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The complicated futility of WordPress

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Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#131

Post by SquareWheel »

pupppet wrote: post #85

I’ve easily built hundreds of WP sites and Gutenberg makes me sad. Anyone raving about the block editor has clearly never used one of WP’s paid page builder plugins like Beaver Builder and Elementor, they’re in a whole different league. You of course can continue using these plugins, but the absolute chasm in quality separating these plugins and Gutenberg highlights Automattic doesn’t have the technical or design kno…

I've used most of them: FusionBuilder, WPBakery/Visual Composer, Elementor. I honestly despise these page editors. They are so incredibly slow, and the markup they produce is indecipherable.

I've been pretty happy with Gutenberg. It has some pain points - notably around block recovery - but it produces sane HTML, its CSS payload is minimal, and there's no frontend JS at all (at least in the default blocks).

You don't get the millions of features of those other editors, but it's those same features that make them slow and cumbersome. I think Gutenberg strikes a good balance. It's the first page editor I don't hate.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#132

Post by johnchristopher »

> The thought of client side marketing interns ‘play(ing) around with site-wide designs’ should make the blood of any professional run cold. Sites that have been painstakingly, designed and built, reviewed and refined to the last detail every step of the way with stakeholders on the client side, optimising UX, legibility, performance and upholding the client’s brand can now be squelched in an instant by someone 3 months into their job who prefers yellow.

That's why you set the intern's role to editor.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#133

Post by johnchristopher »

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…

How does ClassicPress prevent the intern from painting the site yellow ? /s

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#134

Post by dgb23 »

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.

If you’re a dev or have access to devs then the ecosystem is exactly what you’re trying to avoid with few exceptions. You simply don’t gain anything over a solid web framework with decent CRUD editing on top, except familiarity.

It’s a malleable tool, but at some relatively early point you’re fighting against it more than you benefit from it over something like GP suggests. Just slows you down and erodes confidence.

WP is best if you have no or limited dev resources.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#135

Post by shortformblog »

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.

I run Craft CMS for Tedium (https://tedium.co). I could push it further but one way I use it is by creating a custom view that “spits” out a completed email template with all of my desired layout considerations and quirks already considered. I could push it further and run the newsletter through Craft itself, though I’ve chosen to pay someone to manage the sending of the email.

(And while not particularly “Crafty,” I use a paid plugin, Doxter, to manage my CMS code in Markdown, with the use of shortcodes.)

The performance issues mentioned by others are realistic, but if you put it behind CloudFlare, they’re totally reasonable. While Ghost is a much more popular use case for newsletter publishers like myself, I prefer the customization capabilities of Craft to forge a CMS experience I’m comfortable with.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#136

Post by mdrzn »

adflux wrote: post #127
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.

Most hosting platforms offer to install Wordpress via 1-click. Once installed, it's really easy to use and edit even for a novice. Otherwise, downloading Wordpress.org and uploading the files via FTP is really easy. The most technical can edit via CLI if needed, but it's not mandatory to know how to use a shell.

What about Netlify? I've seen and heard about generating static websites, but honestly I have no idea where to start, what technologies are needed, how easy or how hard it is to explain the customer how to edit their own websites once ready..

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#137

Post by chris_wot »

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…

What is a headless CMS?

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#138

Post by detaro »

chris_wot wrote: post #137
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…

What is a headless CMS?

A CMS without the consumer-facing frontend. (i.e. just storage and backend editing UI, with APIs exposed you can hook a custom frontend to)

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#139

Post by gnz11 »

dgb23 wrote: post #117
taubek wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love WordPress. It is kind of a universal tool: you can make simple web sites, you can use it to build complex systems. It is always better if you have developers that know what they are doing. WP development is not installing dozens od plugins to achieve some effect on your web. I guess that WP wants to become "one to rule them all". This means that they strive for even bigger adoption rate among users. FSE is the…

The issue is that if you’re developing like this on WP you don’t gain much from it except the ability to use a select few plugins and an admin UI. At this point why not use a solid PHP framework like Laravel?

> The issue is that if you’re developing like this on WP you don’t gain much from it except the ability to use a select few plugins and an admin UI. At this point why not use a solid PHP framework like Laravel?

Agreed, if you have a dedicated engineering team, but most non-tech companies that need basic websites don't...so in that context, Wordpress's admin UI is a big gain. It's familiar to users and provides media management functionality out of the box. The vast majority of CMSs have terrible/non-intuitive admin UIs and limited functionality. Leaving aside Gutenberg and the rest of the garbage pile that is Wordpress, the admin is the primary selling point of Wordpress IMO.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#140

Post by chris_wot »

MattieTK wrote: post #90

I used to work for a major multinational media company. A few years ago the CTO at that media company looked to slash costs. They have a bunch of newspapers all over the world, and they had just acquired an Indian software development agency with experience in WordPress. You can see where this is going. Soon, a programme to launch WordPress globally to every publisher as their CMS. But of course you would be allowed…

In Australia, Nine’s publishing arm uses Wordpress in the backend. It works great! Curious how the changes will affect them.
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