WordPress has left the building • Hacker News Board

Re: WordPress has left the building

#31

Post by saltcod » Tue, Jan 10, 2012, 5:01 PM UTC

unavoidable wrote: post #26

ddw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I don't keep up with Wordpress too much, but my perception is that you should go with something like Drupal (or other proprietary options) if you want a platform fully capable of being a CMS. That said, any CMS will struggle with the challenges that he lists. It's not some sort of magical entity where you turn it on and it's perfect. I feel bad for his clients...

Except that Drupal is, interface-wise, even worse than Wordpress; and management of the damn thing is difficult even for the developers among us. It's hard to recommend it when you know clients/users will struggle with it.

Handing a Drupal website over to a client was always hard. No wysiwyg, no automatic updating, built-in dependency hell (that the client can see in /modules), _constant_ warnings about module updates and security updates and core updates and updates of every other kind, make Drupal an extremely tough sell.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#32

Post by krogsgard » Tue, Jan 10, 2012, 5:01 PM UTC

WordPress core is not trying to be all things to all people. But can he tell me a CMS that makes it simpler to build out the requirements for a vast majority of the websites in the world?

If you are looking for a custom feature set on a project that you claim WordPress doesn't meet your needs, then build a custom CMS for the job and charge appropriately. WordPress allows organizations and individuals to have massive power in their website for a fraction of the cost of a custom CMS. And in comparison to a custom CMS, it gets a great deal of testing.

WordPress is always looking for new contributors, and if your solution isn't something that works for core and the WordPress core philosophy, then you can extend your idea via a plugin.

And in the author's list of things WordPress "has either no, or severely limited" support for, he is way off the boat. There are a slew of highly talented developers that either having working solutions for or are working on almost all of those things, and more.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#33

Post by zecho » Tue, Jan 10, 2012, 5:01 PM UTC

unavoidable wrote: post #26

ddw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I don't keep up with Wordpress too much, but my perception is that you should go with something like Drupal (or other proprietary options) if you want a platform fully capable of being a CMS. That said, any CMS will struggle with the challenges that he lists. It's not some sort of magical entity where you turn it on and it's perfect. I feel bad for his clients...

Except that Drupal is, interface-wise, even worse than Wordpress; and management of the damn thing is difficult even for the developers among us. It's hard to recommend it when you know clients/users will struggle with it.

>and management of the damn thing is difficult even for the developers among us.

Understatement of the year so far.

I love Drupal, but since there's no bright line separating configuration and content, rolling features up from a dev environment to staging to live can sometimes be a nightmare, particularly if the Features and Strongarm modules don't have you covered.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#34

Post by reustle » Tue, Jan 10, 2012, 5:03 PM UTC

This is what happens when you try to use a blog as a CMS.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#35

Post by antidaily » Tue, Jan 10, 2012, 5:04 PM UTC

reustle wrote: post #34

This is what happens when you try to use a blog as a CMS.

It's a fine CMS... better than most.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#36

Post by wyck » Tue, Jan 10, 2012, 5:05 PM UTC

These are the growing pains a lot of WP developers face at some point.

The problem is that WordPress is really, really good at basic things. Things which involve end users and ease of functionality, this covers quite a bit of actual work.

The problem arises when you need to extend that functionality outside the box, you're used to working with something great, you're taking it for granted that it can do anything.

Well it can't, some very basic functions like say a forms API or media API which you consider essential , does not even exist.

I think there has been a strain lately that the core team, especially with J. Wells leadership, has concentrated WAY to much on UI and Design. Developers are starting to look elsewhere for actual functionality that keeps up, the problem is so far there is not much out there that is easy to use.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#37

Post by antidaily » Tue, Jan 10, 2012, 5:06 PM UTC

zalew wrote: post #21

hm2k wrote: post #4

What's the alternative?

Write spec, hire dev, build your own.

I can't think of a bigger waste of time. That is, unless you've somehow convinced a client to pay you to do it.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#38

Post by smacktoward » Tue, Jan 10, 2012, 5:07 PM UTC

FraaJad wrote: post #20

Time and again, people want to use a hacked up blogging engine as a CMS and lament that it is not working. Use a CMS that's been around for more than decade which has all the features you want in a proper CMS (single sign on, WYSIWGY, multi-lingual support, a huge community of developers and service providers). ie., Plone -- http://plone.org

The problem with CMSes that have "all the features you want" is that they have so many features that the average user who just needs to plonk some content down on a page and periodically edit it can't wade through all the features to figure out how to do that.

(I don't say this to pick on Plone -- I'm a big fan of the TYPO3[1] CMS, for instance, which does lots of the things that he mentions very well, but the downside to that power is that it's insanely hard for normal people to pick up and use.)

[1] http://typo3.org

Re: WordPress has left the building

#39

Post by danso » Tue, Jan 10, 2012, 5:09 PM UTC

This piece is not particularly constructive. While it's not required for an opinion piece to present the perfect alternative in order to rant against the status quo...to say "Wordpress sucks" and say nothing about the alternatives...? What good does that do?

I can think of lots of alternatives for the OP but all of them have certain costs/tradeoffs that are prohibitive in many scenarios. The OP goes into great detail describe how WP doesn't meet his needs...I'm really fascinated to know what alternative he's considered that does meet his clients need and that is realistically doable?

Re: WordPress has left the building

#40

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 10, 2012, 5:10 PM UTC

unavoidable wrote: post #26

ddw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I don't keep up with Wordpress too much, but my perception is that you should go with something like Drupal (or other proprietary options) if you want a platform fully capable of being a CMS. That said, any CMS will struggle with the challenges that he lists. It's not some sort of magical entity where you turn it on and it's perfect. I feel bad for his clients...

Except that Drupal is, interface-wise, even worse than Wordpress; and management of the damn thing is difficult even for the developers among us. It's hard to recommend it when you know clients/users will struggle with it.

[deleted]