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WP21

ma.tt

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Re: WP21

#41

Post by wwweston »

ssalat wrote: post #25

Quick judgments and strong opinions have unfortunately become part of the community. Having spent the last 2-3 months working excessively on WordPress development, I would like to say a word about the excellent isolation of code with blocks ("Gutenberg"). As standalone plugins or in combination with Advanced Custom Fields, these allow for perfect, modular websites and development flows (design system), where even the…

Can you recommend some of the better ways to understand and learn it properly?

(Worked with it extensively 2009-2011, including authoring/modifying plugins, but never felt like I really understood it, only vaguely understood/appreciated it)

Re: WP21

#42

Post by orf »

throw5345346 wrote: post #36

One of the things that strikes me about WordPress is the way that web nerds expect to find it easy and are angered when it is not. Like everything, it takes learning. It has opinions. It has some crazy history (I really wish media items were not handled the way they are), but it also has methodology to it. If I said I know Go and JS and Perl and Java and Ruby and C, and I was enraged that Rust is so hard to learn, I'…

What’s the crazy history?

Re: WP21

#43

Post by 9dev »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #30

WP is 21 years old, and people on HN still bishing and crying about it. How come no one has offered something that can beat WP in 21 years?

Nah, that’s not how it works. People are also complaining about the quality of Google‘s search results, but has anyone come up with a something that can beat them?

Technically, yes! But practically, Wordpress has such a velocity, it’s mostly impossible to stop at this point. There’s an ecosystem of millions of plugins, themes, entire agencies around Wordpress, that’s something you can’t really solve. So just because Wordpress sticks around doesn’t mean it’s the superior solution; it just happened to suck less than the competition a decade ago.

Re: WP21

#44

Post by ehnto »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #30

WP is 21 years old, and people on HN still bishing and crying about it. How come no one has offered something that can beat WP in 21 years?

I think developers underestimate the ecosystem and community aspects. Software is definitely not a space where "if you build it, they will come". There is better codebases, but no one has held a candle to the ecosystem yet. I believe this is because the core users of WP are not it's developers, the users (admins, agency clients etc) hold a considerably larger stake in typical business engagements.

I have been doing eComm agency work for years and even if the chosen eComm platform does have a CMS, we're very often asked to integrate a wordpress site for the company's marketing/content team to use.

Re: WP21

#45

Post by 9dev »

Swizec wrote: post #3

WordPress is my favorite example of "It doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to work" So many cool projects die because people over-complicate the first steps. You can always make it better later if people start using your thing, but first you gotta ship.

Funny, I think it proves the contrary. Wordpress effectively made their whole code base the public API, so now they’re stuck with the legacy code they have for eternity, unable to meaningfully improve it, as plugins may depend on the existing state.

It’s so bad, the PHP language developers are unable to implement some features/fixes in the language, as the Wordpress team refuses to migrate their code, which makes for a huge chunk of PHP usage. Imagine that.

Re: WP21

#47

Post by 9dev »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #29
henning wrote: post #10

WordPress is proof that clean code doesn't matter. Security doesn't matter. Out of the box performance doesn't matter. At least none of these matter if you are the 800 lb gorilla in the market and everyone else is trying to take a piece out of you.

>if you are the 800 lb gorilla in the market but it didn't start out as an 800 lb gorilla. Simply saying it's an 800 lb gorilla in the room is lazy.

No, but there weren’t any good contenders at the time, and Wordpress quickly grew from that cute baby gorilla into the massive beast we have now. We could also say that Google didn’t start as a world-spanning empire of search engine moat. Yet it is now, and it’s hard to build a new search engine unless you’re a multi-trillion dollar company (and it’s hard even for them apparently).

Re: WP21

#48

Post by bboygravity »

nikolay wrote: post #24
henning wrote: post #10

WordPress is proof that clean code doesn't matter. Security doesn't matter. Out of the box performance doesn't matter. At least none of these matter if you are the 800 lb gorilla in the market and everyone else is trying to take a piece out of you.

The only things that matter are a decent admin UI and the illusion of choice of free plugins - most plugins are useless in 2024 because they have a pro version. When you add up the annual costs of all pro versions, the "free" WordPress (which requires a beefy hosting plan) becomes the most expensive and hardest to keep up publishing system nowadays!

From a business perspective the significant part of the website costs are man-hours for setup and maintenance.

Got something to say about how WP compares to others when it comes to man-hours (assuming you can buy any and all plugins you want)? Honest question, because I have no idea about CMS.

Re: WP21

#49

Post by 9dev »

nikolay wrote: post #24
henning wrote: post #10

WordPress is proof that clean code doesn't matter. Security doesn't matter. Out of the box performance doesn't matter. At least none of these matter if you are the 800 lb gorilla in the market and everyone else is trying to take a piece out of you.

The only things that matter are a decent admin UI and the illusion of choice of free plugins - most plugins are useless in 2024 because they have a pro version. When you add up the annual costs of all pro versions, the "free" WordPress (which requires a beefy hosting plan) becomes the most expensive and hardest to keep up publishing system nowadays!

Can’t blame the plugin authors, a freemium Wordpress plugin is about the best possible source of passive income there is. Have a security issue? Take your time, they are coming anyway!
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