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Why Wordpress?

johnmaeda.com

61–70 of 90 posts

Re: Why Wordpress?

#61

The question should be "what". Static HTML will often fit the bill

This is my everyday at the moment. WordPress's biggest success, in my opinion, is that it is synonymous with "website" for many incoming clients. I get "We need a WordPress site" far more often than "We need a website", and they're almost exclusively asking for the latter once we break down the business goals. Always feels like I'm starting from an entrenched position though.

Re: Why Wordpress?

#62
post #50

I see WP Engine touted as a solution. My limited experience with a client several months ago was "hey, we're getting really big, we need better security and better performance", they shop around, and get sold (in a literal sense) on WP Engine. Signed up, and my friend started to try to migrate things over. Oh... yeah, they don't actually support many custom plugins - you could select from some blessed ones, but the c…

What do they use so many plugins for? I took over supporting/developing a WordPress site and one of the first things I did was delete a bunch of pointless plugins. I wound up writing quite a few of my own for different tools and left some third party plugins so there are still probably 10 active between 3 sites on a multisite install. I installed Google analytics directly in the header of the custom themes on each of…

>So, why so many plugins? Am I missing something?

Many people treat WordPress as a fully featured CMS/CRM that runs their entire business. They often have multiple complex custom developed plugins.

Re: Why Wordpress?

#63
WordPress is fantastic for what it was meant to be: a blog. When people try shoehorning it into e-commerce and other things it turns into a real mess. There's no real structure to the application itself, which leads to promoting a procedural, "dump everything in a functions.php file" type of programming.

Re: Why Wordpress?

#64
What are the alternatives? Is there any other free, self-hosted, open source CMS that out-of-the-box allows an average non-tech person to publish content, images, etc. with such ease and nicely designed admin GUI? Easy to install, can be installed on any cheap shared hosting and will work fine, has automatic updates, content is searchable, has tones of themes free or cheap to choose from, it's fairly easy to customize and reasonably safe, as long as developer doesn't get crazy with plugins and has a basic idea of web security it's just fine. Code is ugly as hell and I hate it as much as everyone else, but site owners don't care about it, as long as the interface is nice and easy and cheap to use. And also there's a ton of helpful videos and tutorials to give to your clients to learn how to use it (so they don't bug you at all on "how do I do this"). Developers are cheap and readily available if you don't want to provide support which is a huge benefit for the customer, not being stuck with a custom solution and having to pay a new site each time he changes the developer.

I'd be very happy to use something else, more secure and better written, but what comes even close?

Re: Why Wordpress?

#65
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do they use so many plugins for? I took over supporting/developing a WordPress site and one of the first things I did was delete a bunch of pointless plugins. I wound up writing quite a few of my own for different tools and left some third party plugins so there are still probably 10 active between 3 sites on a multisite install. I installed Google analytics directly in the header of the custom themes on each of…

I think you're missing two things: (1) there are clients who demand administrative access, and since they pay the bills, they get it (2) maintainability. As much as I detest WordPress, and as garbage as many of the public plugins are, what would be even worse is having my team take over support for one of your sites with your custom plugins. Ramp up cost is a very real thing.

I suppose so. I like to think my custom plugins are well written and maintainable. I attribute this to the fact that I identity as a JavaScript engineer with some classic OO tendencies (shout out to Gilfoyle). More or less I write JavaScript and Java/C# so I'm not some dipshit writing WordPress plugins w PHP/Wordpress as my first and only language and framework.

The nicest plugin I've seen [code wise] is the Jasig CAS authentication plugin, and for that I had to modify it to specify the behavior I wanted (custom 500, 501 screens, don't upsert user). So, whenever an update comes around I have to either ignore it or modify the code. Honestly, I think that's even against the license since I didn't publish my changes.

Re: Why Wordpress?

#66
post #64

What are the alternatives? Is there any other free, self-hosted, open source CMS that out-of-the-box allows an average non-tech person to publish content, images, etc. with such ease and nicely designed admin GUI? Easy to install, can be installed on any cheap shared hosting and will work fine, has automatic updates, content is searchable, has tones of themes free or cheap to choose from, it's fairly easy to customiz…

I am currently evaluating October CMS. Give it a shot! Disclaimer: not affiliated with OctoberCMS at all. I'm evaluating it as a CMS platform for client projects.

Re: Why Wordpress?

#67
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing two things: (1) there are clients who demand administrative access, and since they pay the bills, they get it (2) maintainability. As much as I detest WordPress, and as garbage as many of the public plugins are, what would be even worse is having my team take over support for one of your sites with your custom plugins. Ramp up cost is a very real thing.

I suppose so. I like to think my custom plugins are well written and maintainable. I attribute this to the fact that I identity as a JavaScript engineer with some classic OO tendencies (shout out to Gilfoyle). More or less I write JavaScript and Java/C# so I'm not some dipshit writing WordPress plugins w PHP/Wordpress as my first and only language and framework. The nicest plugin I've seen [code wise] is the Jasig CA…

Absolutely - and by the way, I was in no way knocking you or your code! The level of polish or viability of a custom plugin for us would just be secondary to the fact that it was custom to begin with - that's all I was trying to get across.

Re: Why Wordpress?

#68
I'd love WordPress to be on GitHub rather than squirreled away on... Actually I have no idea, I've never actually found it. I bet you can't find it within 2 minutes from reading this, go on, give it a go...

Told you. Get it on GitHub and watch how much better it becomes.

Also sorting out the versioning would make it more usable.

Re: Why Wordpress?

#69
post #64

What are the alternatives? Is there any other free, self-hosted, open source CMS that out-of-the-box allows an average non-tech person to publish content, images, etc. with such ease and nicely designed admin GUI? Easy to install, can be installed on any cheap shared hosting and will work fine, has automatic updates, content is searchable, has tones of themes free or cheap to choose from, it's fairly easy to customiz…

I will add as a Software Engineer, I use WordPress to document my world expeditions[1] because it works, and I don't want to mess with code while using crummy internet in West Africa.

I have never seen a better alternative for what I do.

With Varnish in front of it, the server doesn't break a sweat with 1,000 concurrent connections (according to Analytics)

[1] http://theroadchoseme.com

Re: Why Wordpress?

#70

I'd love WordPress to be on GitHub rather than squirreled away on... Actually I have no idea, I've never actually found it. I bet you can't find it within 2 minutes from reading this, go on, give it a go... Told you. Get it on GitHub and watch how much better it becomes. Also sorting out the versioning would make it more usable.

There's a mirror of it at the obvious place[1], with instructions on how to contribute in the header.

This took me the time it took to type in the URL as a guess. "wordpress github", "wordpress source" both have this as the first result.

[1]: https://github.com/wordpress/wordpress

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