Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WP21

ma.tt

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 183 posts

Re: WP21

#121

Post by kunley »

rrreese wrote: post #86
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…

>Quick judgments I think most peoples judgments have been formed over 21 years. WordPress initially gained a reputation for being a fast and easy way to setup a website, then gained a reputation for being a security nightmare. Maybe its not anymore but people are right to be sceptical. I sure do see a lot of CVEs in the weekly update I check - maybe they're all low risk, or relate to rarely used plugins.

I think the root of bad reputation was due to various plugins and their usage pattern:

lots of non-tech users heard that they can use plugins X Y Z for fun and profit, so they started to use them, but no one told them that managing dependencies requires some skill or at least discipline; that the fact some 3rd party pluggable software exists doesn't automatically mean it's good, viable, maintainable and safe; and that things in IT don't work by means of cargo cult, copy-pasting without underdstanding and by crossing fingers. So, there was a fallacy: these people believed (and many believe until this day) that they can remain being non-tech users while maintaining their wordpress-with-plugins installation, but it's impossible; one needs to become tech-aware in the process.

I am not sure what WP community did to dissolve this fallacy; maybe they did something. maybe didn't.

Re: WP21

#122

Post by V__ »

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…

The thing is, there are a lot of other CMSs out there, which can do this as well with much less bloat. Statamic, Craft CMS etc.

Re: WP21

#123

Post by JimDabell »

hawski wrote: post #92
zelphirkalt wrote: post #71

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, ho…

> Of course it is very clear now, that it is completely unfit for any business website, when the core developers make such bad decisions. I'm not saying it is or it isn't, but I do wonder how many people are doing business with WP while never considering a donation or whatever value add for the project. At the same time maybe you do pay, maybe they already swim in money.

Automattic is valued at $7.5BN. They don’t need your donations.

Re: WP21

#124

Post by JimDabell »

eertami wrote: post #116
zelphirkalt wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR, EU. You cannot simply load third party shit on your website, without asking for consent. By downloading an SVG from a third party provider, I would need to ask the visitor, whether transmitting their IP address is OK or not, since that is personal data. Aside form all the information associated with when someone accesses the site.

> You cannot simply load third party shit on your website, without asking for consent That's not how the GDPR works at all. If it were, there would be no content distribution networks operating in the EU. Linking to a third party image in document markup does not involve you transmitting anything.

By including external references to third-parties, you’re effectively leaking your visitors’ IP addresses to the third-party. Those IP addresses are considered PII and are covered by the GDPR.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/31/website_fine_google_f...

Re: WP21

#125

Post by sureIy »

fastball wrote: post #107
sureIy wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> better solutions now What better solution for self-hosted websites that can be jump started by anyone and provide the kind of flexibility that WP provides?

It really depends on your needs. Are there many alternatives more flexible than WP? No. But that is begging the question. The vast majority of people don't need the kitchen sink that is WP, and would be better served by utilizing one of the many products and platforms that have cropped up to fill more specific niches since the inception of WP. Just need a blog? Maybe want it to be a newsletter? Ghost, Medium, Substac…

Out of all your examples, only Ghost is self hosted. Not everyone wants to or is able to afford a $20/month provider, especially small businesses outside the US.

Re: WP21

#126

Post by egman_ekki »

JeanMarcS wrote: post #109
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…

WordPress is a great blogging CMS. The fact that people use it for something else is what create strong opinions. Example : woo commerce. Products ? In the WP_POST db. Orders ? In the WP_POST db. And in every post about WP it says that using WP_POST for storing your data is good practice. Well I don't think it is (but it's only my opinion. A strong one). And the problem is that a LOT of plugins and themes are like th…

> Example : woo commerce.

> Orders ? In the WP_POST db.

No longer true, at least for new installations: https://woocommerce.com/document/high-performance-order-stor...

Re: WP21

#127

Post by dep_b »

I prefer something like Django to build more complex websites against for clients, or just pure PHP for blog style stuff for myself. WP level sites wouldn’t hire me as two days of my work is as expensive as years of WP hosting.

But I admire the way the web was democratized with these CMS’es.

Re: WP21

#128

Post by 5636588 »

JeanMarcS wrote: post #109
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…

WordPress is a great blogging CMS. The fact that people use it for something else is what create strong opinions. Example : woo commerce. Products ? In the WP_POST db. Orders ? In the WP_POST db. And in every post about WP it says that using WP_POST for storing your data is good practice. Well I don't think it is (but it's only my opinion. A strong one). And the problem is that a LOT of plugins and themes are like th…

FYI, WooCommerce added the ability to store orders in a separate database table.

Re: WP21

#129

Post by Kye »

>> "Almost every site would be improved by having a great blog."

Unfortunately, WordPress seems to move further and further from this every year. I've used WordPress from near the start, and the editor is so top-heavy now that I get anxiety opening it. Switching to Ghost (with a nice little $4/month managed host[0,1]) was a breath of fresh air.

It doesn't do all the things WordPress does, but it does the things it does do better. Especially newsletters and pay gating.

[0] Referral link: https://magicpages.co?aff=9fLJierQBpnV

[1] Non-referral link: https://magicpages.co

Re: WP21

#130

Post by easyThrowaway »

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'…

I've "inherited" a website using Divi for all of its styling.

It's absolutely one of the worst pieces of commercial software I've ever seen. Just saving a blog post is capable of putting the entire website in an unrecoverable condition if there's even the slightest timeout in the execution of the terrifying javascript UI they wrote on top of Wordpress. The italian and french localization is genuinely abysmal, on par with some japanese games from the '90s. Responsive options are absolutely non-working, unless by responsive you mean "hide and show content on specific breakpoints". And even then, everything is absolutely brittle given that the front-end "theme" is basically an unreadable dump of jquery-era javascript.

I'm 100% sure nobody would use that if Elegant Themes (Divi authors) weren't massively spending on advertising.

Post reply on HN