Live data from Hacker News

The complicated futility of WordPress

coderjerk.com

191–200 of 241 posts

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#191
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 don't really care about the markup output like other folks - but I do care about fragmentation. The worst period in WordPress was pre-Gutenberg when all these different page builders were competing for WordPress market share. Offering a consistent user experience is crucial for the long-term health of WordPress and that's the best thing that Gutenberg has brought to it.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#192
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on the other side of the table, I was working for a company that was developing WP plugins bunt I'm not a developer. During my years there I've meet a lot of developers. I've seen different approaches. The most surprising thing to me was headless WP. I didn't get why do they even want WP. Take a look at WooCommerce. I guess that it is much easier to do some of the custom code than to reinvent a wheel. Not to me…

Headless WooCommerce is actually pretty cool - you get free admin UI for managing the shop, and can build whatever frontend you like without the constraints of WordPress. Seems like a no-brainer for anyone who can do a bit of frontend development.

Only if you don't want/need to tap in to any plugin ecosystem. WooCommerce is the worst in this regard as basically everything is bolted on using actions/filters which only work in the traditional theme route.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#193

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…

> wait, what use case?

Blogging

> toward the OP's use case

No, they have moved toward general purpose site building, not focused on _blogging_

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#194
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…

https://developer.wordpress.org/ has everything you're looking for. Is it as organized as Laravel's docs? No. Not even close. But most of the information is there.

The PHP side of WordPress has been very stable for over 5 years at this point. All the new stuff is happening in JS unfortunately...

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#195
post #186

> 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,…

Totally agree. I don’t understand why the author couldn’t just say that Drupal is for a different use case. Rather than label a whole framework, the people who build it, work with it, and use it, as basically “incorrect”.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#196

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).

Those are all related to Wordpress core.

Plugins are categorized separately from WordPress on the CVE website.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#197

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…

Not sure if that’s what you describe but I used Grav: https://getgrav.org/ . It’s written in modern PHP and provide a simple UI to edit an manage your site. No database is needed.

Grav is fantastic. It’s as flexible as ProcessWire, yet with the simplicity and low overhead of a flat-file CMS. I’ve used it for sites ranging from a portfolio to an experimental art project.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#198
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…

This actually seems like a pretty bad use case for WordPress, TBH. To be fair to WordPress, you can set up custom tables and permissions to do this, but you will be writing a lot of code to render overviews, validate forms, and so on. A lot of WordPress's admin UI isn't reusable in a way that works for a CRUD app, or it's only reusable in one specific way (e.g. the default overview you get if you ask for it in your custom post type definition).

Slim and Laravel are both proper application frameworks specifically designed for your use case. That's why they properly document all of the CRUD use cases. However, they don't do CMS stuff at all.

If you absolutely need a working CRUD app to live inside of a CMS, then your best bet would actually be a Drupal module with a custom entity type. However, that requires you to actually know the ins and outs of Drupal's Entity and Field APIs, which are rather overengineered[0]. On the other hand, if you do manage to figure all that out, permissions are relatively easy to hook up, forms are just filling out an array, and you get Views support basically for free.

[0] In Drupal's defense, they're a CMS, so they need to support use cases like letting users define custom node types and custom fields on those types. This makes the interface for interacting with Entities way more complicated than an ordinary CRUD app needs.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#199
post #94
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

They were able to fix this by moving to the WebExtension model instead of letting extensions directly interface with XUL/XPCOM[0]. Of course, then everyone got angry that they couldn't do ridiculously invasive changes to the browser with an extension anymore.

[0] which were then massively refactored, twice.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#200
post #103

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…

I use lektor, it has a preview server with a editor, works for multilanguage sites, themes are easily extended/modified etc. You basically run "lektor serve" edit your site locally in the backend and then once you are done you click "publish" in the backend and it copies the site to the webserver via scp (provided you have the ssh credentials). Simple and effective. For anything more sophisticated I use grav CMS

I love GravCMS. I transitioned to Grav from Drupal right as D8 was coming out for my personal projects. Not having to worry about a db was so nice
Post reply on HN