The complicated futility of WordPress • Hacker News Board

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#91

Post by easrng » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 7:40 AM UTC

sdze wrote: post #81

JimDabell wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-craft…

Why would I choose these niche alternatives, when I have an huge wordpress developer ecosystem at my fingertips? At least here in Europe Webflow is virtually unknown.

Carrd is all over Twitter, people use it as a personal bio/links page or for sharing resources, but I haven't seen it used for anything else.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#92

Post by skilled » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 7:42 AM UTC

My only wish is that someone with deep technical prowess could explain to me why the Gutenberg back-end Editor is so slow. And, enlighten me as to why the core WordPress team aren’t doing much about it.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#93

Post by porker » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 7:42 AM UTC

zrobotics wrote: post #44

thombles wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 progra…

Dreamweaver still exists and does a good job. It requires you to have the expensive Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, but it's still cheaper for organisations who have someone to do the site to go that route than set up and maintain WordPress.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#94

Post by lmm » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 7:44 AM UTC

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.

Firefox has had the converse problem of constantly breaking all their plugins by changing their APIs etc..

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#95

Post by cblconfederate » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 7:45 AM UTC

It's just great to see work on self-hosted cms, and PHP nevertheless, the easiest one to host. Open source has forgotten the art of making the web open to everyone, not just to BigTech employees.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#96

Post by cblconfederate » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 7:48 AM UTC

TimTheTinker wrote: post #20

jshwlkr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They should never do that. People who want walled gardens should go with a rented solution from one of those website builder companies

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#97

Post by lmm » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 7:51 AM UTC

zrobotics wrote: post #39

anon23anon wrote: post #3

I was recently doing some electrical work on my house. The past owner had really jacked things up. I couldn't figure out and had to call an electrician. I'd imagine the majority of their work is DIY'ers who've f'ed up and had to call a pro. To me that's what going to happen here - marketing will continually screw and tinker w/ shit till it's broke and then they'll call you to fix it. I also want to add this is a good…

Question-if marketing is solely restricted to social media, then what is the point of having a website at all? In the original article the author indicated they develop sites for medium-large industrial corps; and that most of these sites are brochure sites. So if the marketing team at acme co want to sell customers on their new line of coyote-seeking anvils, what is the point of having a website if they can't update…

I think it comes down to the basics of running a business: focus on your core competencies and USPs, outsource the rest. Vertically integrating something like your marketing website makes sense if it's part of your value proposition (e.g. if you want to show off your product in a way that you can only do by having development and marketing work closely together). But if you just need some commodity, off-the-shelf marketing, buy it from a specialist.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#98

Post by cblconfederate » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 7:55 AM UTC

muglug wrote: post #62

For at least the last 10 years WordPress has been an OSS tool whose serverside internals make hardened software engineers recoil in horror, but which nevertheless continues to deliver incredible value for the majority of its customer base. It's a reminder that if you build something that people really want, how you build it doesn't matter, as long as you have plenty of duck tape at the ready.

When you build something a lot of people use, it will require a lot of ducttape. Software represents the diversity of its users.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#99

Post by cblconfederate » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 8:06 AM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #42

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?

You can. Squarespace / wix / etc have filled this role.

They don't. not only are the users not having ownership of their content and distribution, there is also censorship

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#100

Post by cblconfederate » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 8:08 AM UTC

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.

that s the size of the smallest mobile app