The complicated futility of WordPress • Hacker News Board

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#181

Post by KronisLV » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:01 PM UTC

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…

If you'd like to share some of your wisdom as someone who has worked with it for such a long time, i posted another question here in regards to actually utilizing WordPress for CRUD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30179205

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#182

Post by KronisLV » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:03 PM UTC

AussieWog93 wrote: post #104

ghostly_s wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they even offer VPS storage in units smaller than a GB these days? No one cares about a 20MB binary.

For what it's worth, I'm running the absolute cheapest DigitalOcean droplet money can buy ($5/mo) and that comes with 25GB of NVME storage as standard.

The smallest VPSes that i've found are the Scaleway Stardust instances, which have 10 GB of storage: https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/

I don't think that it's very economical to provide smaller instances than that for most cloud hosts out there.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#183

Post by Hoefner » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:05 PM UTC

benfrain wrote: post #175

My blog has been on Wordpress since about 2007. It works, and I appreciate that it’s free but I’ve always hated working with it. If someone made a node based equivalent (so I can at least use a modern templating language) that supported comments I would be all over it. The commenting system is the only real reason I stay. There’s nothing else I can find that doesn’t necessitate stitching multiple services together ju…

Try https://ghost.org/ (https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost)

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#184

Post by noahtallen » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:07 PM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #41

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.

I think it's probably too late to save wordpress. Squarespace and such are just better products for the average company. It would require a fundamental redesign of wordpress to solve its issues and at that point it just becomes a clone of the existing products.

You might be surprised to learn that:

> WordPress is used by 65.3% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 43.3% of all websites. [1]

And these numbers have been growing for years. In other words, WordPress is and will be widely used for a long time. So I’m not sure WordPress really needs saving. :p The number of OSS contributors has also been growing. So the project itself hasn’t been stagnating either.

Disclaimer: I’ve been a WordPress contributor and work for Automattic.

1: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#185

Post by 0xbadcafebee » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:13 PM UTC

senko wrote: post #163

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.

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.

Do you ever dive into a PowerPoint file by hand?

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#186

Post by mgas » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

> Drupal was, and still is, a clunking monster, unfriendly to developers and editors alike

I feel like this is an unnecessary and inflammatory swipe, typical of coder-bro culture. Both Drupal and Wordpress are open source tools that have survived for years, are built on tested and long-lasting languages, and serve the people who both build and use them.

Everyone is always crying about how nothing ever stays the same, and and the same time, how the-next-new-thing-ism is ruining the web. And then there is this comment thread with every other response trying to push some ostensibly better and easier thing that stands no chance of surviving more than a couple of years, because CMSs need communities to keep them alive.

I am a proud member of the Drupal community. I struggle with it sometimes, but it is still amazing at how much you can accomplish with core and contrib modules. And don't forget, some organizations need a giant, clunky CMS. We're not all building websites for cutting edge, VC-backed, brochure-based unicorns. My clients need a framework that has legs to stand on for the next decade to come.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#187

Post by dabernathy89 » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:29 PM UTC

> You would use ACF, especially its flexible content fields, to allow you to add repeatable and repositionable content in specific areas of your website.

> 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.

Completely agree. Back when I was building w/ WordPress, ACF was the best choice for building layouts because you could provide only as much flexibility as you wanted the client to have. You could give them lots of power to easily update their content but constrain their ability to ruin the design. I gave a short talk at a WordCamp about this exact benefit of ACF over page builders (at the time).

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#188

Post by acomjean » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:30 PM UTC

KronisLV wrote: post #178

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…

> 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. Here's a question: suppose that you want to use WordPress as a starting point for a CRUD app with some basic permission controls, the ability to dynamically add content and maybe even write your own search logic which respects those permiss…

I don't think you'd want to build a crud application in wordpress. Wordpress probably won't help you there much. You could probably turn it into a "plugin" but even then you'd be writing a lot of your own code.

We're working on switching to wordpress for the volunteer organization I work at. Right now all the "information/kinda static" content is on wordpress with pages and posts. Its a win, anyone with permission can edit. Our custom application isn't there and has its own separate database and code. We're thinking of moving the whole thing into a sort of plugin, but we're very symphony based.. Which we like

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#189

Post by samtho » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:30 PM UTC

donohoe wrote: post #179

I've too have been working with WordPress a long time. I built Quartz (qz.com) and The New Yorker (newyokrer.com) and other sites on WP. However so much of what this author says resonates more than I care to admit. I have a good relationship with WP but I worry about the future.

I’m actually surprised that there is not a popular news-oriented CMS (that I’m aware of). WP has survived so long despite the abysmal architecture and myriad of security issues because it’s just so damn flexible. It really has somehow both transcended blogging while being so stuck in it. I suppose it’s ubiquity, especially during the earlier days of corporate internet, allowed all walks of life to start a website with it. They made it super easy to find, install, buy, or build bespoke themes and plugins, which undoubtedly contributed to its widespread adoption.

I remember doing a lot of work with customizations integrating WP and phpBB specifically, which ended up earning me an unreasonable amount money for a 16 year old. I have a certain fondness of WP but it’s heyday has long past coinciding with the abandonment of the independent internet. I greatly worry about its future mainly because it’s demise would represent the end of an era.

Perhaps the backlash to centralized social media will provide an avenue for a platform like WP to see a resurgence, but Automattic would really need to make a conscious effort to pivot with the changing times if they want to ride that wave. It won’t be the Wordpress as we’ve known it but (hopefully) the ethos remains. I wish them all the luck.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#190

Post by yurishimo » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:35 PM UTC

deltarholamda wrote: post #177

dgb23 wrote: post #117

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?

I can answer this: because people do not want to pay for a developer, they want to pay for a designer. (It is exceedingly rare to find both in a single person.) The designer can, within the structure and strictures of Wordpress, build a site with all the whizzy things the client wants, and they can charge $X for it. A developer can do all of that as well, but they will probably need a designer as well (see above pare…

I was with you until the end there. Tools for performance monitoring exist. Query Monitor is a great starting place for a free plugin. Lighthouse will tell you if you have a million blocking requests. New Relic is offered by any web host worth a damn and WP plays very nicely with it.