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Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

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Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#231

Post by pembrook »

HotVector wrote: post #107
unfocused wrote: post #103

I also host a Wordpress site for some non-technical people that are part of the legal community. I chose it because they just need to publish basic info, much like most govt places, and all the non-tech people find it easy to add content. It's been up and running for 8 years using the same webhost. Easy to keep up to date, and easy to use, and it solves their business problem. Nothing wrong with WP when you just want…

My go-to for creating a static website to be managed by non-tech people is Svelte + some markdown renderer. I put all the info into Markdown files so it can be easily changed, kind of like Jekyll.

You’re getting downvoted because this would only be suitable for the most simple of blogs/sites that rarely need updating. And I’m sorry, giving non-technical people a code editor and telling them to write markdown & front matter and deal with git is just hilarious.

It’s the typical “developer’s developer” solution. Fun for the dev to set up and write an article about how they built it on Dev.to, but with zero thought put towards the marketing functionality or flexible content production that any end user will need.

Developers don’t understand that their role in the process of creating a marketing site is the least important one. The marketing functionality (advanced SEO, newsletter sign up, form collection, landing page generation, dynamic header banners etc) and multi-author content production is all that matters. Otherwise nobody will ever be visiting the site.

Content is king. Not “developer pleasure is King.” Hence why Wordpress runs most of the internet.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#232

Post by jspash »

laumars wrote: post #226
coldtea wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Simplicity? Perhaps in its use, but not the code. Nobody but other devs cares about the simplicity of the code if the code works. > The code and hosting requirements are, frankly, Frankenstein's monster levels of frightening. Huh? Wordpress/PHP hosting requirements are the easiest to meet in the industry. Not to mention the most widely available... > ~~You have to~~ WP expect you to install it such that it can modi…

The NFS requirement for multiple Wordpress hosts are an instant deal breaker for me when discussing CMS on the cloud. Wordpress made sense when the web was a collection of independent servers. However in today’s cloud-orientated hosting landscape there are a thousand better ways to provide said content. Both at the beginner level and at the enterprise.

Those independent servers haven’t gone away just because there are new toys in the box. They are still fast, cheap and ubiquitous.

I’m no fan of PHP or Wordpress by any stretch. But I agree with the pragmatic choice in this case. It will probably only need one dev to maintain the site. But even that would be overkill. You just never want a bus factor of 1. Especially for such a high profile site. But I’m digressing...

But cloud vs VPS aside, I do wonder is they are self hosting due to security reasons. Imagine a bad actor hacking into the WP installation! It does have a bad security record.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#233

Post by arcturus17 »

earthboundkid wrote: post #136
jakelazaroff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that because WordPress is simple , though? There are similar CMSes you can use with e.g. Gatsby. They’re just a glorified build systems, after all — there’s nothing inherently complex about the content management experience. And on the flip side, it’s possible to load up WordPress with enough plugins that it becomes a nightmare to use. I think we see people choose WordPress because it’s familiar, popular, battle-t…

Wordpress makes sense if the goals are: - Big upfront design - Leverage existing plugins to minimize new development - Use managed hosting - Hand off to non-technical or semi-technical people and spin down development to just occasional contract work If you actually have a FTE developer, it doesn’t fit as well at all. Among other problems, it does not work with a git centric development flow, which any modern dev wil…

Eh, the efficiencies you describe happen regardless of whether the dev team is full-time or outsourced, and I think there are ways of doing git flows with WP.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#234

Post by pembrook »

thayne wrote: post #45
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…

From an operations perspective, gatsby and next.js are much simpler though. You are just deploying static content behind a webserver or even something like s3. Horizontal scaling is almost trivial. With wordpress though, you have to worry about a database as well, scaling is more complicated, you need to run php on your webservers (which has security implications), updates that include schema updates frequently requi…

You’re not wrong, but you’re missing the point.

The “operations” perspective is the least important perspective on any marketing site/blog.

Design flexibility in production, marketing features and multi-author content production are the only thing that matters.

Gatsby is built by developers, for developers. And it’s hilariously out of touch with the needs of anybody else.

We’re almost 10 years into the static site ecosystem and there’s still no easy way to do even 1/10th of what Wordpress can do without building everything from scratch and duct taping it together with a rigid headless CMS in the middle.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#235

Post by arcturus17 »

tootie wrote: post #55
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…

A pretty standard stack I've done recently is Netlify, Gatsby (I'd lean next at this point) with Prismic, Hubspot and GTM. It's barely more investment to setup than WordPress but lets you build something visually sophisticated really easily and you get user friendly CMS, CRM and all the analytics and user engagement stuff. And running headless means there's almost zero attack surface.

The very point of OP is that this micro-service approach is bound to provide a poorer user experience for non-technical users - the vast majority will reason about and operate a monolithic CMS with much more ease.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#237

Post by chx »

drummer wrote: post #143

Gutenberg sucks donkey dick. Matt should remove it asap before people switch in masses to another cms. Last I checked reviews are still sucking. https://wordpress.org/plugins/gutenberg/#reviews

This is an example where the words chosen to express a valuable criticism completely undoes it because noone wants to engage with someone using such words. (Wish this was a spoken conversation because you'd hear this said in a very sad voice and not as a high and mighty I-look-down-upon-to-you. Trust me, I know how much it matters how you express yourself. It cost me nearly everything that I valued in my life.)

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#238

Post by aheckler »

nkozyra wrote: post #29
lemonberry wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not asking this to be snarky, but by what metric would you decide something was the best technical option?

There's no single metric, but in particular I believe that inherent inefficiency with WordPress design will incur more cost to scale, as an example. Not to mention things little security issues. I don't have an agenda against WordPress and very often when people ask me what they should use for simple projects I say "just use WordPress." My rule of thumb is that will probably be alright for a simple, small project, bu…

> inherent inefficiency with WordPress design will incur more cost to scale

Check out Cloudflare's Automatic Platform Optimization tool from last year [0]. It uses Workers to cache static and dynamic content from WordPress on the edge. Just $5/month.

IMHO, that would "scale reasonably" for many use cases.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/automatic-platform-optimizations...

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#239

Post by YetAnotherNick »

iamacyborg wrote: post #222
newsbinator wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody but other devs cares about the simplicity of the code if the code works. They care when you start quoting a week for a simple addition that should take an hour, because every time you have to wade into a mess, in which one wrong semicolon in functions.php brings down the entire website. Of course you test and you test, but you're surrounded by landmines at all times.

> in which one wrong semicolon in functions.php brings down the entire website. Don’t immediately deploy code into prod until you’ve tested it?

How do you test wordpress without deploying it? \s

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#240

Post by DigitalSea »

42droids wrote: post #194
Kimitri wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Drupal has multisite capability, too. I don't think using multisite is actually that good an idea. Having two separate websites be dependent on the same codebase is very prone to cause serious life cycle problems. I'd advice against using multisite on WP or Drupal.

We have been doing this successfully for many years, no problems. Some multi site installs have up to 300 sites running on them. You have to know when to use the available technology.

Spot on. I am currently working on a project that has over 25,000 multisites running in WordPress Multisite. The amazing thing besides the sheer number is WordPress has not been a problem, throw it on AWS and the scaling issues are solved. People who proclaim that WordPress can't scale have never built anything scalable with it.
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