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The complicated futility of WordPress

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Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#161

Post by gnz11 »

ivanmontillam wrote: post #55
seanwilson wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Lots of open source projects offer premium support.

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

Sure, but let's not pretend proprietary vendors know more than open-source projects and contributors. Also, if your product is ultimately the content itself, it's an enormous risk to hand that over to third parties that want to take control of it. You are explicitly coupling yourself to the success of the proprietary software vendor.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#162

Post by corobo »

taubek wrote: post #151
gnz11 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I can tell you that new users like Gutenberg. It is us, the old shortcode style users, that have/had a problem with it. It took me some time to switch to it but I must say that I like it now. Things like copy/paste from Google docs with keeping all of relevant the styles and links works. And I guess that a bunch of users is doing that - using WP as a platform for distribution of content.

Seconding this, end users do seem to like how much they can do themselves with it

Especially when you add custom blocks specific to their site needs

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#163

Post by senko »

thombles wrote: post #22
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?

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.

I was there. It was horrible. FrontPage output was an unholy mess and god help you if you ever needed to dive in that codebase by hand.

Current solutions are far from perfect but I never want to go back to that.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#164

Post by pantulis »

"The thought of client side marketing interns ‘play(ing) around with site-wide designs’ should make the blood of any professional run cold."

I cannot even begin to fathom the level of cringeness from this assertion. If you think like this you should not be doing client work.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#165

Post by tyingq »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #149

I'm not a serious WordPress user, so this comes from a perspective of not quite understanding what OP is describing. But. "From the beginning [using wordpress for complicated non-blog sites] has felt like a hack – WordPress is, and always has been a blogging platform at heart," but once WordPress decides to "pull away from this use case completely" [wait, what use case?] to "move the platform to a fully fledged site…

It sounds like he's worried his customers will decide he's not needed anymore. Like, if their perception is that they only call him when layout and style changes are needed, and they can now (somewhat) do that themselves.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#166

Post by josefresco »

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,…

> It's just frustrating when the user wipes an entire section, because they decided that "oh, I can change that font here".

My clients fuck up their WordPress websites all the time. Revisions and incremental backups solve that issue. Nothing we can do to stop an adventurous website owner on a Friday night after 2 glasses of wine.

Thankfully most of my clients stick to what they do best: run their business and leave the website editing (not content creation) to us.

WP is trying to head off Wix and other "full site editors". I don't blame them but I won't use the new tools as I've already implemented my own solutions.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#167

Post by josefresco »

wila wrote: post #130
camillomiller wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Revisions and backups. Don't waste time trying to CSI what the website owner did accidentally or foolishly.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#168

Post by Brendinooo »

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.

Having developed with both of these options, Wagtail gives the developer complete control over what models and plugins go into the system and when upgrades happen. For some situations this is a good thing, for others it is not.

> the ecosystem of WP seems to be a magnitude greater

Define "greater", right? WP has more plugins, but many of them don't work, or are vulnerable, or throw in a bunch of random messaging and nagware, or slow down the site. In one sense, the Wagtail ecosystem is a lot smaller but what's there is of a higher quality. It's the old "Macs don't get viruses because they don't have the market share to warrant the attention" phenomenon.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#169

Post by raylus »

reilly3000 wrote: post #143
raylus wrote: post #72

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

Thanks for sharing, this is all of the things I have been hoping an OSS CMS would be.

No problem, the Wagtail community on Slack [https://wagtailcms.slack.com] along with the docs [https://docs.wagtail.org/] are great resources.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#170

Post by devmor »

I always liked WordPress for what it is, but eventually I stopped recommending it to my clients because it made them dangerous.

I had to severely lock down most of the functionality to keep them from shooting themselves in the foot and it reflecting bad on me.

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