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Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

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Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#281

Post by 1123581321 »

kirstenbirgit wrote: post #211
1123581321 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Customized presentation is possible by starting with a blank template. Most do not do that, so if they want to customize, they spend time modifying and working around the default views. This has an effect of constraining the look. The difficulty emulating controller-like behavior means that adding multiple pieces of content to a view takes extra work.

As for the content architecture, Wordpress cpt are limited in their ability to relate to others and to define flexible custom fields (even with ACF.) It’s possible to hack together something like what a more flexible CMS or application framework can do, but it’s fragile and takes a lot of boilerplate, which, similar to template customization, steers the developer towards a similar architecture to other sites.

For these reasons, increased development and maintenance cost make it unlikely that an attempt to develop something truly customized on Wordpress will be successful. That said, many only know Wordpress development so may still get further with it than with a closer fit to their project.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#282

Post by swyx »

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.

TIL they have a trademark application pending https://uspto.report/TM/88746545

what is the implication of such a trademark? can unaffiliated companies not use the term now? this is a little surprising.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#283

Post by snowwrestler »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #239
iamacyborg wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

This conversation is feeding my suspicion that a lot of the problems people have with Wordpress come from not knowing how to work with Wordpress.

The professional approach is a local copy for development, a staging copy on hosting for QA, and then production. Code goes up in deployments; DB and files come down in regular synchronization. If there are multiple devs you might also have an integration copy on hosting.

This is not specific to WP; I’ve seen the same workflow work for other DB-backed CMSs like Drupal.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#285

Post by icemelt8 »

pembrook wrote: post #231
HotVector wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 though…

You hit the nail on the head. Also I see no comment talking about the eaay to use beautiful block interface of writing content in WordPress admin panel.

I used lot of other CMSs, but Project Gutenberg is just too good

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#286

Post by snowwrestler »

laumars wrote: post #262
jspash wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..…

Sorry, by “independent servers” I meant self hosting / on prem. And while that hasn’t gone away entirely it has diminished massively as companies deprecate on prem hardware as hardware ages and replaces those resources with cloud services. Stuff like NFS made sense for on prem but it’s a terrible solution for building services on AWS (for example). Security wise, any popular CMS will be a security nightmare. It’s not…

> Security wise, any popular CMS will be a security nightmare.

I disagree, and I think it comes from a different understanding of what web security is.

Popular CMS software benefits from millions of people hammering on installations. If the community constructs a sane process for handling vulnerability reports (and WP has), then the average user of that software benefits from a robust continuous testing regime that they could never afford themselves. Testing and patching is an extremely important component of web application security in the long run, and also very expensive to do well. Most custom CMS projects do not bother to do it at all, and yet fool themselves into thinking they are secure because they wrote their own code.

No one can write secure software on the first try. The most well-funded and well-regarded software companies in the world spend tremendous effort on coding practices and testing, and still ship vulnerabilities.

Continuous testing and patching is always required. If your website is the only one running your CMS software, your first hint of a vulnerability may be when it gets exploited in production.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#287

Post by icemelt8 »

maelito wrote: post #177
HotVector wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't get why you get downvoted. I'm doing the same thing with a simple react app that displays markdown, it's working great. More and more non-tech people are happy to be introduced to github. It's just an 'article' dir where you upload your markdown file, then click on 3 green buttons to create a PR. They're happy to discover the integrated discussion system, issues, kanban, etc. Of course, tailor it to your audi…

This comment is as funny as the parent comment.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#288

Post by clintonb »

perardi wrote: post #42
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)

Are we at the point that creating and editing a page in a JAM stack site is as easy as WordPress for non-technical users? Not a snarky or leading question, I honestly don’t know. I use Hugo for my own internal design things, because I want partials and such, but I have no idea where the ecosystem is at for the “we need a poli-sci intern to copyedit this” use case.

Maybe, for basic use cases. I use Forestry as a CMS for my Jekyll site. I only have two templates: page and blog post.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#289

Post by clintonb »

johnchristopher wrote: post #278

This thread is full of pro and anti wordpress/php and of anti and pro jamstack. I'd like to see the project's requirements.

Requirements and time to work. January 20th at noon was the absolute-ish deadline, but when did the work begin? Was it November 4, or sometime later given the lack of concession from the previous administration?

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#290

Post by coldtea »

mattacular wrote: post #270
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.

Programs in any language can crash due to a single character syntax error.

Even in static languages, if the syntax error is in something that will be reflected/eval'ed, etc (which in many languages includes regexes -usually not validated at compile time-).
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