Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core
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Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core
#2The thing I want to see, above all else (and it is coming, but slowly and without any kind of apparent over-arching strategy - which it badly needs) is designer / developer control.
Gutenberg gives remarkable agency to editors, which from one angle is great - lovely to be able to add a column, shift a block upwards, pad that image over to the right without any technical skills.
On the other... I don't know a web designer in the world who wants to give their editors complete control. And rightly so. Web design - good web design (and by proxy, UX) - is about constraint as much as it is about freedom. Probably more so. Knowing what not to include, and when not to include it, is the single skill that a great visual / web designer brings to the table.
So to see interfaces like Gutenberg where anyone can ...shift, adapt, grow, shrink, add to, remove... pretty much any element in the interface - is a total disaster.
Here's how "clever" it has become (and it is, technically, and in a fun sense - clever) - you can go into the edit screen of your Gutenberg website, and then you can pull up a tab to the "Block Pattern Directory" [1], hover over any block in the list, copy it, then jump back into your website and paste it. Wow.
Even if (and man, it isn't) that list of block patterns was beautifully, thoughtfully designed, what kind of awful, awful FrankenDesign is going to result from your client taking a random smattering of block patterns and pasting them into pages on their site?
As I said, there are slow steps appearing around being able to lock blocks and block patterns - but WordPress should have been much, much more thoughtful about being open, up-front and strategic with their acknowledgement of this. I know many WordPress designers who have upped and left to look at other platforms because they need client constraint, not "ultimate freedom".
Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core
#3The thing I want to see, above all else (and it is coming, but slowly and without any kind of apparent over-arching strategy - which it badly needs) is designer / developer control. Gutenberg gives remarkable agency to editors, which from one angle is great - lovely to be able to add a column, shift a block upwards, pad that image over to the right without any technical skills. On the other... I don't know a web desi…
For me at least, Craft CMS answers many of the problems you describe here. I can't see WP as anything but a dumpster fire in comparison.
Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core
#4no mention of security... good luck. i stopped using wordpress after i got hacked. good reason that static sites are the rage.
Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core
#5The thing I want to see, above all else (and it is coming, but slowly and without any kind of apparent over-arching strategy - which it badly needs) is designer / developer control. Gutenberg gives remarkable agency to editors, which from one angle is great - lovely to be able to add a column, shift a block upwards, pad that image over to the right without any technical skills. On the other... I don't know a web desi…
I hesitate to even post here about my software, but "web designer first" is a key idea behind the CMS I've worked on for some time now.
https://archetypewebsites.com/
A key premise is that the designer decides where things go, and the content editors really just want forms to fill out to get content where the designer says it should go. But like any system, there is full WYSIWYG editable regions as well. (where the pink blinky text will show up...)
I've not marketed Archetype widely (but I went through Startup School a few times with YC) because of the same reasons every other developer has, Archetype has warts.
Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core
#6The biggest mess IMO is the media library. Unsustainable, chaotic, impossible to keep in order if you happen to publish more than just a few images.
It’s not a library. It’s a file dump. If you want to reuse an asset on a non-trivial site, it’s easier to reupload the file rather than to find it in a flat list of thousands of thumbnails.
Folders, please.
And the four hopeless fields to provide an image with textual metadata (alt, caption etc). It’s impossible to understand intuitively. So anti-human, lacking understanding of what users need and are capable of grasping.
Reveal the complexity gradually, please.
Same goes for the myriads of options (special love goes to the media link/image size selector with its thoughtless defaults you have to scroll down the media library modal to even reveal itself) just to insert an image into the text.
Just to name a few problems.
Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core
#7no mention of security... good luck. i stopped using wordpress after i got hacked. good reason that static sites are the rage.
was it due to the core or a plugin?
Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core
#8Support for PostgreSQL and SQLite -- that's all I want. (For now.)
Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core
#9no mention of security... good luck. i stopped using wordpress after i got hacked. good reason that static sites are the rage.
was it due to the core or a plugin?
very vanilla wordpress, it was a basic blog site. I think the only plugins I used were google analytics and some basic theme. I would keep it updated whenever I remember but maybe it wasn't often enough. Not exactly sure what the vector was and from whatever quality of analysis I did, the system didn't appear damaged beyond the changes made to the wordpress folder and luckily, the damage didn't seem to escape the www-data user that the http server ran as.
Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core
#10Port it to a modern language so PHP can finally die, add support for PostgreSQL and MS SQL