WordPress has left the building • Hacker News Board

Re: WordPress has left the building

#161

Post by FuzzyDunlop » Wed, Jan 11, 2012, 12:02 AM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #99

chc wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been presented with relatively straightforward CMS site concepts and come to the conclusion that they would be better done in Rails or Django than Drupal because a) it would be easier to present a usable interface, and b) those would actually be less likely turn out looking like a tower of paperclips and bubblegum. This may just be my lack of experience in Drupal talking (I've got plenty of experience in PHP,…

The big difference is that in Drupal it's possible to get pretty far without ever writing a single line of code, even templates. For some use cases that's very powerful, especially an environment where you have trainable, reasonably technical people who aren't programmers.

But for the talented developers and/or programmers on the team, it's a complete productivity and sanity drain. Moreso if you're, say, part of HN's target audience, because you'll know all the modern web development techniques, and you'll be able to use none of them.

I have had an absolutely terrible experience with it, which sadly isn't unique amongst these big PHP projects.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#162

Post by ereckers » Wed, Jan 11, 2012, 12:16 AM UTC

kevinjohn wrote: post #125

Hello everyone, I'm Kevinjohn Gallagher, the author of the post. While I really appreciate all the comments, quite a few folks here have made presumptions that are really wide of the mark. I love WordPress. I use it for my personal site, and thats not going to change. WordPress is very good at what it does, and Im in no way down on it for that; its just that the needs of my small company is now very different that th…

I'm looking forward to your followup post. Primarily, what you ended up switching to and if and when you have moved your clients off of WordPress, what their reaction was.

I've found that a primary reason companies start using WordPress is because the administrative console is literally the only one intuitive enough to use for most non-technical users. I see in your post and this comment that part of issues with WP is because of Admin UI changes, but I'd still bet on WPs Admin UI. I'll be curious as to your reaction when the grumbles of your devs are replaced with the grumbles from the people who write the checks.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#163

Post by pbhjpbhj » Wed, Jan 11, 2012, 12:16 AM UTC

nanodeath wrote: post #52

I'd like to respond to some things a number of people have commented on HN here... 1) Wordpress might seem like just a blogging engine, but this is not how the WP developers see it -- on the Wordpress .org About page, it's described as "[Wordpress] has evolved to be used as full content management system" (sic). So they expect people to use it as a CMS. 2) Plone, unless you have a lot of technical chops, is a nightma…

>So they expect people to use it as a CMS.

And they appear to facilitate that. But, it tellingly IMO, doesn't say that WP was designed as a CMS or even that it was modified to become a CMS just that it has grown to be used as a CMS.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#164

Post by pbhjpbhj » Wed, Jan 11, 2012, 12:18 AM UTC

kevinjohn wrote: post #127

kels wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he means if you are going to hate, hate on it all the way.

"I love WordPress. With it, I have felt a genuine affinity for a product the likes of which is matched only by my Commodore64." Who's hating?

>"It will be exceptionally strange for me to no longer recommend WordPress."

So presumably this is hyperbole and you'd still recommend it, only for a more limited range of sites.

The big question, as others have said I think, is what do you now recommend?

Re: WordPress has left the building

#165

Post by rokhayakebe » Wed, Jan 11, 2012, 12:27 AM UTC

photomatt wrote: post #108

rokhayakebe wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as I've viewed when guys dumps tons of money and time squeezing horsepower of a Honda Civic Exactly. It's still a fucking Honda, and for the time/money spent on it you should have bought a Lexus. Similarly you can tweak wordpress all day long, in the end it's a blogging software.

FWIW, 92% of WordPress users we surveyed are using it as a CMS. People seem to like to say "it's just blogging software" to put us in a box, but people are using it for so much more, and most much happier than the OP.

I d rather have wordpress be the best blogging software then a Swiss army knife that isn't great at anything. Btw I have used wp to do just about anything, but the only times it was great was for blogging.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#166

Post by mortenjorck » Wed, Jan 11, 2012, 12:40 AM UTC

blehn wrote: post #134

mortenjorck wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the author's problem, and the problem of nearly every frustrated WordPress user, is that the alternatives aren't nearly as enjoyable to work with as WordPress. It has a nice, understandable, and flexible API, and even though its greatest strengths are really only in blogging, the friendliness of the environment naturally invites stretching its use. For these people, I would strongly recommend a look at Proces…

I recently went through the process of selecting a CMS for a client. ProcessWire, was the ONLY one I looked at and thought, "ok, now this makes sense." In the end, I couldn't use it because it doesn't yet support repeatable content sections in the admin. Sadly, had to go with Wordpress.

The roadmap for 2012 is actually pretty exciting: http://processwire.com/about/roadmap/

In addition to repeatable fields, they're planning a versioning system, staging states, and even a forms builder. Not exactly earth-shaking for a normal CMS, but these will open up all sorts of possibilities for ProcessWire.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#167

Post by odddogmedia » Wed, Jan 11, 2012, 12:42 AM UTC

I work at a firm that employs WordPress to build simple B2B and B2C websites. We share many of the same opinions as this author, and even more shortcomings come to mind:

1) Unable to change content types 2) Funneled into the "Blog" post type, which is simply called "Posts", with no easy way to kill this off and create your own 3) User group management

The list could go on forever.

However, if the shoe doesn't fit, why force it? Did the author ever consider using (or building) a CMS that fit the needs of the project?

Also, it's an open source piece of software. Why not contribute some time yourself and fix the problem related to moderate_comments (http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4802)?

Other than that, this post is a bit infuriating as it lacks background as well as a solution. Thanks for letting us know you'll no longer choose WordPress as your (seemingly only) choice of CMS. And thanks for not providing one ounce of helpful insight for how to improve the problem or what the alternatives are.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#168

Post by odddogmedia » Wed, Jan 11, 2012, 1:17 AM UTC

wonderyak wrote: post #114

stef25 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Expression Engine yet and am curious to hear people's opinions about it.

A lot of us would love to be able to chime in on EE, I'm sure. Not having a downloadable demo or some way of checking out without paying $200 makes it way lower down the list when you're looking for alternatives. I would love to check it out; but if I don't like it or it won't work for my clients it's a total hassle.

You can usually email them to ask for a free license for testing purposes. Their customer service team has been pretty awesome in my experiences.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#169

Post by krondor » Wed, Jan 11, 2012, 1:26 AM UTC

saltcod wrote: post #31

unavoidable wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just a few nitpicks;

Drupal does have wysiwyg implemented as a module http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg (actually several competing editors are possible),

Drupal also can do automated updates, though I wouldn't advise it. Drush works for it, http://drupal.org/project/drush and a lot of people use it with great success. You would want a carefully vetted rollback plan though. The better road is to forgo updates other than security until scheduled maintenance or a MUST have feature is present. The GUI /update process is actually quite nice if you've set everything up properly.

The thing about Drupal is doing everything doesn't have to be painful, but if you've approached it in a "non-Drupal" way it can get bad quickly. Drupal is complex and the hand off to a customer is never easy with complex software. Have you tried the same with Plone?

Re: WordPress has left the building

#170

Post by rafski » Wed, Jan 11, 2012, 2:19 AM UTC

Plugins often cause more problems than they solve.

I had way too many situations where a plugin would break after a WordPress update and the author wouldn't support it anymore.

Also, there are malicious plugins on WordPress.org with no direct way to submit report or post a warning. Can you imagine a FaceBook widget that after a while of use starts to promote some rogue site?