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I have whole rants about this, based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. It comes down to eas

I have whole rants about this, based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. It comes down to ease of editing. A WP site optimises for the editor. Not the hosting, not the tech folk, not the accountants, and definitely not the reader. The people who edit the site get to say how it's implemented. If you give them the choice (as I have) between a site that renders in <100ms, is completely secure, and costs literally nothing to host, but requires markdown files and a bit of Git to deploy, and a Wordpress site that's as slow as hell, costs a fortune, is insecure, needs constant maintenance, but has a nice editing process, then they go for WP every time. I'm always confused as to why these particular people get to be the ones who make the choice. But I've repeated this experiment multiple times and it has always come back with the same result.

motoxpro 2y ago
You said it yourself. The tech you're suggesting didn't meet their requirements. Once it does, they will use it. A marketing site SHOULD be optimized for the editor. This is a failure of the dev, not the marketing person.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  my confusion is why it's their requirements that need to get met, not say, the readers' requirements.
  - pistoleer 2y ago
    How would you go about collecting the user requirements of the readers? Do they pay for the development?
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    It's marketing, alright? Users are cattle to be milked, their requirements matter only to the degree it keeps them on the farm, which means not much.
    - motoxpro 2y ago
      Apparently co-workers of devs don't even get that much respect.
  - ano-ther 2y ago
    The marketers care quite a lot about the readers. After all, their goal is to reach them with glorious content so they do something. This leads them to aim for “reasonably performant for the users” as part of optimizing the package of reader + marketer experience. In that view, IT requirements such as security rank between “should be standard” to “don’t really care” (at least until the first compromise).
  - zanellato19 2y ago
    Better editor performance, more agility, the faster they can test stuff, the faster they can check what works -> better marketing.
  - Nemi 2y ago
    Because part of their job, if they are good at it, is to present some data, measure how customers are responding to it, and then tweaking said data to get a better response. If you make it too hard for them to “tweak” it, then they will be more reluctant to tweak it. Thereby doing a poorer job. Them being able to easily change the website is critical for them to be able to do their job. As in most things in life, it is a balance that needs to be achieved and not one thing that trumps everything else. As others have said, WP gives them a way to easily change the data that they are responsible for. It should be the devs/systems engineers responsibility to make that data present as a static web page using plugins or caching layers and that should be transparent to the marketers.
  - FalconSensei 2y ago
    The mass of readers don't have the same requirements as HackerNews commenters. Proof is that content on wordpress still gets viewed and apparently, leads to sales.
  - comte7092 2y ago
    Imagine if you were told that you had to do all of your software development work in notepad, because for whatever reason that lead to better optimized code… would you be ok with that?
    - kjs3 2y ago
      The embedded dev world would like to have a word with you.
relistan 2y ago
Most of the time annd energy spent on active marketing sites is content management. If marketing are the people with the budget and they are the ones who manage the content, that will be the priority. It makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that there’s not(?) a better alternative that solves both sides of the problem.
zild3d 2y ago
> based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. Sounds pretty user-hostile. You're talking about marketers who have a "Job to be done" which is to make content and get it in front of some target audience. Of course the editing experience trumps security and rendering speed. I'm confused why you're confused they always choose WP over figuring out text editors and git! The experiment should be giving them a nice editing experience that behind the scenes is creating a static site and some git to deploy vs wordpress. Then maybe the secondary requirements you care mostly about will be relevant
- Aeolun 2y ago
  > You're talking about marketers who have a "Job to be done" which is to make content and get it in front of some target audience That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway). How they sell stuff is something they can determine themselves. You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them, but the important distinction there is that many do not care about what their job is (just like many recent engineers), they just care that it’s easy to do and they don’t get fired. So… Wordpress.
  - immibis 2y ago
    We are suffering from some kind of crisis of measurable competency across the board. The appearance of contributing to achieving something is more important than actually achieving it. It may be related to the preceding extremely long ZIRP period.
  - macspoofing 2y ago
    >That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway). Huh? What are you talking about? Marketing is the job of Marketers, which in most companies (certainly small to mid companies) includes the content on the marketing web-page. >You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them The technical aspect of how a web-site works, or how it is deployed or how quickly it is rendered, is NOT their job. Optimizing render speed of a given web-page is not part of their skillset - nor should it be. There are folks who specialize in that, typically software engineers. It is also not reasonable to expect marketing folks to create html/css/javascript and deploy via git. You really do want those folks to be independent and create the necessary content without needing an engineer anytime they want to add a new sub-section or fix a spelling mistake. One "problem" is that most small/mid size businesses are not willing to hire technical folks or use engineering resources to do the technical part of this work. Another problem is that there should not be a tension between ease-of-use by editor and page rendering speed. Maybe WP is a bad product, and if so, what is the alternative that covers both use cases?
dzikimarian 2y ago
They make choice, because they're the ones working with this daily. Their goal is to put content on display fast. Content varies a lot - often containing for eg. tables, which simply don't work well in markdown or images you need to host somewhere. I spent a lot of time looking and still hasn't found toolchain, that would allow interns with zero technical experience deliver edits, without getting involved in tech details. Closest one would be some headless CMS with Static site generator bolted on top, but honestly they all suck.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  In one case I offered to (and actually did) convert the Word docs they sent me to the appropriate Hugo markdown with front matter and push it for them (not a huge effort, maybe 10 mins per post, I was happy to do it). It worked for a bit but they still ended up pushing for a Wordpress site. So yeah, it's not down to technical experience required for the edit process.
  - macspoofing 2y ago
    >It worked for a bit but they still ended up pushing for a Wordpress site. Because they don't want to call you every time the need to fix a spelling mistake, or adjust fonts or colors or layout, or add/remove a section. What if you're busy or on vacation? It may also be your personality - do you think you may come off as inflexible and arrogant to your colleagues?
  - dzikimarian 2y ago
    Imagine you need to email code to someone to be committed :-)
- matfrana 2y ago
  Have a look at React Bricks. You can create content blocks in React and then the editors are autonomous with a visual editing interface.
  - dzikimarian 2y ago
bergie 2y ago
Back in 2011 I built a JS-based thing for making essentially any website editable: https://bergie.iki.fi/blog/introducing_the_midgard_create_user_interface/ https://bergie.iki.fi/blog/introducing_the_midgard_create_us... This required you to add a bit of RDFa markup to identify the editable parts (including collections, so you could add a news item or whatever), and then had a Backbone.js plugin setup for implementing saving to your chosen CMS. This all could likely be done easier today. But trick is of course figuring out how to save from browser to git. GitHub has a REST API you can use, but authentication needs a server-side component.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  There is a similar solution in SurrealCMS[1], where the user will edit their website pages in complete WYSIWYG. It works perfectly for clients who are not programmers, and should replace WordPress for about 99% of websites (except for blogs of course). There is no reason at all for WordPress, it just became popular because people online were recommending it to each other without a thought as to why. I myself was one of these small time web devs, thinking that user editable pages would require such complicated NASA back-ends that WordPress was the only solution. In the end WordPress has been a huge net-negative on the economy as a whole, for all time wasted. >This all could likely be done easier today. But trick is of course figuring out how to save from browser to git. SurrealCMS connects by FTP instead to solve this. [1] https://www.surrealcms.com https://www.surrealcms.com * "What you see is what you get"
figassis 2y ago
This is the issue. I'm an engineer, and I moved away from WP years ago, now I use ghost. But wordpress gives you that feeling of control, that you just need to search for "online store", and you get 100 plugins, including woocommerce, that are full blown ecommerce platforms. It's less the blogging, and more the customizable application that laymen can hammer into their desired function by clicking and dragging, no coding necessary, at least until it gets hacked or they need a real engineer to build that bespoke functinality. But if you use Hugo, Ghost, or whatever, you get to the point of "for this you need this other platform", where platform is shopify, or an accounting system, or a social network/membership plugin, a job board, etc. Wordpress became this thing that can be turned into anything else. So someone calls a consultant and says I want this, and they go, I'll set it up for you in Wordpress. Then, because everyone was using wordpress, it was easy to get people to help you when you had issues, or to tweak your plugins slightly, add a hook to send an email, etc. So the age of PHP consultants gave Wordpress it's dominance. Problem is, most of these solutions, even paid ones, are not full solutions. When you start using them you quickly realize Wordpress imposes non sensical limitations. You can't architect your online store outside Wordpress's performance disaster of a entity/metadata system where any reasonably sized query takes 5 seconds and generates 50 other secondary, non optimized queries. Some plugins even try to work around this by going around wordpress and creating their own db tables out of wordpress's control. Wordpress is horrible, not architected for anything other than a blog, but used as a tool for everything. Other CMSs don't do that, so people don't use them.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  Trying to explain to someone how static sites work vs how WP works, and that the server has to literally recreate the entire page from a bunch of database entries (having first compiled all the PHP files into something the server understands) for every single page request. It's crazy that we ended up with this powering most of the web.
  - closewith 2y ago
    > It's crazy that we ended up with this powering most of the web. What's crazy is your wilful ignorance of _why_ WP is so popular. One important reason is that it allows writers to avoid people like you, who hold them in disdain without even the slightest attempt to understand their needs.
closewith 2y ago
Your comment is the height of arrogance and user-hostility. The idea that they should accept a sub-par solution not of their choosing just for the developer's convenience is absurd.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  I think you missed the point. It's not the developer's convenience. It's the readers. Each blog post is going to get written once, but read (hopefully) thousands of times. Why are we optimising the writing experience and not the reading experience?
  - closewith 2y ago
    Readers don't care at all whether they're served WP or a static site. The GP doesn't have a point to miss.
    - freedomben 2y ago
      Sure they do. They don't know about WP or static site, but they do know about "how long does the page take to load" and does the page work properly. It's certainly possible to build a WP set up that is super fast (and basically a SSG), but the vast, vast majority of them will not be done like that. They'll be loaded with a bunch of marketing plugins that kill performance and routinely throw errors that manifest to the user as some broken button or form that won't submit properly. It's possible, but much harder, to build a static site that performs as poorly.
  - FalconSensei 2y ago
    > It's not the developer's convenience. It's the readers. The marketing folks and copywriters are being paid to post, and they have a manager and boss to report to - which can fire them. I guess it's very much about convenience and ease of use to people writing the posts
nicbou 2y ago
I switched to a SSG for the ease of editing! Offline, version-controlled editing with regular expressions, linters and other text-based magic. When you maintain a few hundred pages for a living, this is a game changer. For the average user though, you are 100% correct. You need a UI that they will understand. Explaining git to them is not a good idea.
- 0xEF 2y ago
  Except it is a good idea. Making everything convenient for the user has been a thorn in my industry for a long, long time, resulting in massive, complex machinery that is controlled by an HMI which amounts to "user push, machine go" and copious amounts of magic happen between those two steps. I see the same issue as I enter software development. We treat the users like ridiculous idiots, shackling them the ignorance that come with convenience. The auto industry excels at this, selling $30,000USD products to people who can't change an oil filter or explain in basic terms how an ICE works. I'm ranting, sorry, but what I am getting at is all this drive to make everything as convenient as possible without teaching the user anything does many bad things; 1. Denies users any enrichment, leaving them stuck making the same decisions over and over without expanding a skill. 2. Creates a Culture of Dependency, where users don't understand anything about the product they are using aside from the most basic operations, leaving them unable to pivot as things change, or troubleshoot when things inevitably break. 3. Adding to 2, when all the power is shifted to the folks who make the magic work in the product, they start doing user-hostile things with it like the copious amounts of data harvesting and privacy violations of the modern Internet, not to mention extracting their piece of the value pie to an egregious level. As someone who is constantly learning new things to try and stay current, fights for the right to repair and uses FOSS whenever possible, I just can't get behind the thinking that brings is to the conclusion that marketers should be making these kinds of decisions based on convenience. I bid you goodluck and farewell as I die on that downvote hill.
  - gbalduzzi 2y ago
    It always boils down to how many users you want to engage with your product. The reality is that you can create a great product that engages with users, using transparent processes that can be tinkered by and with a ton of free customization features, you will lose a huge amount of market share to a competitor with a more simple interface (and probably a less efficient and more complex machinery behind it). > As someone who is constantly learning new things to try and stay current, fights for the right to repair and uses FOSS whenever possible, I just can't get behind the thinking that brings is to the conclusion that marketers should be making these kinds of decisions based on convenience. You and marketers have very different priorities and targets, of course they don't reach your same conclusion
joncrocks 2y ago
The golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.
macspoofing 2y ago
>I'm always confused as to why these particular people get to be the ones who make the choice. Is it really confusing? They are the ones that are supposed to maintain it (from a content perspective) ... unless you want to be called every time they want to fix a spelling mistake, write a blog post, add a section, adjust the color scheme, add/remove a section - because that's what would happen if force them to use git and raw css/html.
jglmn90 2y ago
Just use a polished CMS like Sanity and get the best of both worlds
- lakomen 2y ago
  The polished CMS nobody heard about :)
petra 2y ago
Elementor bought strattic, which offered static wordpress hosting. I believe they use this technology in their hosting offering.
cowsandmilk 2y ago
You’re conflating two separate functionalities. Wordpress apparently provides a content management system your users like. How you serve that content is easily decoupled and can still be from static files generated and distributed via a CDN. Static sites don’t require markdown and git.
tvaughan 2y ago
I was surprised at how hard it was to find a designer who could make a simple html and css only website. Just having to dip my toe in this world for a good-looking but mostly non-functional website gave me all kinds of ick. Oh, https://sumar.io https://sumar.io is a form handler for static websites available under the AGPL.
- FalconSensei 2y ago
  > a form handler for static websites available under the AGP Marketing and copywriting people don't know any of those licenses. And I guess not ironically, first search result for me for AGPL was "Understanding the AGPL: The Most Misunderstood License". So this already makes it kind of a no-go. If I'm in a rush to add a form, I need a simple answer: can I use for business purposes and do I have to pay for it?
JodieBenitez 2y ago
My experience as well ! And even when we do give WP-like ease of editing with background static generation, editors still want WP, because this or that plugin.
- FalconSensei 2y ago
  > editors still want WP, because this or that plugin So you are saying that you are still missing functionality
  - JodieBenitez 2y ago
    Nope, I'm saying they don't need this functionality.
    - FalconSensei 2y ago
      But the editors want. So... I guess you are out of touch with your own clients. Either you actually don't know their needs, or you didn't take the time to sit with them to explain why they shouldn't have that
      - JodieBenitez 2y ago
        We don't have enough time to convince them against a whole ecosystem built around false assumptions. But we don't have to either, since we're in position to force them to change their methods. And the reason why we're in this position is because they've fucked up their WP install in the first place.
ozim 2y ago
Wordpress has plugins to generate static sites. You can have your rich editing and fast loading times as well.
FalconSensei 2y ago
> and costs literally nothing to host Costs nothing to host, but then you need to train every user, which demands time, will make productivity go down every time there's a new user. VS wordpress, which any copywriter or marketer already knows how to write on, or will learn in just a few minutes because creating a post there and clicking 'publish' is easy
- pxtail 2y ago
  > Costs nothing to host, but then you need to train every user, which demands time It's more than that - imagine that marketers want a contact form on such static site, well nice, you can add that easily. But now there is a lot of spam coming through, okay that can be dealt with. Now they want to have multiple, editable forms. And Hubspot integration, and analytics integration, and now one of forms needs to be 2-step, another needs to have dynamic part shown/hidden based on conditions. etc etc All of that is already solved issue in the Wordpress world - one can pick proven and tested solutions from multiple vendors and deliver results. And that is ONE component, form - sure it can be replaced with some 3rd party embedded widget but that never comes without hidden costs/annoyances. There are multiple components similar to used "form" example
cxr 2y ago
> but requires markdown files and a bit of Git to deploy Why does it require those things? There's nothing inherent to static sites that demands either. There's also nothing inherent to either static sites or WordPress that keeps you from providing a user-facing post-writing and -editing UI that looks the same as WordPress's.

motoxpro 2y ago

You said it yourself. The tech you're suggesting didn't meet their requirements. Once it does, they will use it. A marketing site SHOULD be optimized for the editor. This is a failure of the dev, not the marketing person.

marcus_holmes 2y ago
my confusion is why it's their requirements that need to get met, not say, the readers' requirements.
- pistoleer 2y ago
  How would you go about collecting the user requirements of the readers? Do they pay for the development?
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  It's marketing, alright? Users are cattle to be milked, their requirements matter only to the degree it keeps them on the farm, which means not much.
  - motoxpro 2y ago
    Apparently co-workers of devs don't even get that much respect.
- ano-ther 2y ago
  The marketers care quite a lot about the readers. After all, their goal is to reach them with glorious content so they do something. This leads them to aim for “reasonably performant for the users” as part of optimizing the package of reader + marketer experience. In that view, IT requirements such as security rank between “should be standard” to “don’t really care” (at least until the first compromise).
- zanellato19 2y ago
  Better editor performance, more agility, the faster they can test stuff, the faster they can check what works -> better marketing.
- Nemi 2y ago
  Because part of their job, if they are good at it, is to present some data, measure how customers are responding to it, and then tweaking said data to get a better response. If you make it too hard for them to “tweak” it, then they will be more reluctant to tweak it. Thereby doing a poorer job. Them being able to easily change the website is critical for them to be able to do their job. As in most things in life, it is a balance that needs to be achieved and not one thing that trumps everything else. As others have said, WP gives them a way to easily change the data that they are responsible for. It should be the devs/systems engineers responsibility to make that data present as a static web page using plugins or caching layers and that should be transparent to the marketers.
- FalconSensei 2y ago
  The mass of readers don't have the same requirements as HackerNews commenters. Proof is that content on wordpress still gets viewed and apparently, leads to sales.
- comte7092 2y ago
  Imagine if you were told that you had to do all of your software development work in notepad, because for whatever reason that lead to better optimized code… would you be ok with that?
  - kjs3 2y ago
    The embedded dev world would like to have a word with you.

relistan 2y ago

Most of the time annd energy spent on active marketing sites is content management. If marketing are the people with the budget and they are the ones who manage the content, that will be the priority. It makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that there’s not(?) a better alternative that solves both sides of the problem.

zild3d 2y ago

> based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. Sounds pretty user-hostile. You're talking about marketers who have a "Job to be done" which is to make content and get it in front of some target audience. Of course the editing experience trumps security and rendering speed. I'm confused why you're confused they always choose WP over figuring out text editors and git! The experiment should be giving them a nice editing experience that behind the scenes is creating a static site and some git to deploy vs wordpress. Then maybe the secondary requirements you care mostly about will be relevant

Aeolun 2y ago
> You're talking about marketers who have a "Job to be done" which is to make content and get it in front of some target audience That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway). How they sell stuff is something they can determine themselves. You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them, but the important distinction there is that many do not care about what their job is (just like many recent engineers), they just care that it’s easy to do and they don’t get fired. So… Wordpress.
- immibis 2y ago
  We are suffering from some kind of crisis of measurable competency across the board. The appearance of contributing to achieving something is more important than actually achieving it. It may be related to the preceding extremely long ZIRP period.
- macspoofing 2y ago
  >That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway). Huh? What are you talking about? Marketing is the job of Marketers, which in most companies (certainly small to mid companies) includes the content on the marketing web-page. >You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them The technical aspect of how a web-site works, or how it is deployed or how quickly it is rendered, is NOT their job. Optimizing render speed of a given web-page is not part of their skillset - nor should it be. There are folks who specialize in that, typically software engineers. It is also not reasonable to expect marketing folks to create html/css/javascript and deploy via git. You really do want those folks to be independent and create the necessary content without needing an engineer anytime they want to add a new sub-section or fix a spelling mistake. One "problem" is that most small/mid size businesses are not willing to hire technical folks or use engineering resources to do the technical part of this work. Another problem is that there should not be a tension between ease-of-use by editor and page rendering speed. Maybe WP is a bad product, and if so, what is the alternative that covers both use cases?

dzikimarian 2y ago

They make choice, because they're the ones working with this daily. Their goal is to put content on display fast. Content varies a lot - often containing for eg. tables, which simply don't work well in markdown or images you need to host somewhere. I spent a lot of time looking and still hasn't found toolchain, that would allow interns with zero technical experience deliver edits, without getting involved in tech details. Closest one would be some headless CMS with Static site generator bolted on top, but honestly they all suck.

marcus_holmes 2y ago
In one case I offered to (and actually did) convert the Word docs they sent me to the appropriate Hugo markdown with front matter and push it for them (not a huge effort, maybe 10 mins per post, I was happy to do it). It worked for a bit but they still ended up pushing for a Wordpress site. So yeah, it's not down to technical experience required for the edit process.
- macspoofing 2y ago
  >It worked for a bit but they still ended up pushing for a Wordpress site. Because they don't want to call you every time the need to fix a spelling mistake, or adjust fonts or colors or layout, or add/remove a section. What if you're busy or on vacation? It may also be your personality - do you think you may come off as inflexible and arrogant to your colleagues?
- dzikimarian 2y ago
  Imagine you need to email code to someone to be committed :-)
matfrana 2y ago
Have a look at React Bricks. You can create content blocks in React and then the editors are autonomous with a visual editing interface.
- dzikimarian 2y ago

bergie 2y ago

Back in 2011 I built a JS-based thing for making essentially any website editable: https://bergie.iki.fi/blog/introducing_the_midgard_create_user_interface/ https://bergie.iki.fi/blog/introducing_the_midgard_create_us... This required you to add a bit of RDFa markup to identify the editable parts (including collections, so you could add a news item or whatever), and then had a Backbone.js plugin setup for implementing saving to your chosen CMS. This all could likely be done easier today. But trick is of course figuring out how to save from browser to git. GitHub has a REST API you can use, but authentication needs a server-side component.

carlosjobim 2y ago
There is a similar solution in SurrealCMS[1], where the user will edit their website pages in complete WYSIWYG. It works perfectly for clients who are not programmers, and should replace WordPress for about 99% of websites (except for blogs of course). There is no reason at all for WordPress, it just became popular because people online were recommending it to each other without a thought as to why. I myself was one of these small time web devs, thinking that user editable pages would require such complicated NASA back-ends that WordPress was the only solution. In the end WordPress has been a huge net-negative on the economy as a whole, for all time wasted. >This all could likely be done easier today. But trick is of course figuring out how to save from browser to git. SurrealCMS connects by FTP instead to solve this. [1] https://www.surrealcms.com https://www.surrealcms.com * "What you see is what you get"

figassis 2y ago

This is the issue. I'm an engineer, and I moved away from WP years ago, now I use ghost. But wordpress gives you that feeling of control, that you just need to search for "online store", and you get 100 plugins, including woocommerce, that are full blown ecommerce platforms. It's less the blogging, and more the customizable application that laymen can hammer into their desired function by clicking and dragging, no coding necessary, at least until it gets hacked or they need a real engineer to build that bespoke functinality. But if you use Hugo, Ghost, or whatever, you get to the point of "for this you need this other platform", where platform is shopify, or an accounting system, or a social network/membership plugin, a job board, etc. Wordpress became this thing that can be turned into anything else. So someone calls a consultant and says I want this, and they go, I'll set it up for you in Wordpress. Then, because everyone was using wordpress, it was easy to get people to help you when you had issues, or to tweak your plugins slightly, add a hook to send an email, etc. So the age of PHP consultants gave Wordpress it's dominance. Problem is, most of these solutions, even paid ones, are not full solutions. When you start using them you quickly realize Wordpress imposes non sensical limitations. You can't architect your online store outside Wordpress's performance disaster of a entity/metadata system where any reasonably sized query takes 5 seconds and generates 50 other secondary, non optimized queries. Some plugins even try to work around this by going around wordpress and creating their own db tables out of wordpress's control. Wordpress is horrible, not architected for anything other than a blog, but used as a tool for everything. Other CMSs don't do that, so people don't use them.

marcus_holmes 2y ago
Trying to explain to someone how static sites work vs how WP works, and that the server has to literally recreate the entire page from a bunch of database entries (having first compiled all the PHP files into something the server understands) for every single page request. It's crazy that we ended up with this powering most of the web.
- closewith 2y ago
  > It's crazy that we ended up with this powering most of the web. What's crazy is your wilful ignorance of _why_ WP is so popular. One important reason is that it allows writers to avoid people like you, who hold them in disdain without even the slightest attempt to understand their needs.

closewith 2y ago

Your comment is the height of arrogance and user-hostility. The idea that they should accept a sub-par solution not of their choosing just for the developer's convenience is absurd.

marcus_holmes 2y ago
I think you missed the point. It's not the developer's convenience. It's the readers. Each blog post is going to get written once, but read (hopefully) thousands of times. Why are we optimising the writing experience and not the reading experience?
- closewith 2y ago
  Readers don't care at all whether they're served WP or a static site. The GP doesn't have a point to miss.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Sure they do. They don't know about WP or static site, but they do know about "how long does the page take to load" and does the page work properly. It's certainly possible to build a WP set up that is super fast (and basically a SSG), but the vast, vast majority of them will not be done like that. They'll be loaded with a bunch of marketing plugins that kill performance and routinely throw errors that manifest to the user as some broken button or form that won't submit properly. It's possible, but much harder, to build a static site that performs as poorly.
- FalconSensei 2y ago
  > It's not the developer's convenience. It's the readers. The marketing folks and copywriters are being paid to post, and they have a manager and boss to report to - which can fire them. I guess it's very much about convenience and ease of use to people writing the posts

nicbou 2y ago

I switched to a SSG for the ease of editing! Offline, version-controlled editing with regular expressions, linters and other text-based magic. When you maintain a few hundred pages for a living, this is a game changer. For the average user though, you are 100% correct. You need a UI that they will understand. Explaining git to them is not a good idea.

0xEF 2y ago
Except it is a good idea. Making everything convenient for the user has been a thorn in my industry for a long, long time, resulting in massive, complex machinery that is controlled by an HMI which amounts to "user push, machine go" and copious amounts of magic happen between those two steps. I see the same issue as I enter software development. We treat the users like ridiculous idiots, shackling them the ignorance that come with convenience. The auto industry excels at this, selling $30,000USD products to people who can't change an oil filter or explain in basic terms how an ICE works. I'm ranting, sorry, but what I am getting at is all this drive to make everything as convenient as possible without teaching the user anything does many bad things; 1. Denies users any enrichment, leaving them stuck making the same decisions over and over without expanding a skill. 2. Creates a Culture of Dependency, where users don't understand anything about the product they are using aside from the most basic operations, leaving them unable to pivot as things change, or troubleshoot when things inevitably break. 3. Adding to 2, when all the power is shifted to the folks who make the magic work in the product, they start doing user-hostile things with it like the copious amounts of data harvesting and privacy violations of the modern Internet, not to mention extracting their piece of the value pie to an egregious level. As someone who is constantly learning new things to try and stay current, fights for the right to repair and uses FOSS whenever possible, I just can't get behind the thinking that brings is to the conclusion that marketers should be making these kinds of decisions based on convenience. I bid you goodluck and farewell as I die on that downvote hill.
- gbalduzzi 2y ago
  It always boils down to how many users you want to engage with your product. The reality is that you can create a great product that engages with users, using transparent processes that can be tinkered by and with a ton of free customization features, you will lose a huge amount of market share to a competitor with a more simple interface (and probably a less efficient and more complex machinery behind it). > As someone who is constantly learning new things to try and stay current, fights for the right to repair and uses FOSS whenever possible, I just can't get behind the thinking that brings is to the conclusion that marketers should be making these kinds of decisions based on convenience. You and marketers have very different priorities and targets, of course they don't reach your same conclusion

joncrocks 2y ago

The golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.

macspoofing 2y ago

>I'm always confused as to why these particular people get to be the ones who make the choice. Is it really confusing? They are the ones that are supposed to maintain it (from a content perspective) ... unless you want to be called every time they want to fix a spelling mistake, write a blog post, add a section, adjust the color scheme, add/remove a section - because that's what would happen if force them to use git and raw css/html.

jglmn90 2y ago

Just use a polished CMS like Sanity and get the best of both worlds

lakomen 2y ago
The polished CMS nobody heard about :)

petra 2y ago

Elementor bought strattic, which offered static wordpress hosting. I believe they use this technology in their hosting offering.

cowsandmilk 2y ago

You’re conflating two separate functionalities. Wordpress apparently provides a content management system your users like. How you serve that content is easily decoupled and can still be from static files generated and distributed via a CDN. Static sites don’t require markdown and git.

tvaughan 2y ago

I was surprised at how hard it was to find a designer who could make a simple html and css only website. Just having to dip my toe in this world for a good-looking but mostly non-functional website gave me all kinds of ick. Oh, https://sumar.io https://sumar.io is a form handler for static websites available under the AGPL.

FalconSensei 2y ago
> a form handler for static websites available under the AGP Marketing and copywriting people don't know any of those licenses. And I guess not ironically, first search result for me for AGPL was "Understanding the AGPL: The Most Misunderstood License". So this already makes it kind of a no-go. If I'm in a rush to add a form, I need a simple answer: can I use for business purposes and do I have to pay for it?

JodieBenitez 2y ago

My experience as well ! And even when we do give WP-like ease of editing with background static generation, editors still want WP, because this or that plugin.

FalconSensei 2y ago
> editors still want WP, because this or that plugin So you are saying that you are still missing functionality
- JodieBenitez 2y ago
  Nope, I'm saying they don't need this functionality.
  - FalconSensei 2y ago
    But the editors want. So... I guess you are out of touch with your own clients. Either you actually don't know their needs, or you didn't take the time to sit with them to explain why they shouldn't have that
    - JodieBenitez 2y ago
      We don't have enough time to convince them against a whole ecosystem built around false assumptions. But we don't have to either, since we're in position to force them to change their methods. And the reason why we're in this position is because they've fucked up their WP install in the first place.

ozim 2y ago

Wordpress has plugins to generate static sites. You can have your rich editing and fast loading times as well.

FalconSensei 2y ago

> and costs literally nothing to host Costs nothing to host, but then you need to train every user, which demands time, will make productivity go down every time there's a new user. VS wordpress, which any copywriter or marketer already knows how to write on, or will learn in just a few minutes because creating a post there and clicking 'publish' is easy

pxtail 2y ago
> Costs nothing to host, but then you need to train every user, which demands time It's more than that - imagine that marketers want a contact form on such static site, well nice, you can add that easily. But now there is a lot of spam coming through, okay that can be dealt with. Now they want to have multiple, editable forms. And Hubspot integration, and analytics integration, and now one of forms needs to be 2-step, another needs to have dynamic part shown/hidden based on conditions. etc etc All of that is already solved issue in the Wordpress world - one can pick proven and tested solutions from multiple vendors and deliver results. And that is ONE component, form - sure it can be replaced with some 3rd party embedded widget but that never comes without hidden costs/annoyances. There are multiple components similar to used "form" example

cxr 2y ago

> but requires markdown files and a bit of Git to deploy Why does it require those things? There's nothing inherent to static sites that demands either. There's also nothing inherent to either static sites or WordPress that keeps you from providing a user-facing post-writing and -editing UI that looks the same as WordPress's.