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WP21

ma.tt

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Re: WP21

#71

Post by zelphirkalt »

I have come across a situation, where an automatic Wordpress update (need to keep up to date, against vulnerabilities) made a site I maintain violate the law:

I used a unicode symbol for something in text. Wordpress out of nowhere and by itself decided, that it would be better to replace that symbol with a bloody svg, that is loaded from some third party. At first I could not believe my eyes, then it dawned on me, how incredible reckless they acted with that update. They must really have no clue what they are doing.

Then I scrambled to reverse this bs and tried various things, including editing the theme minimally, which originally I never wanted to do, because I do not want to maintain a theme in addition to the site. Well nothing worked, except for installing a plugin, whose sole purpose it is to reverse this stupidity.

If I had not had functionality connected to the DOM structure around my unicode symbol, I might not have noticed it, because that functionality also broke.

So there we go, WP automatically making the site violating the law by loading from third party without consent and also breaking my functionality and basically forcing me to install a plugin to correct WP core mistakes. Of course it is very clear now, that it is completely unfit for any business website, when the core developers make such bad decisions. It requires constant maintenance, even if you update nothing but WP itself. Alternatively you let it get outdated and get hacked due to vulnerabilities. Great.

Re: WP21

#72

Post by nikolay »

bboygravity wrote: post #48
nikolay wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But they overprice and they forget people use multiple plugins, so I use a third-party service that leverages GPL to offer most premium themes and plugins for a low annual fee.

Re: WP21

#73

Post by nikolay »

9dev wrote: post #49
nikolay wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I blame them as they usually don't know how to price their plugins to get real revenue.

Re: WP21

#74

Post by o_____________o »

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…

It sure seems that way until you need to get just a little bit deeper and you realize what a dumpster fire WordPress is.

You want metadata on posts, you install ACF. You want to filter on that metadata, good luck if it's over a couple filters simultaneously, the SQL queries will time out. Take a look at WP's insane schema to figure that one out.

Gutenberg promises to have WYSIWYG editable React components, which is a big deal, but they made insane decisions like storing the attributes in HTML, rendering HTML in the database, and requiring component developers to keep an array of deprecated changes when they want to modify anything on the component.

There are some people trying to untangle Wordpress by refactoring and bolting Laravel onto it[1], but every layer is just a nightmare; the authors of different parts can barely assess why things randomly break.

You might find WP appealing for the plugin ecosystem, but the plugins are completely random in implementation, so you're likely to get a bloated scramble of CSS and JS pushed to your users.

I moved to Directus and Astro, but I would probably use a Laravel-based CMS like October or Statamic for more generalized PHP deployment.

[1]: https://roots.io/

Re: WP21

#75

Post by smooc »

I'm getting old. I really thought for a moment that the title was about Word Perfect 2.1.

Dann I miss the underwater screen.

Re: WP21

#76

Post by benatkin »

askonomm wrote: post #66

I just wish WordPress actually adhered to development standards, not actively tried to break them. Using globals everywhere and encouraging spaghetti code with its classic themes, and with its new themes it evidently learned nothing and is encouraging JSON inside HTML comments which obviously has no editor support, is very prone to errors, besides being just plain stupid (like seriously, some senior engineers I assum…

I agree that WordPress has often failed to live up to development standards, but those aren't them, those are ones that can legitimately vary between platforms.

Re: WP21

#77

Post by zelphirkalt »

askonomm wrote: post #66

I just wish WordPress actually adhered to development standards, not actively tried to break them. Using globals everywhere and encouraging spaghetti code with its classic themes, and with its new themes it evidently learned nothing and is encouraging JSON inside HTML comments which obviously has no editor support, is very prone to errors, besides being just plain stupid (like seriously, some senior engineers I assum…

They encourage lots and lots of bad practices. I mean, just look at themes and how they are built by default. Comments in a CSS file describe the theme metadata. Using concattenation instead of composition everywhere, so that parts of HTML are not reusable. CSS, inside JS inside HTML inside PHP ...

Part of it is this implicit structure it defines, which file it loads adter ehich other file to make a whole page. It seems convenient at first, if only you know it, but it encourages people to not properly finish all their HTML elements on the same file, but split them up stupidly and end them in other files, never to be reused.

It all seems very beginner-mistake like. But I guess they are stuck with this now, because thousands of themes rely on this, instead of having a structure based on composition. Contrast this for example with how one uses Jinja2 templates rendering blocks and macros.

Re: WP21

#78

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

But HTML is not in your own hands with WP. WP changes your HTML as it pleases. See my other comment as an example.

Re: WP21

#79

Post by jesterson »

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.

> clean code doesn't matter. Security doesn't matter. Out of the box performance doesn't matter.

Absolutely so. Those are things for people to play, while the only thing taht matters is value. Does clean code provide value? No. Does security? No either.

Re: WP21

#80

Post by prmoustache »

9dev wrote: post #47
MangoCoffee wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

> No, but there weren’t any good contenders at the time,

Well yes and no. They were very few good blog focused CMS at the time. A contemporary one that comes to my mind and that actually predate Wordpress was Dotclear (which is still alive and still focusing on blogging). More general CMS like Typo3, Drupal, SPIP, Plone to name only a few open source ones were already around too and much more capable than Wordpress was.

What Wordpress did very well at the beginning, was focusing on one thing: blogging for non technical people. It was a much more limited software but that made it much easier for so much people. And it came exactly during the blog boom and only with time became a more general purpose CMS. But if you had to build a website for your business it was a very bad choice at the time.

Bottom line: making good software is one thing, but timing is everything.

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