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Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

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Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#211

Post by kirstenbirgit »

1123581321 wrote: post #105
mattmanser wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a few months ago, it was ridiculously easy. It literally took me 20 minutes to customize how the side bar was working and embed some new dynamic content. I even inherited off a parent theme so any updates to the theme wouldn't over-ride my changes. I've never even written much PHP in the past. I even added it into the the theme editor so the client could change the text/etc. themselves. Not sure what you did, bu…

That's one problem with Wordpress' default renders; it sends developers down those relatively narrow paths of customizing existing output. It's easy if requirements are flexible enough to allow that, but not the right CMS for truly customized content architecture and presentation.

> truly customized content architecture and presentation

Can you give an example of something like that which is not possible with WordPress?

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#212

Post by kirstenbirgit »

onion2k wrote: post #171
shiftpgdn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JAM stack (this term is trademarked by Netlify, FYI) is such an awful trend for anyone but developers. The web runs on WordPress because it's SO easy for anyone to stand up a quality, functional website. I drop in on a local WordPress event a few times a year and many of the people there are 60+ and very much non technical but have put together great sites that benefit humanity.

it's SO easy for anyone to stand up a quality, functional website And its also really easy for it to be left without updates or security patches, with an insecure admin account password, and with a set of plugins that open up more security problems. It might be a bit harder to get up and running with a static site generator but the fact that it's essentially unhackable (through the site itself; the host server has th…

WordPress has automatic updates, and you actually have to enter a hard to guess password when creating an account.

The plugin issue is not specific to WordPress.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#213

Post by jeromenerf »

wvenable wrote: post #183
jaza wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a Drupal dev for ~10 years. Once upon a time, I built many sites with it, and I recommended it to many folks. Despite its flaws (and it always had flaws), it was a great piece of software in its heyday, and it had (and still has?) an amazing community. I'd still choose it over WordPress any day. But the days when I'd recommend either of them (or indeed anything in PHP) are long gone. Your best bet now is probab…

Does no one else ever have users want to setup content to go live at specific dates and times? Static site generators are great for truly static content but that's extremely rare anywhere where content is frequently edited.

Hugo metadata allows to define a publication date for content. Then you need to run the Hugo build periodically to have the content published. The hugo cli has options to build "drafts" and "futures" so that you can preview them.

I have used Hugo in the past to generate websites from external content sources, such as trello, gitlab, GitHub, RSS feeds, Dropbox, headless CMSes, etc. Some of them provided webhooks to trigger the build, others required polling and periodic rebuild, yet others can commit to a git repo and trigger a CI pipeline. Most of the time, hugo was more of a composable solution to a given flow than a constraint i had to build around thanks to its capabilities to use "data content" and not only markdown files. Using json as the metadata "front matter" for documents often proved very handy when using API sources.

Hugo is very fast, so build time wasn’t a big concern. There was no incremental build however, so for a very large corpus it could be an issue. The most problematic issue is that Hugo doesn’t ever delete anything from a previous build, but overwrites on top, so that could be problematic if you involuntarily publish something and then want it off. The same kind of issues you get into with caching or object storage. My "solution" was the classic parallel builds, symlink and cleanup dance.

Would recommend.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#214

Post by achairapart »

falcolas wrote: post #61
westoque wrote: post #4

I hope we again see the value of using systems like Wordpress for it’s simplicity in getting a blog/website setup and easily modify content. Lately most of the modern marketing websites I see is built using gatsby and next.js. Having been talking to different content/marketing teams, they hate it so much because of the complexity it brings. Editing content? Sign in to this headless CRM app, want a form? Go sign in to…

Simplicity? Perhaps in its use, but not the code. The code and hosting requirements are, frankly, Frankenstein's monster levels of frightening. ~~You have to~~ WP expect you to install it such that it can modify its install folders - all of them. Security-fucking-nightmare. It will use incoming requests to trigger "cron" jobs (which can include self-upgrades), via a non-loopback HTTP request. It falls apart under any…

While, as others already pointed, most of your examples are debatable, I think parent was mostly talking about the simplicity about EDITING content, ie the benefits for the end user.

WordPress has become so ubiquitous in web publishing that often it is a client requirement when asking for a new website to a web agency.

Using WordPress is a skill that people put in their CVs, in the same lines where they talk about their MS Office proficiency.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#215

Post by StreamBright »

westoque wrote: post #4

I hope we again see the value of using systems like Wordpress for it’s simplicity in getting a blog/website setup and easily modify content. Lately most of the modern marketing websites I see is built using gatsby and next.js. Having been talking to different content/marketing teams, they hate it so much because of the complexity it brings. Editing content? Sign in to this headless CRM app, want a form? Go sign in to…

Nothing is stopping you from setting up a site in Hugo or something similar. I don't really understand why dynamic rendering or a huge amount of JS is required other than continue down the road of bloat.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#216

Post by XCSme »

onion2k wrote: post #171
shiftpgdn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JAM stack (this term is trademarked by Netlify, FYI) is such an awful trend for anyone but developers. The web runs on WordPress because it's SO easy for anyone to stand up a quality, functional website. I drop in on a local WordPress event a few times a year and many of the people there are 60+ and very much non technical but have put together great sites that benefit humanity.

it's SO easy for anyone to stand up a quality, functional website And its also really easy for it to be left without updates or security patches, with an insecure admin account password, and with a set of plugins that open up more security problems. It might be a bit harder to get up and running with a static site generator but the fact that it's essentially unhackable (through the site itself; the host server has th…

I agree that WordPress security is a huge issue, the biggest potential problem is that not when a random website goes down but when someone finds a mass-exploit and then gets access to millions of websites.

> It might be a bit harder to get up and running with a static site generator but the fact that it's essentially unhackable

You could also use WordPress to generate a static site, just add a caching level on top.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#217

Post by ehnto »

gnicholas wrote: post #71
imwally wrote: post #62

I was curious after seeing the accessibility statement what the previous administration's had. https://www.whitehouse.gov/accessibility/ https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/accessibility https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/accessibility.ht... https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/accessibility With that last one not being surprising at all.

I was surprised that the accessibility widget on the current website has a feature called “high contrast mode” that does not significantly increase the contrast ratio between the primary text and the background. It also significantly lowers the contrast between the secondary text and the background, sometimes as low as 2.1 (7 is the recommended minimum). Given the icon they chose, it seems like “dark mode” would be a…

Accessibility compliance widgets are such a shot to the nads for accessibility. Sites drop in an accessibility plugin and never think about accessibility again. You need a real audit, and an accessibility first mindset to build a genuinely accessible website.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#219

Post by XCSme »

monoideism wrote: post #89

The one thing great about WordPress is the massive number of themes available (and plugins, if you're not a programmer). I wish very much that there were 10% as many attractive themes available for static sites. Yes, you can port them, but it's a pain. And yes, you can design them, but it takes more time and most programmers don't have the design chops to pull it off.

> themes available for static sites

By this do you mean plain HTML/CSS themes that you can edit yourself, or themes that are integrated and can be edited within static website providers?

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#220

Post by ehnto »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #44
julianlam wrote: post #2

In this age where the trend is JAM stack, it is refreshing to see that something battle-tested like WordPress was chosen. There's a reason WP has withstood the test of time. (WordPress developers being a dime a dozen also help make the case)

JAM stack (this term is trademarked by Netlify, FYI) is such an awful trend for anyone but developers. The web runs on WordPress because it's SO easy for anyone to stand up a quality, functional website. I drop in on a local WordPress event a few times a year and many of the people there are 60+ and very much non technical but have put together great sites that benefit humanity.

> JAM stack (this term is trademarked by Netlify, FYI) is such an awful trend for anyone but developers

JAMstack sites are annoying to build, so much minutiae and configuration, abstractions on top of abstractions, and you never own the codebase as it's frameworks and libraries all the way down. You spend half your time trying to figure out if X could work with Y, rather than just making X do Y's job by writing some actual code for a change.

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