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And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need, and all they can afford, and all they can figure out without hiring IT. Whi

And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need, and all they can afford, and all they can figure out without hiring IT. Which means, if we want to kill WordPress, we need to offer a better solution. Not just for WordPress, but a coherent system that also reimplements the top hundred or so plugins. If anyone wants to join me rewriting it in Laravel so we could add a WSL-like layer for WordPress cancer plugins… I don’t know. I wish someone would have the conversation. I don’t even care whether it’s Rust.

iambateman 2y ago
Statamic for Laravel is pretty great for what it does. I wrote a WYSIWYG CMS for Laravel called Prodigy that I really enjoy but it hasn’t gotten much market pick up. There’s definitely some thinking in this area on how to move WP users toward Laravel.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  Statamic is awesome; watching Jack McDade in person at Laracon last month was great. However, Statamic is not a WordPress replacement. We need a system that can be installed, with hundreds of themes and plugins available, without touching code. An open-source Squarespace, basically. Statamic has a role, but not as a WordPress replacement for most people unfortunately…
bsder 2y ago
> And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need Except they don't. A static website would work for 99.9% of all businesses and could be hosted on a potato. The problem is that marketing wants a website that "Doesn't look embarassing and has 5 nines uptime." Translation: "Marketing wants a website that looks completely like our competitors(because reasons)! But make it completely different (because reasons)! And make sure it's on AWS (because reasons)!" Response from IT: "Our website results in zero revenue to the company and is a gigantic security problem and spam magnet. And because marketing is involved it's also a headache of a political football. Here's the WP Engine credentials. Now fuck off."
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  > Response from IT This is where the mistake was made. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of small businesses do not have an IT department. Even the business I work in - almost a dozen employees before a single IT guy. WordPress and Squarespace, and software like them, are the off-the-shelf solutions for them. You sign up for GoDaddy or another shared hosting provider, what do you get? Right now though, Squarespace is eating WordPress’ lunch, and (if you don’t need plugins) is objectively superior in many ways. We need a modern replacement for WordPress to fulfill that role which won’t make programmers swear, or let closed-source solutions shut out the open ones.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  Hahaha, I've been in this exact situation. Marketing set up an entire WordPress website unbeknownst to IT. Over a year's worth of effort and they never even mentioned to us they work working on it. I'm in a monthly directors meeting of all depts and marketing unveils their wonderful website to much applause and oohs and ahhs. They then say, looking at me, "Yes we should be ready to launch in a couple weeks after IT sets up authentication and integrates it with our CRM and mail blast system." I was so lost for words I just kind of nodded my head, wide-eyed. The way they had it set up did not allow us to use the same SSO/auth we used for everything else. So users would need a separate account. Their auth system didn't support any kind of MFA. Their plugins were not compatible with our CRM. External accounts would need to be set up manually. They used a different domain thinking they could just change it later but it got so baked into everything that changing it everywhere would be extremely difficult. Their hosting solution was going to cost us a shit ton of money because none of the graphics were optimized for web. Every image was like a 50MB PNG. It did look nice, but nothing was set up in a way that made it compatible with anything we already had in place. I told marketing there was no way I could make this work and they'd wasted a year's worth of effort by not pulling me in from the get go to at least help them find some sane compatible solutions. "Well, if we can't use SSO, couldn't we just build a spreadsheet with everyone's logins so you could plug that in?" Jfc no. The CEO/owner sends me a meeting invite and asks me why I'm refusing to work with marketing on their website. I explain that they had decided not mention any of this to me from the get go and explained the reasons why I couldn't make it work. I said, "well, technically we could make anything work, but you're going to have to hire a small dev team to integrate this with our CRM. We're going to have to pay a lot more monthly for our CRM because now we need API access (we'd need that either way even if the plugins were compatible) and if you want a team to write some custom integrations for this, you'll need some kind of retainer to make sure they can support it when the plugins change and break everything in unpredictable intervals or the plugins are no longer maintained." He refused to believe me and basically said "Well I'm not sure why I'm paying you if you can't even get a website to work." I quiet quit and resigned about a month later. You can imagine the other kind of shenanigans that went on if that was considered acceptable.
ksenzee 2y ago
Drupal is trying for basically this with its Starshot project. It might just work, if they can get enough people to build third-party themes.
bigiain 2y ago
> Which means, if we want to kill WordPress, we need to offer a better solution. Not just for WordPress, but a coherent system that also reimplements the top hundred or so plugins. And a solution for which a typical non-tech business can ask around their family/friends/employees and find someone who's experienced enough to come in for a few hours out a few hours a week to to typical CMS admin/editorial stuff. And for which there are heaps of easy to find tutorials and youtube videos which can get someone up to speed enough to keep their own site running, while still spending 95+% of their time making widgets or selling trinkets or whatever their actual business is. I'm not _that_ much of a fan of WordPress, but WordPress on WPEngine is 100% my initial recommendation for anyone asking about how to run their business website. (I'd be curious to see a Rust backend API replacement for the WP + top 100 plugins that uses the standard html/frontend, to have the type safety and security Rust is famed for, while being identical in use to WordPress so all the people currently admin-ing WP site wouldn't have to even know it's different. But not curious enough to expend any effort to make it. )

iambateman 2y ago

Statamic for Laravel is pretty great for what it does. I wrote a WYSIWYG CMS for Laravel called Prodigy that I really enjoy but it hasn’t gotten much market pick up. There’s definitely some thinking in this area on how to move WP users toward Laravel.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
Statamic is awesome; watching Jack McDade in person at Laracon last month was great. However, Statamic is not a WordPress replacement. We need a system that can be installed, with hundreds of themes and plugins available, without touching code. An open-source Squarespace, basically. Statamic has a role, but not as a WordPress replacement for most people unfortunately…

bsder 2y ago

> And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need Except they don't. A static website would work for 99.9% of all businesses and could be hosted on a potato. The problem is that marketing wants a website that "Doesn't look embarassing and has 5 nines uptime." Translation: "Marketing wants a website that looks completely like our competitors(because reasons)! But make it completely different (because reasons)! And make sure it's on AWS (because reasons)!" Response from IT: "Our website results in zero revenue to the company and is a gigantic security problem and spam magnet. And because marketing is involved it's also a headache of a political football. Here's the WP Engine credentials. Now fuck off."

gjsman-1000 2y ago
> Response from IT This is where the mistake was made. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of small businesses do not have an IT department. Even the business I work in - almost a dozen employees before a single IT guy. WordPress and Squarespace, and software like them, are the off-the-shelf solutions for them. You sign up for GoDaddy or another shared hosting provider, what do you get? Right now though, Squarespace is eating WordPress’ lunch, and (if you don’t need plugins) is objectively superior in many ways. We need a modern replacement for WordPress to fulfill that role which won’t make programmers swear, or let closed-source solutions shut out the open ones.
bongodongobob 2y ago
Hahaha, I've been in this exact situation. Marketing set up an entire WordPress website unbeknownst to IT. Over a year's worth of effort and they never even mentioned to us they work working on it. I'm in a monthly directors meeting of all depts and marketing unveils their wonderful website to much applause and oohs and ahhs. They then say, looking at me, "Yes we should be ready to launch in a couple weeks after IT sets up authentication and integrates it with our CRM and mail blast system." I was so lost for words I just kind of nodded my head, wide-eyed. The way they had it set up did not allow us to use the same SSO/auth we used for everything else. So users would need a separate account. Their auth system didn't support any kind of MFA. Their plugins were not compatible with our CRM. External accounts would need to be set up manually. They used a different domain thinking they could just change it later but it got so baked into everything that changing it everywhere would be extremely difficult. Their hosting solution was going to cost us a shit ton of money because none of the graphics were optimized for web. Every image was like a 50MB PNG. It did look nice, but nothing was set up in a way that made it compatible with anything we already had in place. I told marketing there was no way I could make this work and they'd wasted a year's worth of effort by not pulling me in from the get go to at least help them find some sane compatible solutions. "Well, if we can't use SSO, couldn't we just build a spreadsheet with everyone's logins so you could plug that in?" Jfc no. The CEO/owner sends me a meeting invite and asks me why I'm refusing to work with marketing on their website. I explain that they had decided not mention any of this to me from the get go and explained the reasons why I couldn't make it work. I said, "well, technically we could make anything work, but you're going to have to hire a small dev team to integrate this with our CRM. We're going to have to pay a lot more monthly for our CRM because now we need API access (we'd need that either way even if the plugins were compatible) and if you want a team to write some custom integrations for this, you'll need some kind of retainer to make sure they can support it when the plugins change and break everything in unpredictable intervals or the plugins are no longer maintained." He refused to believe me and basically said "Well I'm not sure why I'm paying you if you can't even get a website to work." I quiet quit and resigned about a month later. You can imagine the other kind of shenanigans that went on if that was considered acceptable.

ksenzee 2y ago

Drupal is trying for basically this with its Starshot project. It might just work, if they can get enough people to build third-party themes.

bigiain 2y ago

> Which means, if we want to kill WordPress, we need to offer a better solution. Not just for WordPress, but a coherent system that also reimplements the top hundred or so plugins. And a solution for which a typical non-tech business can ask around their family/friends/employees and find someone who's experienced enough to come in for a few hours out a few hours a week to to typical CMS admin/editorial stuff. And for which there are heaps of easy to find tutorials and youtube videos which can get someone up to speed enough to keep their own site running, while still spending 95+% of their time making widgets or selling trinkets or whatever their actual business is. I'm not _that_ much of a fan of WordPress, but WordPress on WPEngine is 100% my initial recommendation for anyone asking about how to run their business website. (I'd be curious to see a Rust backend API replacement for the WP + top 100 plugins that uses the standard html/frontend, to have the type safety and security Rust is famed for, while being identical in use to WordPress so all the people currently admin-ing WP site wouldn't have to even know it's different. But not curious enough to expend any effort to make it. )