Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: WordPress vs. Django/Flask?

news.ycombinator.com

41–49 of 49 posts

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

#41

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…

> Django's features that make CRUD easier, will just get in your way.

No? You can import whatever you want into the view and do whatever logic you need to. The Django stuff doesn't get in the way at all.

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

#42
post #15
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a typical informational website for a small agency with up to 3-4 tabs, presenting their services, a blog, some contact form. It may not need much animation or interactivity in the beginning. But optimization for mobile may be useful. I've watched a dozen of tutorials on Django/Flask on Pluralsight/FreeCodeCamp building some simple registration sites, even a basic e-shop. For my former Wordpress site I have…

I did read from somewhere, that with Wordpress SEO plugins etc some website got to top of search results. Those that did website with other tech did not get same results, and thinked how to compete or survive. For security, I use Sandstorm https://sandstorm.io fork of WordPress that generates static websites. But that does not work with some interactive plugins.

I doubt those SEO plugins make any difference at all.

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

#44
post #9

WordPress is totally fine and used by many agencies in the real world. It gets a bad rep because it is extremely popular and has low barrier to entry which also attracts more eyeballs and script kiddies trying to break in due to vulnerability in some low quality plugins. But you need to choose based on what your objectives are. WP is quick and give you decent bang for buck especially if you don't need to create somet…

Wordpress is a blogging engine that can be hacked to work as a CMS. Thousands of mostly low-quality plug-ins with questionable security and unproedictable compatibility issues when used with other plugins.

If you want to install a theme and not adjust anything it’s ok-ish. For anything more complicated I’ve found Wordpress unworkable.

I feel myself lucky to have discovered craftcms - well architected CMS with flexible content modeling. Free for a single user.

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

#45

Where are all these HN posts you're talking about Wordpress installs being hacked? Not saying it doesn't have some risks / for a very long time, but there aren't posts on here about it regularly.

I just searched on HN for the most recent 2-3 years and found this:

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584788 Researcher goes public with WordPress CSP bypass hack

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32561198 Hacked WordPress – over 17,000 spam links injected post compromise

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5702570 Tell HN: Bots are Constantly trying to hack your Wordpress Sites

There are more dating 5 and more years ago, but I didn't link them here. It seems I saw at least twice as more similar news for WP in recent years, but maybe these links were in HN server cache or something and with no comments so are not shown in search.

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

#46
post #7

"I am self-teaching myself web-design and the related stuff (Python mainly for everything, but HTML/CSS, C++, SQL and databases also) and a few years ago I also administered a Wordpress site for a while, so am a bit familiar with themes/addons etc." Sounds like you trying to learn to many things at once. And you for sure do not need to learn C++ for web development. PHP is and JS/TS is missing from your list. That wo…

I may be hired as the bureau coordinator/SEO's assistant and on my CV I mentioned that I am just learning all this stuff from multiple online and offline resources. Formally I have completed 3 introductory courses on Python on Coursera and 2 certification courses on FreeCodeCamp in Python for Data Analysis and Scientific Computation (actually wrote and understood code), and watched (without practice) dozens of them on Django/Flask to get familiar which I would re-watch with more attention and practice by now. Because anyway I will need Python/C++ programming for my biophysics projects.

By "keywords" I mean just the names of the tools/frameworks/concepts.

I posted a few links about WP being hacked below. It may be that's all I've seen on HN.

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

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The Python user base is perfectly fine. Of course, any additional package installed outside of Django and Wagtail can introduce security risks. Since Wagtail and all of its additional packages incorporates Django's security features, which includes protection against many common attack methods, it is a more secure offering. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.2/topics/security/ Not to mention security through obscuri…

  Of course, any additional package installed outside of Django and Wagtail can introduce security risks.
Nothing to add your honour

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

#48
They are totally different axis.

WP is mostly small business workhorse, nearly all included in package (admin, editor, lot of third party addons), which is good enough for small scale, cheap and simple (most things could be done without developers), but not scales well.

So if business grow, at some moment it will be very hard to use WP, and/or business will be slow down if continue use WP.

Django is better when have developers team, it is full featured framework, have many things included into one officially supported package (but not as complete as WP), optimal for medium business, and with good developer/ops, could serve any scale, but it have too steep learning curve for start small.

Flask, could be considered as simplified Django, also good, but to make same things as Django, you need to create modular design from many separate packages, which are not orchestrated/supported by one official source.

So with Flask you probably will start faster than with Django, (I myself spent ~half of year to learn Django, with Flask I started in weekend), but you may encounter problems, when some dependency will be changed too much, so you will need to recreate interface for it.

Unfortunately, Django does not offer standard way to transit between major releases, but within one major release you could expect minimal efforts to transit, if use standard components. Many things, possible to recreate on other version, just by change config and/or database scheme, so many works could be done by ops (Admin/Database administrator).

WP also does not offer standard transition way, but in many cases it is just very simple to recreate all from scratch, many works could be done by just user and some things need ops.

With Flask, when you need to transit to other version, you probably, will recreate all interfaces between components, need programmer to do this, also ops.

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

#49
post #48

They are totally different axis. WP is mostly small business workhorse, nearly all included in package (admin, editor, lot of third party addons), which is good enough for small scale, cheap and simple (most things could be done without developers), but not scales well. So if business grow, at some moment it will be very hard to use WP, and/or business will be slow down if continue use WP. Django is better when have…

And yes, when found weakness in WP/Django, in many cases you will just need to transit to patched version, or recreate (if different major version). As I said, recreate for WP much cheaper than any other you asked.

But when found weakness in some part of software, which you used in Flask, this could be big problem, because parts are supported by different persons, some may become just unsupported, or may be supported worse than others, and you will not have one subject to call, unlike case of pure Django.

Same problem could happen with WP, because many custom plugins are practically just other separate big system, also not supported by main WP team. But in many cases, SEO and leads tracker could be from official package.

But, from what I seen myself, with WP typically you will end with few sites, each serve part of business, each consisted from 2-4 big chunks, which working good together, so you will depend from limited number of subjects (with Flask, number of parts will be more than 5, because there nearly all separate).

With Django, it is possible, to make all in one site, and to not use anything from separate sources, except frontend framework and markup (for example in ideal world could be Django+React+Bootstrap, and nothing else, sure in real will be additionally some SEO addon, leads tracker addon).

Post reply on HN