management scripts with some ssh_config integration hooks because I work on more than WP and value standardisation across VM environments more than I value the features Local adds)

rob 2y ago

Hasn't roots.io been doing this for a while? Specifically, Bedrock: https://roots.io/bedrock/ https://roots.io/bedrock/ (They also have a bunch of other projects in this space, like plugin development based on Laravel.)

throw46365 2y ago
I am not fond of Bedrock. (Acorn maybe solves a problem though) Subverting the way WP works to make it work more like other environments is, in my long experience with WP, the cause of almost all unmaintainable, hacky sites, no matter how good the intentions. It’s entirely possible to use Composer and the autoloader within a plugin without doing stuff like this. I tend to wrap up every plugin I write using Composer, and enclose the plugin’s functionality in a singleton instance. If you are not then also targeting the WP plugin repository, you can make good use of PHP lambda functions to make tidier code. But generally, it’s just better not to assume the WP conventions are wrong; almost all the interoperability of WP comes from understanding its idiosyncratic way of doing things, and leaning on simplicity and the core whenever you can.
- chuckadams 2y ago
  Don’t make the mistake of believing the default settings of WP come from any kind of informed wisdom instead of historical accident. WP was never designed, it was grown, it predates composer and every sensible modern PHP practice, and is still distributed the same way for compatibility reasons. For all its faults tho, WP does let you rearrange its half-dozen or so directories, and is designed to do so. Bedrock’s layout isn’t radically different from what many multi-user WP setups adopt. WP itself uses constants everywhere to refer to its directories, and as long as you set them, WP will work fine. Plugins that hardwire paths have to be fixed of course, but even the dumbest plugins still tend to use the constants, or are easily edited to do so. (BTW, I recommend cweagans/composer-patches for those plugins you do need to tweak by hand: much more maintainable than forking the plugin locally)
  - throw46365 2y ago
    > Don’t make the mistake of believing the default settings of WP come from any kind of informed wisdom instead of historical accident. I don't, thanks. To repeat myself, I just say it's better not to assume they are wrong. Almost every bit of bad WP development out there comes from people who work against the flow of what WP is doing, whether because they don't understand or do understand and feel they know better. They may, in fact, know better, but it's almost always wasted energy that leads to future unmaintainability when a WP site is handed to a new stakeholder for example. The WP sites I've had to maintain where someone has subverted the templates, or tried to superimpose some MVC scheme, or whatever, have always been the worst ones. There are good, official tools to manage most of the idiosyncrasies of WP (WP-CLI, for example) without just arbitrarily moving stuff around. Learning them helps.

camillomiller 2y ago

>> I did what most of us do in such situations. I went for WordPress, a not-too-crappy theme for which I might have even paid a few bucks, and cheap hosting. The recommended way to fetch WordPress is to download a zip file (scream), tweak it locally if you can, and then upload it to a server using FTP (more scream). You could use sFTP if you wish to make things less worse (still screaming). Oh, the national sport of criticizing a platform or tool without having used any of the many different options it offers, I see. Also… wow, this comes straight from the dept. of complicating easy things… for the only reason of not wanting to understand how the platform perfectly handles all the issues describe, not researching any of the good existing professional wordpress based solutions out there, which have been available for ages.

tdlx 2y ago
Thanks. I spent many many years with WordPress, and I loved it for many years. Once I started seriously leveling up with other tools, such as Symfony or Laravel, the standards enforced in WordPress were insufficient. I know WordPress future is still bright and getting better with every release. I love its community. But my personal decision is to move aside.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

neya 2y ago

I know this is controversial, but I was in his EXACT spot and I did something else that many of us at some point in our lives ended up doing - I wrote my own CMS. But, I wrote mine for the last 10 years. I iterated it with various different languages, frameworks and eventually settled for a Phoenix/Elixir based backend that is locally / cloud hostable, with a more or less similar UI to Wordpress. I actually wrote a lengthy article about it if you are interested to follow on its updates: https://medium.com/@ideatocode/what-i-learned-as-an-artist-writing-my-own-blog-engine-for-10-years-straight-0cb8297e7712 https://medium.com/@ideatocode/what-i-learned-as-an-artist-w... The thing that keeps people hooked with Wordpress is actually the UI. For most people, it is stupidly simple to use after they play around with it for a couple of days. In Singapore, I met this florist who was running her entire business based off of a shared hosting hosted Wordpress that wasn't updated in years. I asked her what kept her on the platform still as it was slow af and she said "it just works". She got hacked a couple of times, but no biggie, she was also back on track after just a support ticket to her hosting provider. That is the power of Wordpress from a user's POV. Thanks to Wordpress, almost my entire career was built on top of it, just detesting it (unknowingly).

pixelmonkey 2y ago
Obligatory meme: https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/ https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/ I'm personally in the top left corner and bottom right corner at the same time, which is sort of funny. I have used WordPress since 2004-2005, and I've also written a Python static site generator before using Flask, Frozen-Flask[1], and webpack. I've also made stops through tools like Sphinx, Hugo, Gatsby, and VitePress[2]. But my personal site continues to run WordPress[3]. I think I'd prefer something like VitePress these days for a technical documentation site. It has a lot going for it for that use case. Also, I recently learned that MediaWiki with a reasonable theme like Citizen[4] is a nice choice for an open source powered private wiki, although I do find the Mediawiki markup language a little cumbersome versus simpler markup languages like reST or Markdown/MyST in the Python community (or GitHub-Flavored Markdown or Asciidoc supported elsewhere). But Mediawiki has a lot of nice features (after all, Mediawiki powers Wikipedia). The theme makes it work properly on mobile and makes content editing a bit simpler. It still isn't nearly as polished as commercial wiki-like software (e.g. Notion) but it's better than open source wikis used to be. I do find it kind of amusing how many tools and frameworks developers have created for making it easier to edit HTML pages. Truly a foundational 21st century problem, I guess! [1]: https://frozen-flask.readthedocs.io/ https://frozen-flask.readthedocs.io/ [2]: https://vitepress.dev/ https://vitepress.dev/ [3]: https://amontalenti.com https://amontalenti.com [4]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Citizen https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Citizen

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

markx2 2y ago

Given the name chosen, was permission sought? https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/ https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/

throw46365 2y ago
I almost made the same post. In the author's position I'd consider a different name or talking to the Foundation if he hasn't already.
- tdlx 2y ago
  Thanks for the warning. I'll get in touch with them. If I have to rephrase the title, I'll go with "Why I'm leaving WordPress", because it is also the stage were I'm at on my (very long) journey with that CMS. I started web development with it.