3 ms·

As a JS/React dev, I had to do some WP work a few years back and the whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. I found WP itself to be nice to work with bu

As a JS/React dev, I had to do some WP work a few years back and the whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. I found WP itself to be nice to work with but the ecosystem around it is just jarring. In the JS ecosystem if you have an issue then you usually go look it up and someone either recommends a fix or a NPM package to get around the issue you are having. With WP when you tried to figure out an issue it was always endless blogspam with an upsell to a plugin or consulting services in the end. I remember reading so many articles on really basic topics where the author would dance around the solution before finally going "well if you want the real answer, please hire my WP consulting firm and we can take a look". And with plugins I found it very hard to find anything open source or free. Every plugin, no matter how small, always seemed to have it's core features locked behind a "premium" version. Now I get it, plugins take time to develop and people want to be paid for their work but it was just really jarring to go from a community where folks contribute to developing the best solution for something together versus everyone hacking it on their own because they wanted to sell a plugin.

nicce 2y ago
If you wanted to modify some plugins and host the source in GitHub, for example, you were essentially writing your own plugins that modify other plugins to be able to do that.
eXpl0it3r 2y ago
I also only recently learned how much money is flowing in the WordPress "community". You ran into all these commercial plugins and consulting services, because that's what most of the WordPress community is. People having their own company, hosting or maintaining sites for others and on the side developing commercial plugins. To me this begs the question, whether making everything open source and available for free in your own free time or while working at some big corp as is the standard in the JavaScript world, is really the better alternative? At least the WordPress community has found a way to sustain themselves, provide services to tens of thousands of small to big businesses, while the JavaScript community seems to be mostly dependent on big tech to keep the lights on for most services.
- betenoire 2y ago
  That's a good point, but there's probably a bit of nuance in there considering NPM serves a solution space to the entire spectrum of developers using a technology, and Wordpress to users in need of web content management features.

nicce 2y ago

If you wanted to modify some plugins and host the source in GitHub, for example, you were essentially writing your own plugins that modify other plugins to be able to do that.

eXpl0it3r 2y ago

I also only recently learned how much money is flowing in the WordPress "community". You ran into all these commercial plugins and consulting services, because that's what most of the WordPress community is. People having their own company, hosting or maintaining sites for others and on the side developing commercial plugins. To me this begs the question, whether making everything open source and available for free in your own free time or while working at some big corp as is the standard in the JavaScript world, is really the better alternative? At least the WordPress community has found a way to sustain themselves, provide services to tens of thousands of small to big businesses, while the JavaScript community seems to be mostly dependent on big tech to keep the lights on for most services.

betenoire 2y ago
That's a good point, but there's probably a bit of nuance in there considering NPM serves a solution space to the entire spectrum of developers using a technology, and Wordpress to users in need of web content management features.