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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

#51

Post by pathartl »

ericcholis wrote: post #31
pathartl wrote: post #30

I was a WP dev for 5-7 years before moving on to bigger and better things. It's easy to hate on the platform, for both justified and unjustified reasons. As a writer, it's good not great. As a low code dev, it's the best because you can do 99% of what you need to do with no licensing costs. As a regular beginner dev it's a great platform to learn on. As an experienced dev it's just terrible to get anything done and t…

I think your two points about Xdebug and PHP naming conventions aren't a fair lense on PHP as a whole. Seems that they're framed around how wordpress uses PHP (poorly) for some of the more basic abstractions. You aren't likely to find those issues in any modern PHP Framework out the box.

That's why I'm bringing it up in the conversation of WordPress. The platform has probably the largest slice of PHP developers out there and lack of proper debugging techniques and an ancient-feeling codebase drives a lot of the negativity towards PHP. It's giving the language a bad name. Laravel is a wonderful framework and helped me bridge the gap towards .NET, as I was a self taught WordPress dev to start with.

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#52

Post by pathartl »

deltarholamda wrote: post #34
pathartl wrote: post #30

I was a WP dev for 5-7 years before moving on to bigger and better things. It's easy to hate on the platform, for both justified and unjustified reasons. As a writer, it's good not great. As a low code dev, it's the best because you can do 99% of what you need to do with no licensing costs. As a regular beginner dev it's a great platform to learn on. As an experienced dev it's just terrible to get anything done and t…

>Using methods like get_post or the_content are great examples of why people hate PHP The big problem with people getting into PHP via Wordpress is that Wordpress isn't, really, written in PHP. It's a WP-flavor subset of PHP, and a lot of it goes way, way back to when PHP could only be written with a hammer and chisel. It's been kept because a lot of things depend on it not changing. (I give the devs credit for not b…

It's really incredible how far they e been able to maintain compatibility for sure, but there are just objectively bad parts of the platform they're keeping around for fear of backlash. There's a lot wrong with WordPress, and the editing experience shouldn't have been the first thing to tackle. I think it's bred many poor development practices.

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#53

Post by edent »

aaaaaaaaata wrote: post #44
billpg wrote: post #29

Since everyone else is posting their wish-list, here's mine. Use a database like SQLite so I can back-up a website into a ZIP without being concerned about keeping a separate MySQL database backup in sync. (I wrote about this three years ago: https://billpg.com/dear-wordpress-please-stop-using-mysql/ ) Include TOTP one-time-password login in the core. (I hate having to deal with plug-ins.) Full backup in the core. Wh…

> Include TOTP one-time-password login in the core. (I hate having to deal with plug-ins.) What's everyone currently using for this?

I use JetPack. That lets me sign in with my WP account, which is protected by 2FA.

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#54

Post by thunderbong »

billpg wrote: post #29

Since everyone else is posting their wish-list, here's mine. Use a database like SQLite so I can back-up a website into a ZIP without being concerned about keeping a separate MySQL database backup in sync. (I wrote about this three years ago: https://billpg.com/dear-wordpress-please-stop-using-mysql/ ) Include TOTP one-time-password login in the core. (I hate having to deal with plug-ins.) Full backup in the core. Wh…

I've replied to another comment here asking for SQLite -

https://github.com/stokry/wp-sqlite Not official though. Submitted a few days ago (97 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396732

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#55

Post by bph »

dmje wrote: post #2

The 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…

As developer / designer there are multiple ways to lock things down and provide a design system for content creators.

https://gutenbergtimes.com/how-to-disable-theme-features-and...

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#56

Post by wink »

snowwrestler wrote: post #37
mszmszmsz wrote: post #6

The 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 me…

Folders have problems too, inflexible and depend on people managing them well. If the team can’t be bothered to namespace files and fill in metadata properly, I doubt they will manage folders well either. It’s 2022. There’s got to be something more sophisticated than folders, something content-aware that reliably finds the desired image in the library and suggests it when someone tries to upload a dupe. How do we hav…

That does not make sense to me at all. As a single user, where is the relation between "namespace files" and "metadata" when all I want is to upload some images to a folder named foo or 2022?

I'm not saying there isn't a better solution, but other blog/cms applications could do folders without problems 15 years ago.

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#57

Post by stefanos82 »

Things that I would love to see in WordPress:

  * Slim the core as much as possible. 80-20 Rule applies here. A default WP setup installs 80% of unnecessary stuff for a simple blog or website; get rid of them or make them composer packages so I can install them separately upon need.
  * A wizard-like mechanism to let me choose the type of the website or app I would like to setup initially.
    - is it a blog?
    - is it a traditional website?
    - is it an ecommerce?
    - is it a landing page?
    - what database would you like to use? SQLite, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server, MySQL / MariaDB?
    - Monolith, microservices, or hybrid?
  * Headless by default so users can choose the front-end of their choice.
  * Full-Site Editing should become optional or even a plugin like it already exists. It's the #1 reason people and developers have had enough with WP and decided to look for alternatives; I'm one of them.

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#58

Post by rograndom »

jolux wrote: post #48

Just from digging through the WordPress source, and knowing it's a frequent source of CVEs, I think it urgently needs large-scale refactoring and rewriting. If that can't be done because of how many things depend on it, is the backwards compatibility really worth the continuous stream of security problems? From one perspective it seems kind of wrong to be encouraging people to keep using a platform that is so broken…

To be honest, the majority of the CVEs are for 3rd party plugin and themes that no rewriting of core will fix.

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#59

Post by kkoppenhaver »

noisymemories wrote: post #33

I've worked mainly on Wordpress themes and plugins for the last 7-8 years, and I've yet to see anything resembling common best practices regarding testing, CI/CD or even deployment coming from Automattic, especially regarding themes. That would be very nice to have. Most of the issues regarding the instability and lack of security of the platform come straight from the mantra "upload the file using ftp and the edit t…

Regarding the deployment and testing, this is a direction I hope to take the content on the Branch CI (https://www.branchci.com/) and WP Pusher (https://wppusher.com/) blogs in the coming months!

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#60

Post by jolux »

rograndom wrote: post #58
jolux wrote: post #48

Just from digging through the WordPress source, and knowing it's a frequent source of CVEs, I think it urgently needs large-scale refactoring and rewriting. If that can't be done because of how many things depend on it, is the backwards compatibility really worth the continuous stream of security problems? From one perspective it seems kind of wrong to be encouraging people to keep using a platform that is so broken…

To be honest, the majority of the CVEs are for 3rd party plugin and themes that no rewriting of core will fix.

They couldn’t be fixed by making the plug-in model more structured and restrictive?
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