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Ask HN: WordPress vs. Django/Flask?

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Re: Ask HN: WordPress vs. Django/Flask?

#21

Post by nocommandline »

1) Lots of Wordpress (WP) sites. This makes it quite easy to find devs (to maintain the website in the future). There are also lots of plugins making it easy to add functionality/features.

But easy availability of plugins leads to high probability of hacking. Put another way, a WP site needs constant monitoring/upgrades of the plugins to avoid being hacked. This means $$ out of pocket for website owners but money for developers.

2) Personally, I don’t recommend WP. I prefer Python/Flask (I’m more familiar with it) or Django. You can build the site and essentially forget about it.

In addition, I prefer separating front end code from back end code (for WP, you use PHP which combines both html and server side code in same file)

Re: Ask HN: WordPress vs. Django/Flask?

#22

Post by chadpaulson »

physicsguy wrote: post #17
chadpaulson wrote: post #13

Django has a CMS called Wagtail, which has some really nice features including custom content blocks which allow you to easily create unique looking pages. Wagtail has over 15,000 stars on GitHub, is heavily supported and was created in 2014. It has since been adopted by organizations such as NASA, Google, and the National Health Service. Below is a comparison between Wagtail and Wordpress. https://wagtail.org/wagtai…

Worth noting that it also has Django-CMS although having used it, I wouldn’t advise adopting it as a lot of QoL things are not really well developed. Doing a migration into it by creating pages in a programmatic way for e.g. was not straightforward.

I have used both Django-CMS and Wagtail. Wagtail is much more user-friendly and extensible. You can create Wikis, Blogs and regular content pages with models and maintain it all through a friendly CMS interface that rivals Wordpress.

Re: Ask HN: WordPress vs. Django/Flask?

#23

Post by judge2020 »

nocommandline wrote: post #21

1) Lots of Wordpress (WP) sites. This makes it quite easy to find devs (to maintain the website in the future). There are also lots of plugins making it easy to add functionality/features. But easy availability of plugins leads to high probability of hacking. Put another way, a WP site needs constant monitoring/upgrades of the plugins to avoid being hacked. This means $$ out of pocket for website owners but money for…

> (for WP, you use PHP which combines both html and server side code in same file)

Laravel fixed this with Blade templates, and this repo[0] brings it to Wordpress.

0: https://github.com/roots/sage

Re: Ask HN: WordPress vs. Django/Flask?

#24

Post by rossdavidh »

1) If you just need a website, not any custom functionality but just the basics (i.e. a glorified blog), then Wordpress is fine. Pick a good WP hosting company and they will take care of a lot of the security stuff. WP is secure if kept up to date, and you're not using third-party plugins.

2) If you need what is called a CRUD (Create-Read-Update-Delete) website, doing something more like a spreadsheet, but with more complexity than a spreadsheet can handle, then Django makes this as easy as it is possible to be. However, you will have to do a lot more programming than with WP, where really you shouldn't have to do much programming at all.

3) If you need even more customized functionality than CRUD, then Flask is easier to customize. For example, you need to make a real-time auction site, or connect to a machine learning library to train up new models every week, or some other really non-standard thing. There, Django's features that make CRUD easier, will just get in your way. Flask is more lightweight, meaning it provides less but is also much more flexible to do non-CRUD websites.

If you are doing what a typical small company needs, then you should go with Wordpress. It can do everything you need, there is an abundant ecosystem of companies to host and maintain it for you, and all of the extra power that Django or Flask would give you, are not going to be utilized. Wordpress is fine security-wise, if you keep it up to date.

Re: Ask HN: WordPress vs. Django/Flask?

#25

Post by foco_tubi »

Use Wordpress (or Wagtail) as a headless CMS to let your client add and edit content, and hit the endpoints to hydrate your templates in your front-end framework of choice.

My workplace has multiple WP sites and Shopify stores, and I'm thinking of trying to consolidate all of these under a single presentation layer, probably with Gatsby.

Re: Ask HN: WordPress vs. Django/Flask?

#26

Post by chadpaulson »

You had also mentioned you were looking to create a platform for invoicing. There are several Django apps that offer invoicing functionality. I do not have experience with any of them, but below is a good feature matrix which should allow you to drive decisions as you prototype and test them out.

https://djangopackages.org/grids/g/invoicing/

Re: Ask HN: WordPress vs. Django/Flask?

#27

Post by ahmedfromtunis »

As a Django fanboy, I recommend you choose WordPress everytime.

It takes care of 99% of the things a marketing website needs to have. For the 0.999% other stuff it doesn't include, the plugins can take care of it.

"But what I'm building falls under those 0.0001% cases not covered :/"

Oh, then use Django.

Re: Ask HN: WordPress vs. Django/Flask?

#28

Post by lnxg33k1 »

chadpaulson wrote: post #13

Django has a CMS called Wagtail, which has some really nice features including custom content blocks which allow you to easily create unique looking pages. Wagtail has over 15,000 stars on GitHub, is heavily supported and was created in 2014. It has since been adopted by organizations such as NASA, Google, and the National Health Service. Below is a comparison between Wagtail and Wordpress. https://wagtail.org/wagtai…

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: WordPress vs. Django/Flask?

#29

Post by maremmano »

Hey there!

Using Django or Flask might be overkill for what you're trying to do. I suggest you to stick with WordPress, but check out the Sage/root style over at https://roots.io/sage.

It's not the classic WordPress; it's a modern, more secure version (not more secure but less prone to some common automatic attacks).

Also only use plugins when you absolutely have to, and if you do, stick with the pros (i.e. Gravityforms).

I've used WP alot (more than 1000s of websites) and I'm also using Python with Flask and FastAPI (but never used Django).

Re: Ask HN: WordPress vs. Django/Flask?

#30

Post by snowwrestler »

I think you are smart to be nervous. There is risk when you don't know very much but are getting paid by a company to do technical things to enable their business.

Consider what is commercially available. Selecting, configuring, integrating, and supporting software services is still something you can charge for. Small companies pay for efficient results, they don't typically care how much code you personally write.

You could build their marketing site on a fully hosted solution like Squarespace, Wix, Weblow, etc. Or if you want to use Wordpress, stick to something like Wordpress.com or WP Engine with a commercial template and all auto-updating turned on. Make it easy on yourself and outsource security to folks who know what they are doing.

Remote desktop and invoicing also sound like needs that can be met more efficiently and securely by available commercial solutions.

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