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Why Wordpress?

johnmaeda.com

71–80 of 90 posts

Re: Why Wordpress?

#71
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…

Drupal 8 is very user friendly out of the box. (For publishing, you could maybe go further and use a distribution like Thunder - http://thunder.org/)

Re: Why Wordpress?

#72
post #28

People keep saying wp is bad. Ye it is from your point of view. But there are maybe billions who have no clue how internet works but they want a site/blog/shop whatever. Many of them don't even think about paying someone to make a website, or pay for tools. So they pick wordpress: 1 click install in cpanel, no html, css, js, php knowledge whatsoever, pick a free theme from millions of themes, pick plugins from millio…

I don't think anyone is questioning that WP fills an important niche. The problem is that as used in many cases, it has some serious problems. Being able to "pick plugins from millions free ones, done" is great UX out of the box and terrible in the long term when the inevitable compromises and lack of support sets in.

Re: Why Wordpress?

#73
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…

Take a look at Concrete5. It's a LAMP stack like Wordpress, MVC under the covers, a common sense architecture, and highly extensible. It has an exceptional, in-context UI for content editing that is the best I've seen, and a good core team and community that is very active.

One area that Wordpress wins is with respect to the overall number of themes and plug-ins, but that's pretty much it.

Re: Why Wordpress?

#74

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.

Do you have a good way to let clients update their site if it's static? I'd love to ditch CMSs, but asking my clients to write HTML is a stretch and expecting them to sync changes over SSH is right out.

Re: Why Wordpress?

#75
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…

Install woocommerce - you'll end up with 12-15 plugins off the bat.

Would you like to force everything to be SSL? Another plugin. Do you want a contact form? Another plugin. Do you want to disable the bizarre update messages from ignite woo that won't go away? Another plugin. Oh, you want some slider-carousel thing on some page? Another plugin. Caching? Another plugin. Image optimization? Another plugin. Some sort of 'maintenance mode' to deal with taking down the site for upgrades? Another plugin. Social sharing buttons? Another plugin.

I could keep going, but perhaps you get the picture. And the argument could be made that 90% of these are not needed, and there's other ways to deal with the requirements. In my most recent excursion, I'd taken over a project from someone else, and this was it. Any changes to anything would require investigation, custom code, and still require some sort of UI to manage things, all of which cost time and money, which were in short supply, so this particular project kept going with dozens of plugins.

You want to do an upgrade to WP core? You've got 30+ plugins to test. Or... just click 'update' and hope for the best. Or test each plugin and upgrade process on a separate server. Again, back to relatively large amounts of time and money expended just to keep up with wp core to avoid inevitable hacking attempts.

I have another multisite install I was brought in on over the summer, with 165 plugins. It's just another version of 'crappy legacy software and undocumented crap with no documentation' which we've all seen, but it is also quantified by "number of wp plugins". No, not every site is using all 165. But there were/are > 40 sites, with various groups using various combinations - there's 0 good reasons for all of these to have been combined (over several years) in to one massive multisite mess, but it was, and it's taken many people far too long to unravel some of the mess to extricate some sites.

Yes, some of this is just a 'bad code is bad code' rant, but given the mindshare that WP owns, it would seem to be incumbent on them to raise the bar with respect to tools for plugin management (as just one example), give developers better starting code and samples and guidance for what's acceptable and what's not. A paid certification program which would vet code for 'best practices' would be something I think would help improve the landscape in short order (and no doubt has been considered by some over the years).

Re: Why Wordpress?

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a good way to let clients update their site if it's static? I'd love to ditch CMSs, but asking my clients to write HTML is a stretch and expecting them to sync changes over SSH is right out.

Yeah, absolutely. To be clear, we haven't ditched the concept of a CMS altogether, we've simply shifted the paradigm to get the client's focus back on managing content instead of managing a site.

Our current setup is using a static site generator (we're Rubyists on Middleman - https://middlemanapp.com/ - but take your pick here) to build the actual site. However, the content itself lives in a cloud-based CMS (we're on Contentful, but Prismic and Siteleaf are also good choices) - this is what the client has access to. During the build proc, the SSG polls the CMS and grabs all the latest content to package into the static site.

On publish of any piece of content in the CMS, a webhook hits our build proc (either Codeship or Netlify) which in turns fires a rebuild of the site (which in turns pulls down the latest content).

For us, the best part about the setup is that it's virtually impossible for the client to break the site. They could certainly make it look like hell - but they can't break it. On top of that, if they somehow, someway, manage to break the build by simply editing content, then the new site is simply never deployed.

Let me know if you have any more questions - I love talking about this stuff.

Re: Why Wordpress?

#77
I hate wordpress. Always having to be updated, plugins that fall behind or also need to be updated, duplication of images instead of using original and styling or scripting it instead - same image creates 30 images in some templates. Change a template and things break. I've never understood why people keep touting it.

Re: Why Wordpress?

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a good way to let clients update their site if it's static? I'd love to ditch CMSs, but asking my clients to write HTML is a stretch and expecting them to sync changes over SSH is right out.

Yeah, absolutely. To be clear, we haven't ditched the concept of a CMS altogether, we've simply shifted the paradigm to get the client's focus back on managing content instead of managing a site . Our current setup is using a static site generator (we're Rubyists on Middleman - https://middlemanapp.com/ - but take your pick here) to build the actual site. However, the content itself lives in a cloud-based CMS (we're…

Oh, that's a great solution! Webhooks are probably the missing link, since I've already looked at and used generators. I could even host a text editor on a server for them; there are enough decent HTML5 editors that the UX wouldn't be an issue. Thanks!

Re: Why Wordpress?

#79
post #77

I hate wordpress. Always having to be updated, plugins that fall behind or also need to be updated, duplication of images instead of using original and styling or scripting it instead - same image creates 30 images in some templates. Change a template and things break. I've never understood why people keep touting it.

wut

Re: Why Wordpress?

#80
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…

What about Joomla or Drupal? (Although does anyone use them anymore? As WordPress got more popular I've seen more and more serious sites running WordPress and leaving Joomla). But for a business, a proprietary CMS is a management mess (proprietary as in custom designed) because you can't switch web companies.
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