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.
I think it's probably too late to save wordpress. Squarespace and such are just better products for the average company. It would require a fundamental redesign of wordpress to solve its issues and at that point it just becomes a clone of the existing products.
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?
You can. Squarespace / wix / etc have filled this role.
Prismic's "slices" might be what you're looking for if you want out-of-the-box functionality and hosting. If you're wanting a bit more flexibility from a code-perspective (and you don't mind TypeScript), I've found Payload CMS to be a great option to build out a page builder as you've described using their "blocks".
Looks like Prismic and Payload CMS aren't open source? https://github.com/payloadcms/payload/blob/master/license.md - "Payload is free to download and install—and free to use for Personal Purposes. We are passionate about Payload, and we hope that you will enjoy it, too. A valid license is required to utilize Payload as detailed below" https://prismic.io/faq/product - "Proprietary, not open source"
Ah, you are correct. I missed that aspect of your question.
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?
It's funny you invoke PowerPoint - MS FrontPage was exactly this tool and it worked reasonably well, as did iWeb. Publishing WYSIWYG websites from the desktop was given up in the 00s, and now we have Squarespace and Facebook Pages.
It's really quite a shame we don't have current equivalents of FrontPage and VisualBasic. Sure, the code they generated wasn't clean at all, but those tools allowed average users to create some fairly sophisticated sites and tools. I remember a friend in college just randomly asked me to look over the site she had made for the nonprofit she volunteered at. She had never expressed even the slightest interest in programming, and frankly was your average windows user in 2007; really only familiar with office. Sure, the actual Html was atrocious, and changing anything directly in the code was nigh-impossible, but the site itself actually looked pretty good. I really only needed to help with getting it setup on hosting, since it was mostly a static site the FrontPage output was completely fine. This nonprofit didn't have the money to hire me, since that type of webdev was fairly lucrative, but since it only took a few hours of my time I just comped the work. I don't know of a modern equivalent aside from something like squarespace, which has a monthly fee that small orgs might find prohibitive.
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).
It's fair to the extent that you're required to rely on 3rd-party products to get something done. If WordPress-the-Technology uses WordPress-the-Ecosystem as a main selling point, then its their choice to bundle their reputations together.
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.
Do they even offer VPS storage in units smaller than a GB these days? No one cares about a 20MB binary.
Yes, Strapi ( https://strapi.io/ ) though I'm not sure about previews. https://www.sanity.io/studio is open source, but some parts of the CMS aren't I don't think. Possibly there could be an adapter to use Sanity Studio w/ Strapi?
Looks like Strapi has paid only features. Are these significant to most sites? https://strapi.io/pricing-self-hosted "Free...Up to 3 default roles" https://strapi.io/blog/introducing-strapi-enterprise-edition... Sanity.io doesn't seem to be fully open source: https://github.com/sanity-io/sanity/issues/978 "You can only run the Studio connected to the Sanity hosted backend. There is no option for connecting the Studio…
StrapiCMS is MIT licensed and any role limit could easily be mitigated.
Looks like Strapi has paid only features. Are these significant to most sites? https://strapi.io/pricing-self-hosted "Free...Up to 3 default roles" https://strapi.io/blog/introducing-strapi-enterprise-edition... Sanity.io doesn't seem to be fully open source: https://github.com/sanity-io/sanity/issues/978 "You can only run the Studio connected to the Sanity hosted backend. There is no option for connecting the Studio…
StrapiCMS is MIT licensed and any role limit could easily be mitigated.
https://github.com/strapi/strapi/blob/master/LICENSE "* All software that resides under an "ee/" directory (the “EE Software”), if that directory exists, is licensed under the license defined in "ee/LICENSE"."
StrapiCMS is MIT licensed and any role limit could easily be mitigated.
https://github.com/strapi/strapi/blob/master/LICENSE "* All software that resides under an "ee/" directory (the “EE Software”), if that directory exists, is licensed under the license defined in "ee/LICENSE"." What features does that impact?
I don't know? If some functionality is desired, alternative backends could be developed.
If the only limitation is 3 roles apparently, then admin, manager, and writer could be acceptable for most companies.
Are there any good options for an open source headless CMS that works with a static site generator that has a page builder that has quick and accurate live previews before you deploy? E.g. so you can build new landing pages from header, testimonial and contact form blocks. There's lots of options if you just want Markdown but this isn't enough for heavily branded business websites where you need to check how complex…
Directus is an amazing open source tool that you can self host as easy as deploying a Node app. You can setup content types with a nice UI, very configurable roles so a client can't break the site, a media library that can hook into S3/DO Spaces, a REST or Graphql API built in, webhooks, revisions, works with many different DBs, and a bit more I'm not thinking of.
I'm not affiliated with them at all. Was just very pleased to find how polished it is for a self hosted, free product compared to the other $499/mth proprietary options in the space.