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WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser

developer.wordpress.org

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Re: WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser

#31

Post by ehnto »

graiz wrote: post #29

No need to dunk on wordpress but it has a lot of history and issues. It would be great to have a modern alternative self-hosted solution that doesn't require static site generation or complex hosting.

There are many functionally perfect substitutes, unfortunately the WordPress value proposition is actually it's ecosystem of plugins, developers and advocacy of it's users.

We've all met the client who wants WP and nothing else. And there are countless times we've rolled a clean new solution out, but the client goes back to WP.

I have seen value in hybrid approaches, a custom app written in some other framework for complex requirements, and a WP instance and connector for content, so the client is comfortable.

Re: WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser

#32

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

Php & WordPress were fun. With that ugly php tag you could get pretty much everything working on the web.

All you had to do was edit, save & refresh. No rebuild of code, server restart, compiling Just edit & save.

Did it have the tendency to get ugly? Sure. But it was easy, quick and fast. Not every blog and needs a git flow, united, e2e, type-safe double encrypted dev environment.

Both PHP & WordPress got shamed for their dirty nature so much that they are in identity crisis. PHP tries to mimmick Java as much as possible. WordPress plugin structure is a disaster. Having to run an entire npm project for every plugin, no easy data saving helpers, etc. Let alone the ux-disaster of the block Editor.

Feels like the php decade is truly over. And it was php that killed itself.

Laravel is a joy btw.

Re: WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser

#33

Post by bamfly »

graiz wrote: post #29

No need to dunk on wordpress but it has a lot of history and issues. It would be great to have a modern alternative self-hosted solution that doesn't require static site generation or complex hosting.

Any competitor has a nasty chicken/egg problem to overcome. Wordpress is still hard to avoid because there's a plugin—usually with paid support available—that can do damn near anything. The codebase isn't great, developing against it sucks, and the way it's designed and the official store curated does nothing to prevent some real messes & risks on the database side—but, two days of set-up and $80/m in plugins/themes is just a much easier sell than "OK, first we'll need at least two months of development time..."

There's also the scale-benefit that you can hardly throw a ball without hitting someone who's done Wordpress development, if you do need development work, and Wordpress-focused agencies are abundant, if you'd rather not hire to get the work done. Not true for any up-and-coming competitor.

Designing a system—even an extensible one with plugin and theming architecture—that is a lot better than Wordpress isn't a small task, but is also far from impossible and wouldn't take some super-genius team to accomplish; however, that's the easiest step on the path to actually displacing Wordpress in the market.

Re: WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser

#34

Post by ceejayoz »

jchw wrote: post #20
bamfly wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wordpress is one of those things I've plenty of experience with, but leave off my résumé and avoid mentioning to bosses and colleagues, so I won't get roped into that bullshit if it comes up—and it often does , sooner or later. "Wordpress? I can take a look if you need me to, but I don't really know much about that. I think Fred said something about Wordpress the other day, maybe ask him...." I've known others who co…

Similarly, I do not mention to anyone that I have touched Drupal in the past.

I'd happily put "completed a major Drupal version upgrade" on mine, if I'd ever successfully accomplished it. I think it was 6 --> 7; still gives me the willies to think about that attempt. Seeing that on a resume would be an immediate "wow, this person can handle a complex migration..."

Re: WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser

#35

Post by cyrialize »

jchw wrote: post #20
bamfly wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wordpress is one of those things I've plenty of experience with, but leave off my résumé and avoid mentioning to bosses and colleagues, so I won't get roped into that bullshit if it comes up—and it often does , sooner or later. "Wordpress? I can take a look if you need me to, but I don't really know much about that. I think Fred said something about Wordpress the other day, maybe ask him...." I've known others who co…

Similarly, I do not mention to anyone that I have touched Drupal in the past.

Oh man, I have tons of experience with WordPress AND Drupal early on in my career. Good call, I'm not going to have these on my resume haha.

Re: WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser

#36

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

whyage wrote: post #6
fredley wrote: post #3

WordPress was where I got my start, a while ago now. From poking around with PHP files, to building my own things, to Django, and on. It would have been inconceivable back then (mid noughties) that the whole thing could be done client side. The Web has come on a long way. These days I tend to hate WordPress with a passion. Occasionally I will be asked to peek at some technical problem with a WordPress installation an…

What no-code alternative would you recommend for pro web designers?

Wouldn't say "pro" unless you get strictly mean design and not functionality. In which case I'd have recommended Photoshop which is what I used for design only 20 years ago, but I think the UX folks like Figma or something these days.

Re: WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser

#37

Post by cyrialize »

bamfly wrote: post #17
fredley wrote: post #3

WordPress was where I got my start, a while ago now. From poking around with PHP files, to building my own things, to Django, and on. It would have been inconceivable back then (mid noughties) that the whole thing could be done client side. The Web has come on a long way. These days I tend to hate WordPress with a passion. Occasionally I will be asked to peek at some technical problem with a WordPress installation an…

Wordpress is one of those things I've plenty of experience with, but leave off my résumé and avoid mentioning to bosses and colleagues, so I won't get roped into that bullshit if it comes up—and it often does , sooner or later. "Wordpress? I can take a look if you need me to, but I don't really know much about that. I think Fred said something about Wordpress the other day, maybe ask him...." I've known others who co…

I have thought about making a plugin.

The plugin documentation/architecture is a bit gnarly (at least from what I remember). That being said, I feel like most WordPress plugins are awful.

I've sometimes wondered if I could make a better version of X plugin, but I fear I'm missing something - like providing customer support or covering every version of WP.

Re: WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser

#38

Post by ravenstine »

fredley wrote: post #3

WordPress was where I got my start, a while ago now. From poking around with PHP files, to building my own things, to Django, and on. It would have been inconceivable back then (mid noughties) that the whole thing could be done client side. The Web has come on a long way. These days I tend to hate WordPress with a passion. Occasionally I will be asked to peek at some technical problem with a WordPress installation an…

I had a love-hate relationship with Wordpress from the beginning.

Yes, I too basically got my true start in dynamic web development by downloading Wordpress, running it under a WAMP/LAMP stack, toying with the code, and eventually writing some plugins. My coding skills back then were TERRIBLE, but even at that time I had a sense that Wordpress was actually quite a mess under the hood. The database design was pretty bizarre in particular. Fast forward almost 20 years later and I'm a senior web developer, and my opinion of Wordpress has not changed. That doesn't mean Wordpress is bad, because on the surface it does its job very well, but it was (and probably still isn't) the pinnacle of well-written software, and it's not a coincidence that there were vulnerability reports being issues all the time for it.

Wordpress was awesome in high school, the times before StackOverflow, MDN, YouTube, etc. It was a "framework" before frameworks were cool. One of the big selling points for Wordpress was that it was far more approachable than competing CMS softwares like Joomla and Drupal. I tried to figure both of those out back then, and I just utterly despised them. You could do a ton with Wordpress out of the box because, for the most part, you just wanted to have pages for things, a blog section, CSS, and a way to extend functionality. That said, I'm so glad I never have to use it again.

Re: WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser

#39

Post by gamblor956 »

WordPress exposes a huge divide in the HN crowd:

- one group recognizes WordPress for what it is: a value-multiplier used by non-coders for websites so they don't have to deal with the coding and can focus on their core competencies

- the other group hates WordPress because of the ugly codebase, and meanders off to work on their own perfectly formatted, ultra-scalable code that has no little to no value because it's never actually going to be used by anyone outside of their startup.

WordPress powers more than half of the Web. It might not be the best tech, it might very well be the worst possible tech, but the lesson that so many programmers continuously fail to take from WordPress is that NOBODY CARES HOW THE SAUSAGE IS MADE.

Re: WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser

#40

Post by imilk »

whyage wrote: post #6
fredley wrote: post #3

WordPress was where I got my start, a while ago now. From poking around with PHP files, to building my own things, to Django, and on. It would have been inconceivable back then (mid noughties) that the whole thing could be done client side. The Web has come on a long way. These days I tend to hate WordPress with a passion. Occasionally I will be asked to peek at some technical problem with a WordPress installation an…

What no-code alternative would you recommend for pro web designers?

Wordpress is still great for downloading a theme from Themeforest to get brochure style sites (restaurant, simple small business, etc) up and running pretty fast. It is not great (possibly horrendous) for revisiting a few years later when all the plugins/theme/core needs to be updated and a bunch of different people have added custom JS/CSS all over in random places.

It's hard to reconcile "pro web designer" with no-code though. Having said that, my preferred stack for something that involves more than a simple site is Sveltekit, Tailwindcss, & Sanity. But everyone has their own preferences.

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