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The complicated futility of WordPress

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Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#11

Post by theteapot »

amiircoal wrote: post #4

I’ve been a WordPress dev since 3.0. It is a tool. And a very good one. Its market share dominance it not because it is proprietary (it is not) or because of vendor lock in (there is none). It is because it works very well, it is lightweight, it runs pretty much on any host, and is friendly to devs and end users. Part of being a good dev is knowing which tool to use (and when to not use a tool) and how to get the mos…

Wordpress is lightweight? 5.9 download is +19.7M zipped and that's without any plugins. The lock in to the Wordpress framework. Not sure whether that qualifies as "vendor" lock in but it's pretty big dep that's impossible to break out of if you go beyond simple blog.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#12

Post by chiefalchemist »

cmsguy2000 wrote: post #2

The blog author complains about the loss of control over the editing experience with the recent changes to WordPress. Personally I found Drupal to be a much better system for their use case, to provide client 'content editing' that does not disrupt the front end design (allowing user to edit content but limit novice users changing styles or branding). Drupal has got quite a lot better over the past few years but gets…

But funny enough, Drupal has also adopted Gutenberg.

https://www.drupal.org/project/gutenberg

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#13

Post by jshwlkr »

amanzi wrote: post #9

I've been working with WordPress for a long time and have run a blogging network built on Wordpress since 2005-ish. Over the last few years, it's felt like I've been swimming upstream fighting against WordPress as they have tried to morph into a general website publishing tool (in order to compete with Wix, SquareSpace, etc) rather than their initial blogging roots. Security has never been a WordPress strong point an…

I'm not entirely sure it's fair to blame WordPress directly for the quality of 3rd-party products (and their security).

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#14

Post by smitty1e »

> No doubt we could work up a system to prevent this, we can restrict access and force use of the classic editor etc, but that’s where the ‘complicated futility’ comes in. It’s one thing to find a way to cherry pick aspects of the software to serve your purpose, it’s another thing entirely to try to build in complete opposition to it.

Please do not invoke the Amazon Godz, who will take this open source stack, spread it across a score of services, shoot it full of IAM, and give us AWS ProwDress.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#15

Post by chiefalchemist »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #8

I hope more people stop building bespoke websites and start building tools for regular people to just make things. It's 2021. It should not be this hard for a regular person to update a website. If you can make a powerpoint presentation with MS PowerPoint, why can't you make a website that way?

Well, that was the original WP. Lean, and the theme handled the presentation. But as the article points out, that's fading away.

Sure page builders reduce the need for a FE dev, but then the user needs to understand CSS. Is that a win? Pay someone else $100? Or spend half a day trying to figure out CSS? I see basic questions in (FB) WP groups all the time.

And what about UX basics?

All that said, and to your point, from a web vistor pov, most sites are too bloated, too complex, etc. And all that visual shite on your small screen? Who wants that??

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#16

Post by justinator »

jshwlkr wrote: post #13
amanzi wrote: post #9

I've been working with WordPress for a long time and have run a blogging network built on Wordpress since 2005-ish. Over the last few years, it's felt like I've been swimming upstream fighting against WordPress as they have tried to morph into a general website publishing tool (in order to compete with Wix, SquareSpace, etc) rather than their initial blogging roots. Security has never been a WordPress strong point an…

I'm not entirely sure it's fair to blame WordPress directly for the quality of 3rd-party products (and their security).

All these 3rd party products still have to use the WordPress Way (tm) hooks into the app.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#17

Post by calibas »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #12
cmsguy2000 wrote: post #2

The blog author complains about the loss of control over the editing experience with the recent changes to WordPress. Personally I found Drupal to be a much better system for their use case, to provide client 'content editing' that does not disrupt the front end design (allowing user to edit content but limit novice users changing styles or branding). Drupal has got quite a lot better over the past few years but gets…

But funny enough, Drupal has also adopted Gutenberg. https://www.drupal.org/project/gutenberg

That's kind of misleading, it's like saying Drupal has adopted NFTs because someone created this module: https://www.drupal.org/project/nft

Anybody can create any kind of module for Drupal, but in the case of the Gutenberg and NFT modules, only a small minority of sites are actually using them.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#18

Post by 1over137 »

theteapot wrote: post #11
amiircoal wrote: post #4

I’ve been a WordPress dev since 3.0. It is a tool. And a very good one. Its market share dominance it not because it is proprietary (it is not) or because of vendor lock in (there is none). It is because it works very well, it is lightweight, it runs pretty much on any host, and is friendly to devs and end users. Part of being a good dev is knowing which tool to use (and when to not use a tool) and how to get the mos…

Wordpress is lightweight? 5.9 download is +19.7M zipped and that's without any plugins. The lock in to the Wordpress framework. Not sure whether that qualifies as "vendor" lock in but it's pretty big dep that's impossible to break out of if you go beyond simple blog.

Everything is relative. I just downloaded a Xerox firmware update that was almost 500 MB.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#19

Post by Groxx »

jshwlkr wrote: post #13
amanzi wrote: post #9

I've been working with WordPress for a long time and have run a blogging network built on Wordpress since 2005-ish. Over the last few years, it's felt like I've been swimming upstream fighting against WordPress as they have tried to morph into a general website publishing tool (in order to compete with Wix, SquareSpace, etc) rather than their initial blogging roots. Security has never been a WordPress strong point an…

I'm not entirely sure it's fair to blame WordPress directly for the quality of 3rd-party products (and their security).

Not directly, but their API and security design absolutely does influence how normal plugins behave (i.e. common bugs), and how well they can limit the damage of abnormal ones.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#20

Post by TimTheTinker »

jshwlkr wrote: post #13
amanzi wrote: post #9

I've been working with WordPress for a long time and have run a blogging network built on Wordpress since 2005-ish. Over the last few years, it's felt like I've been swimming upstream fighting against WordPress as they have tried to morph into a general website publishing tool (in order to compete with Wix, SquareSpace, etc) rather than their initial blogging roots. Security has never been a WordPress strong point an…

I'm not entirely sure it's fair to blame WordPress directly for the quality of 3rd-party products (and their security).

Third-party plugins are subject to WordPress's security model and implementation.

Automattic could create a PluginV2 system with tightened security and new requirements for plugin developers, then put a plan in place to deprecate and remove support for v1.

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