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The complicated futility of WordPress

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Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#51

Post by dinkleberg »

Just today I was looking for a quick way to build a marketing site for my startup that would allow my not super technical co-founder to do the majority of the building. It has been a while since I had used WordPress regularly so maybe there are new sources out there, but I defaulted to checking out ThemeForest to find a decent theme to start with.

I consider myself fairly decent at design (though I'm far from an expert), and I was amazed to see how at odds virtually every theme on there was with what I consider good design, particular from the UX perspective.

Most of them are so bloated they take forever to load and they have an absurd amount of animations.

I've just given up on the idea of taking the easy route here, I can't in good conscience have the first look that people have of my business be a bloated, over-animated mess. Gonna have to build it from scratch.

If anyone has found themselves in a similar situation I'd love to hear what you did.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#52

Post by eric4smith »

I absolutely hate Wordpress, but I completely understand why it's popular.

The reason why it's bigger than other publishing tools, is because there's almost nothing out there that has the deep network of plugins that can do almost anything.

Sure, the backend of spaghetti PHP, HTML, MySql and endless backdoors and security issues are a nightmare, but there are really not that many alternatives to what Wordpress can do.

And that's why Automattic is doing such a good business by basically hosting Wordpress and cleaning up and whitelisting more and more plugins. It makes perfect sense.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#53

Post by askbill »

seanwilson wrote: post #21

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…

We use WordPress with the Gutenberg editor and Gatsby Cloud. It’s been very nice to work with and the Gatsby Cloud team seems to pay a lot of attention to the editorial and deploy experience. We’re happy and this is how we’re building things today.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#54

Post by ivanmontillam »

eric4smith wrote: post #52

I absolutely hate Wordpress, but I completely understand why it's popular. The reason why it's bigger than other publishing tools, is because there's almost nothing out there that has the deep network of plugins that can do almost anything. Sure, the backend of spaghetti PHP, HTML, MySql and endless backdoors and security issues are a nightmare, but there are really not that many alternatives to what Wordpress can do…

My business partner and I hit a wall when we tried to automate WordPress.

We tried to implement a plugin where Events in WordPress would be triggered, evaluate Conditions and then execute Actions (Send email, Trigger Webhook at Zapier, Update fields over the triggered record, etc.)

Turns out, WordPress is not architecturally ready for this much evolution. And that's when we got disenchanted from WordPress and went to hunt on anything else.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#55

Post by ivanmontillam »

seanwilson wrote: post #38
andrei_says_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CraftCMS is great and free for single admin. Can’t recommend it enough. If combining with a static site generator you can find craftcms hosting for $5/month.

Doesn't seem to be open source: https://github.com/craftcms/cms/blob/develop/LICENSE.md

It doesn't have to be open source to be successful.

I understand that open source things can increase reach of the product, but that's at the expense of proper software support.

Let's accept some proprietary software in our lives. Sometimes these have demostrated technical superiority.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#56

Post by prog5 »

imilk wrote: post #50
seanwilson wrote: post #21

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 pl…

This looks amazing thank you. I'm curious about the REST API part. Have you used that before? How configureable is it? It sounds like a scaffold of some sort... but, what if I needed to do some custom data processing on the data before returning it in the API, are there hooks for that?

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#57

Post by JimDabell »

gwern wrote: post #36
TimTheTinker wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, after 18 years of WordPress development, the architects' excuse of blaming bad actors in plugin ecosystem has begun to wear thin, especially when contemporaries or predecessors like Firefox or Debian never had remotely the same level of problems with their users being hacked constantly by plugins/packages.

“No Way To Prevent This,” Says Only CMS Where This Regularly Happens

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#58

Post by sircastor »

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 know there’s lots of noise about Gutenberg, but I love the block editor. It’s one of the reasons I stick with Wordpress rather than moving to a SSG.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#59

Post by JimDabell »

dinkleberg wrote: post #51

Just today I was looking for a quick way to build a marketing site for my startup that would allow my not super technical co-founder to do the majority of the building. It has been a while since I had used WordPress regularly so maybe there are new sources out there, but I defaulted to checking out ThemeForest to find a decent theme to start with. I consider myself fairly decent at design (though I'm far from an expe…

Carrd and Webflow are popular for non-technical founders who want a basic marketing site these days. WordPress or DIY are not even close to your only choices, there are a huge amount of platforms out there for this.

Developing a marketing site by hand is almost never the right choice for an early-stage startup. Pretty much everything else on your to-do list is a more useful thing to spend your time on than hand-crafting a marketing site.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#60

Post by acomjean »

sircastor wrote: post #58
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 know there’s lots of noise about Gutenberg, but I love the block editor. It’s one of the reasons I stick with Wordpress rather than moving to a SSG.

Gutenberg is a bit of a pain to get started with, but it truly is kinda amazing page layout tool.

I think Wordpress needs something like better defaults. You are so dependent on picking a good theme and it seems really hard to tell what’s going on in the theme world.

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