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WordPress Is in Trouble

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Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#71

Post by dageshi »

treyd wrote: post #32

WordPress is a very mature project with a long legacy but I'm surprised that there hasn't been a larger profile attempt to make a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage of being PHP and the long history of vulns that have come along with it. I'm imagining some very pluggable and template driven runtime that you can ship very declarative packages for. The spicy take would be to use a Scheme for the templ…

Every time I read a comment like this about replacing WP and PHP with a successor it just sounds so incredibly out of touch.

I mean no offense OP but it's obvious you have no clue at all about who actually uses WP and why they do it.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#72

Post by hombre_fatal »

lbhdc wrote: post #27
huijzer wrote: post #19

Hopefully many sites will switch to a static site generator like Hugo or Zola. Way lower costs, lower risk of being hacked (almost impossible actually), and a reliable backup thanks to Git. I’m running multiple static sites for years already and am very happy with it. It has been very reliable.

I think the popularity of Wordpress comes from the access it gives to non-technical people (plus ecosystem). I am sure someone is smart enough to write a CMS that can effectively do that under the hood, but I don't think it matters to the people who choose Wordpress.

Also, Wordpress already can generate a static site.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#73

Post by pluc »

softwaredoug wrote: post #50
pluc wrote: post #11

Mullenweg is in trouble, WordPress is gonna be fine. https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...

Without a canonical fork for the community (and crucially plugin authors) to rally around it’ll be a bit like Linux distros without a shared executable format, making life difficult for everyone and making it harder to keep critical mass for any vendor.

That's difficult to do, but time will tell. There are already established forks, there are obvious leaders, there are known mechanisms to go around wordpress.org... something at some point will pick up steam and that'll be that. Maybe it will be Mullenweg himself who will continue to dig his own grave, maybe it will be the lawsuit that will be the final nail in his coffin... who knows. But WordPress will be fine.

And if it isn't, really, who cares. It's not a particularly well built or unique piece of software. Maybe it's time for something else.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#74

Post by internetter »

karaterobot wrote: post #17

I've had a Wordpress blog for about 25 years. This makes me want to turn off automatic updates, since I'm worried he might just go nuclear and flip some sort of kill switch that bricks every blog, or push some ridiculous anti-Wordpress Engine banner to every installation. Of course, not keeping WP up to date is very risky as well. I'm not even insensitive to his position, even though I don't know full details. But, h…

Consider a static site. They cannot be hacked, they are cheaper to host, and once the files are generated they are immutable

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#75

Post by hoofhearted »

I’ve been working on a side hobby project for a year in an attempt to solve these problems.

It keeps growing in interest, and the demand has become more than I can handle currently.

If anyone is interested in helping to build an open and secure platform that is an alternative to WordPress, please reach out or comment.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#76

Post by justinator »

Spunkie wrote: post #24

Crazy how hosting wordpress, between 2003-2024, your main concern was Chinese/Russian hackers. And in 2025 you main concern should be if Mullenweg will hijack your website for his pissing match. Also he didn't shut down the sustainability team because he "didn't know about it". He shut it down because their stated goals are a threat to Mullenwegs dictatorship hold over wordpress.

As a content creator, it's mostly dealing with Gutenberg and the new theme editor. I couldn't care less what these people are up to.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#77

Post by TheRealPomax »

hoofhearted wrote: post #75

I’ve been working on a side hobby project for a year in an attempt to solve these problems. It keeps growing in interest, and the demand has become more than I can handle currently. If anyone is interested in helping to build an open and secure platform that is an alternative to WordPress, please reach out or comment.

Blog about it and get it on HN?

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#78

Post by ben_w »

woleium wrote: post #43
jazzyjackson wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The principal use of Wordpress IME experience is so people can add content without learning markdown and git and so on

With AI that is now possible without wordpress

Kinda yeah, but with a lot of caveats.

AI output is in a frustrating half way place where the results are simultaneously better than an amateur and worse than someone with a few years of professional experience.

Makes it very tempting to use, but unless you're good at attention to detail and reviewing the output, it's also by default[0] producing certain tells that make many people very weary — think of the meme "if you didn't bother to write it, why should I bother to read it".

[0] you can get past this fairly easily, but IMO learning that is a skill that only comes to the kind of technical person who would also not have any trouble learning the markup/markdown anyway

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#79

Post by internetter »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #36
huijzer wrote: post #19

Hopefully many sites will switch to a static site generator like Hugo or Zola. Way lower costs, lower risk of being hacked (almost impossible actually), and a reliable backup thanks to Git. I’m running multiple static sites for years already and am very happy with it. It has been very reliable.

The principal use of Wordpress IME experience is so people can add content without learning markdown and git and so on

There are CMSes that work with static site generators. Static site generators do not imply that the input is markdown, though this is often the usecase. Any CMS that is decoupled from presentation, in fact, could be used for static site generation. Just read the structure and generate an appropriate HTML tree statically. Here are some CMSes with specific thought given to this use:

https://decapcms.org/

https://getkirby.com/

https://tina.io/

https://statamic.com/

ect ect

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#80

Post by mg »

I find it an interesting question to what degree the design decisions of WordPress are still the right ones in 2025. A PHP backend and frontend running on the same machine, serving dynamically rendered content from a MySql database.

Personally, I prefer to have my content in text files, which are using a DSL similar to Yaml but optimized for use in a CMS. And render it to static html files via Python. A process that happens on a different machine. The html files are then pushed to the server that serves the frontend.

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