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The complicated futility of WordPress

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Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#121

Post by pbowyer »

modernerd wrote: post #106
skilled wrote: post #92

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.

Riad's writeup here may be interesting to you on the “why it's slow” part: https://riad.blog/2020/02/14/a-journey-towards-a-performant-... I don't think it's fair to say the core team isn't doing much to improve or prevent degrading performance — they performance-test every PR: https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/contributors/co... There's also a performance team (for general WP performance, but also coverin…

> There's also a performance team (for general WP performance, but also covering the editor/JS) that meets regularly and posts minutes.

Rant incoming...

I would love to be involved with the performance team (it's what i've done for 15 years), but the problem of funding open source comes up. Key members of the team are Google employees and therefore paid to work on it. I by contrast am a solo developer with responsibilities, and every hour I would spend on the performance team is one that I can't spend on earning money or with my loved ones.

And in the end who benefits from the performance team? Every business who needs better performance. Automattic for not having to fund the work. The incentives don't align.

I say this having written a plugin that speeds up WordPress AJAX requests by 30-95% (dependent on the request). I'd love to open source it and it'd be an ideal contribution to WP... but it's taken a year to get this far and there's more to come

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#122

Post by danjac »

bsder wrote: post #10

> Sites that have been painstakingly, designed and built, reviewed and refined to the last detail And this misses the point . Many/most businesses gain zero business value from a website. Most businesses don't need a bespoke website. They need a website that looks like every other business website, allows marketing to throw a new whitepaper up every couple of months, and maybe allows people to send marketing/sales an…

I suspect Wordpress developers make bank from the Everest-sized amount of bikeshedding from non-developers that goes the average bog-standard corporate website.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#123

Post by nyanpasu64 »

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 as a document content editor, is a good concept with truly awful execution (endless bugs).

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#124

Post by amiga-workbench »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #32
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…

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.

We're currently having painful performance issues with Craft at work. It takes 300ms+ just for an empty craft installation to return an empty page. Saving entries to the database programatically is slow too, one of our sites has a nightly sync process, only needs to touch a few thousand entities, with a normal database schema that workload is doable in seconds, with Craft it takes hours.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#126

Post by modo_mario »

sdze wrote: post #83
raylus wrote: post #72

Django [ https://www.djangoproject.com/ ] + Wagtail CMS [ https://wagtail.org/ ] have been great alternatives for our team.

Why did you choose this over WP? Or was WP not even considered as a candidate? I mean the ecosystem of WP seems to be a magnitude greater.

Not OP but what equivalent ecosystem do you expect from something like django that you can compare to wordpress?

If someone at work told me "yeah you could write an ERP in C# ...but excels ecosystem is just so much greater" then I'd be a bit confused.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#127

Post by adflux »

mdrzn wrote: post #125

What's the quickest-to-learn alternative to Wordpress? Possibly with a CLI version so I could edit it via bash commands. Wordpress atm is the quickest way to whip up a website for any objective needed.

>Wordpress atm is the quickest way to whip up a website for any objective needed.

Bullshit.

Static HTML template + Azure Static Web App/Netlify/... is definitively faster and cheaper to setup.

I am a developer who runs multiple wordpress sites for small businesses.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#128

Post by danuker »

bdlowery wrote: post #107
ironmagma wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only for interesting definitions of "doesn't matter." The number of security exploits for WordPress websites seems to differ. https://www.cvedetails.com/product/4096/Wordpress-Wordpress....

That’s awesome, now can you find one that points to all the plugins that cause these security exploits? Because none of those are from the default WordPress install with the Standard plugins (ACF Pro, CPT UI, etc).

Here's one from this year: https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2022-21664/

"SQL injection due to improper sanitization in WP_Meta_Query", fixed in WordPress itself:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2039317

https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/commit/c09ccf...

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#129

Post by danuker »

ironmagma wrote: post #78
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.

Only for interesting definitions of "doesn't matter." The number of security exploits for WordPress websites seems to differ. https://www.cvedetails.com/product/4096/Wordpress-Wordpress....

I suspect the "doesn't matter" is the limited value lost compared to the value gained. There might not be enough black-hat hackers executing on those exploits :)

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#130

Post by wila »

camillomiller wrote: post #114
indymike wrote: post #7

It looks like the chief complaint is that full site editing will make it so you don't have to call in a developer - or a WordPress power user to change something in the footer. This has really been needed for a long time. At the same time, it's kind of amazing that WordPress is the best we can do for making publishing to the web easy for everyone. It's really good, but is sure seems like something better should be po…

I don't agree. I'm exactly in the position of the author with my clients. The real problem is with the Wordpress makes your client think it can outsmart you. I don't care about billing random hours to fix a footer. If anything, I program all my sites so that global options like these are ALWAYS easily editable by the customer. That's not my business model. It's just frustrating when the user wipes an entire section,…

Exactly this.

With a user that has more power than what they understand, they will break the layout and blame the developer. You then have to go look at what they did.. and as it is in a GUI and not in code, it will be much harder to troubleshoot and thus fix for a reasonable price.

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