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WP21

ma.tt

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Re: WP21

#51

Post by onli »

9dev wrote: post #45
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…

This is stability. Stability is good. There is no need to change code that works just because it collides with modern taste.

If WordPress has a stabilizing influence on php that's even better. All the breaking changes of the new versions are a nightmare for an established project I work on.

Re: WP21

#52

Post by DrSiemer »

Haven't used it a lot in the last decade, but WordPress was great for quickly setting up a basic website that needs a nice beginner friendly CMS.

Just make sure you stick to the base theme with a custom child theme and only use a select few plugins (like custom fields and contact form), that don't stab you in the back or begin to fight with each other later on.

I just still don't understand how Gutenberg is an improvement. It's so clunky and confusing to get even the most basic things done with it.

Re: WP21

#53

Post by throw5345346 »

orf wrote: post #42
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?

Well, maybe not crazy. Just heavily legacy.

There are a few deeply frustrating things, if you ask me:

All the media files are stored in a single uploads/year/month (maybe year/month/day) directory, which can mean some very big directories of file variations

There's code that cannot be fun to support anymore, like the Pluggable functions (that still let you get Wordpress to check some external login system)

There's still really not enough of a sense of a "model" anywhere.

It still (AFAIK) stores some things in the database using PHP serialization (which is unambiguously the most annoying serialization format on earth, and means that search and replace tasks must be done in PHP)

I mean... it's hard to blame them for not wanting to break stuff, and the commitment to backwards-compatibility is very nearly unprecedented.

I think WordPress is great, and I am not judging. I'm just saying, there are decisions that might have gone better with a little more foresight. But some of them are literally twenty years old and hard to change now.

Not that WP is alone in that -- FreeCAD is just getting through its "fix a two decade legacy problem" as we speak!

Matt is right about zip uploads. I mean it's better than explaining to random users how to upload nested hierarchies over FTP, but still.

Re: WP21

#54

Post by throw5345346 »

wwweston wrote: post #41
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)

Not parent but:

https://fullsiteediting.com will help you.

It's a great project.

Re: WP21

#55

Post by patates »

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?

People are also complaining about JS/PHP/Python, Excel, JIRA, people-complaining, Windows, Teams, Google, death of RSS, ...

I think it helps some people re-evaluate their decisions, helps products to get some unfiltered feedback, and perhaps motivate entrepreneurs to analyze the market needs. What's there to complain? :)

Re: WP21

#56

Post by throw5345346 »

zubspace wrote: post #35

I avoided wordpress like a plague. Used stuff like django, flask, grav and who knows what. But recently I had to make a website with lots of unknowns which needed to be authored by dummy users and I just said ** it and went with wordpress. What I struggled with are: 1) Interesting site design, 2) custom functionality through plugins, 3) making it easy to add pages and blog posts with a nice editor. I'm glad open sour…

I agree about builder plugins -- they are expensive mossy lock-in.

WordPress now has a full-site editing system that lets you GUI edit the templates that are in the normal flow. It is not what I would call easy to master at the code level, but there is a global styles system and a way to use Gutenberg blocks to control layout outside the main content flow.

So we are getting towards a point where page builder plugins won't be needed for skilled shops. But IMO until there are really easy to use themes based around FSE (there may be some), small design shops are still likely to use Elementor, which is a slow, frustrating experience (slower and more frustrating than Squarespace can be)

Re: WP21

#57

Post by karolist »

My gf has a WP ecommerce site that her business revolves around, it was built buy some local guys doing WP development who have an agency solving problems just with WP. She told me how fast they were able to iterate and solve all their problems. The site has a bunch of plugins integrating various social services, ad tracking, SEO and whatnot.

The site generates PDF shipment labels for parcels, one day her sales got high enough to buy a label printer, one that spits out 10x15cm stickers. The problem - PDFs from the site come out as A4 and text gets tiny if squeezed to fit into that sticker. She asked her developers to fix it, they said it's impossible and refused. Now that's interesting, nothing is impossible I shouted with my nerd hat on. I'm in the tech space for a good few decades now, I have FAANG experience, complex systems are my thing!

I spent 5 hours diving through tons of spaghetti code plugins masquerading as highly abstracted set of interfaces to arrive at the conclusion that these guys were right, the PDF blob comes from the shipment company's SOAP API, though it's obfuscated deep enough. In the end I solved it with a simple PyQT+fPDF UI utility to crop out the printable parts and project them onto the right sized canvas for printing, it took me 2h to complete with binary packaging and all, less time than it took to understand why the WordPress site can't do it natively, and much less than than it would have taken me to integrate this PDF modification into WordPress. These guys were basically right.

Her site now backs up to 4GB zip with photo assets. I dread the day when her site goes down due to some "hack" but I have no idea how to replicate this functionality for this cost without WP. No way in hell I would say I can do it from scratch for her, my previous Web dev experience doesn't matter at this point. Shopify? Sigh.

Re: WP21

#58

Post by skilled »

karolist wrote: post #57

My gf has a WP ecommerce site that her business revolves around, it was built buy some local guys doing WP development who have an agency solving problems just with WP. She told me how fast they were able to iterate and solve all their problems. The site has a bunch of plugins integrating various social services, ad tracking, SEO and whatnot. The site generates PDF shipment labels for parcels, one day her sales got h…

4GB? Those are rookie numbers. I have a site where /wp-content/ is 20GB. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of images that have been auto generated by WordPress because of how thumbnails and minifaction works, but also converting images to WebP. And if you delete old posts or any other content, the images stay.

And it’s my understanding that there is no safe way to remove unused images. I have tried to do it using the in-built media manager but eventually I gave up because it’s tedious and I don’t want to risk leaving pages without images by accident.

Re: WP21

#59

Post by p4bl0 »

I remember a time when WordPress was "easy". Nowadays starting from a clean install and customizing the appearance and modules has actually become quite difficult. Even the usage workflow feels bloated.

These days I prefer Dotclear as a blog engine. It also has grown in complexity over the years, but not quite as much and still feels like nothing is getting on your way.

This is from the point of view of someone knowing how to program and the languages involved (PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS, etc.) but who's not a professional web developer and even less a professional WordPress-based developer (since this is now actually a thing).

Re: WP21

#60

Post by dmje »

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?

It’s HN. This is where WordPress comes to get bashed :-)

Although - to be fair, I’m not seeing nearly as many anti-WP comments as you’d expect here - most people are being reasonably balanced with their criticisms.

As a long time WP agency owner I agree with a fair number of the comments.

My main beef now with the platform is that there are three fairly distinct types of WordPress in 2024.

1) “Classic” WordPress with no Gutenberg: great for data rich sites where you want many custom post types and taxonomies

2) “Gutenberg” WordPress for rich front end editing

3) “FSE” WordPress for quickly throwing up a one pager or simple brochureware site

I wish WP was a bit more vocal about explaining these types and how they differ. And in fact I think they’re sufficiently distinct that the installation path should be explicit about these types and which to choose.

There are of course endless things that really should be in core and not provided by plugins - it’s sometimes galling to have a team pushing endless changes out to Gutenberg when the underlying software doesn’t have obvious stuff. Page duplication, acf style custom field support, rich seo, sitemaps, better media handling, etc - all of this should just be there without plugins.

But - as said above, it’s easy to snipe and overall I bloody love most of the whole ecosystem :-)

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