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The complicated futility of WordPress

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Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#211

Post by amanzi »

cmccomas wrote: post #152
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 feel your pain. We have a WordPress network pushing 600 sites and I'm kind of concerned about the future of WordPress and think daily about migrating over to Drupal (or even exploring CascadeCMS or something along those lines). When we picked WordPress back in ~2012 as our CMS it was because of how simple the editing of post/page content was compared to the alternatives. The majority of our content editors are stud…

Yep - great summary of my current position. I also use the Classic Editor plugin but still let users toggle the setting if they choose too.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#212

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

senko wrote: post #205
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you ever dive into a PowerPoint file by hand?

No. Do you ever publish your web content as PPT? Written a web app using PPTX?

No, but my point is, why don't we? I mean, we've gone to the moon, we're going to Mars, we can now delicately land a rocket on a platform floating in the middle of the ocean, and we can turn vaccines around in a year.

Maybe we can make websites as easy as powerpoint? If we can't make it work with HTML and CSS, maybe they need to go?

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#213

Post by Gigachad »

noahtallen wrote: post #184
Gigachad wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

Sorry, I didn’t mean in a popularity way. But security wise, I don’t know how it would be possible to make Wordpress secure when the average user installs a bunch of plugins / themes and then leaves never to update it again. I just can’t see how this can work without becoming a fully managed platform.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#214

Post by andrei_says_ »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #124
andrei_says_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Their support is super responsive on discord and via email.

And yes Craft’s schema is pretty complicated.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#215

Post by KronisLV »

yurishimo wrote: post #194
KronisLV wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Thanks! This does indeed seem more like what i was looking for, couldn't for the life of me find it in their main navigation menu on the site.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#216

Post by KronisLV »

kmeisthax wrote: post #198
KronisLV wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> 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.

This was also a sneaking suspicion of mine after diving into some plugins and seeing how they work, e.g. things that definitely aren't pages/posts beings stored in those tables in the database regardless, hinting that maybe the base functionality needs to be stretched out a bit for custom use cases.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#217

Post by KronisLV »

acomjean wrote: post #188
KronisLV wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ca…

> 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.

This is a nice approach - getting to leverage WordPress for the typical use case at which it is good, using something bespoke for the more advanced use cases. I've actually done something a bit similar in the past (the particular app i made used Lumen which is essentially stripped down Laravel, but the concept was close enough).

It's just that many made WordPress seem like a pretty much universal tool and while i've seen some pretty advanced things be done with plugins, i personally didn't quite feel like it's well suited for certain tasks where you'd typically reach for a general purpose web framework instead.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#218

Post by seanwilson »

sneek_ wrote: post #157
seanwilson wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like Prismic and Payload CMS aren't open source? https://github.com/payloadcms/payload/blob/master/license.md - "Payload is free to download and install—and free to use for Personal Purposes. We are passionate about Payload, and we hope that you will enjoy it, too. A valid license is required to utilize Payload as detailed below" https://prismic.io/faq/product - "Proprietary, not open source"

Ahhh thanks for the shout out to Payload! I'm one of the founders. seanwilson, Payload is technically open source and completely free forever for up to one admin panel user. There are no restrictions at all besides that and the code is fully open on GitHub. Would this model work for you, or would you like to see changes to our current model?

> Payload is technically open source and completely free forever for up to one admin panel user.

Can you explain how the licensing works here? If it's open source, couldn't you modify it to allow more admin panel users? Can you self-host with no reliance on other hosted services or paid licenses?

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#219

Post by omnimus »

wingmanjd wrote: post #200
atoav wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I used to use Grav. If you want similar more mature and “zen” try Kirby CMS. I am not afiliated but ive been loving it for years. It’s commercial product but i think of it as high-end Grav. More polished and with better admin interface. Actually since Kirby is older i believe Grav was inspired by it a lot.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#220

Post by omnimus »

johnchristopher wrote: post #159

Author mentions Twill. https://demo.twill.io/ . Looks interesting, like a big shiny ACF front-end. I wonder what the back-end looks like for dev. edit: ah, it's a laravel package.

Its pretty great CMS but its mostly laravel you need to be comfortable with it or its going to be rough. I think it makes sense if your site requires advanced functionality.

I think there are more productive alternatives for most people like Kirby CMS, Craft CMS that have great docs and focus on the CMS part very well.

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