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The dire state of WordPress

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Re: The dire state of WordPress

#51

Post by andybak »

jsdalton wrote: post #7

To paraphrase Churchill, Wordpress is the worst CMS -- except for all the others. I'd love to find an open-source CMS (preferably in Python or Ruby) with clean, secure, elegant code and a well-organized framework that comes with a friendly admin and active, responsive development community like Wordpress, but so far I've got nothing. (If anyone has any suggestions, please do feel free to share them!)

You could take a look at FeinCMS for Django. But seriously with Rails or Django - especially Django due to the admin site - a bespoke CMS is a fairly trivial endeavour. My initial CMS took a couple of days and it's been easy to extend it for every site that's come along since.

It's a hell of a lot easier for end users than Wordpress and as it's bespoke for every client, they never get clobbered with chunks of the admin that bear only a loose relationship to their own content.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#53

Post by JVIDEL »

chc wrote: post #32
EwanToo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And don't forget the amazing amount of functionality that's available for free using the plugin system. It's a classic software development problem - Wordpress's complexity is both it's strength and weakness, and will probably be it's downfall one day (but not just yet)

On the other hand, most of the free plugins are awful. Many of the paid ones are as well, in fact. Many plugins can bring your site to its knees as soon as five people look at it sideways.

And the templates, some are simply STUNNING it makes you wonder why pro designers charge you so much for stuff that barely holds a candle to stuff you see on WP.

Then you install the template and everything goes to shit, you have to read some of the stuff support writes to users, it boils down to "we sold you a broken product and now we will give you just a hint about how to get it to almost work".

Still lightyears ahead of templates on other CMSs...

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#54

Post by bluedino »

booruguru wrote: post #11
jiggy2011 wrote: post #3

I'm yet to inherit a PHP project that does not contain a file called "functions.php" and it always makes my heart sink when I see it. What I don't get is the demand for all kinds of stuff to be built on top of wordpress that doesn't really have much to do with content management or blogging. For example online games, CRM systems, auction sites etc. Seems a bit like asking for a CMS system that has been implemented as…

People treat WordPress like a Swiss Army Knife because they can. Why build an online directory or CRM or auction site from scratch when you can just use WordPress? It can be a bit sloppy, code-wise, but it works and you can get the job done a lot faster than it would take to do it from scratch. Consider an online business directory. You could just build one from scratch or use some script designed for that purpose bu…

I suggested our company site be re-done using Joomla. The original site was on an ancient platform that we don't work with anymore and we kept an entire server around for it.

We spun up a cloud server with Joomla on it for production use, and a local VM for testing. We had a template created for a couple hundred bucks from some ideas our designers came up with (they can't code, so...) from an Eastern-European on a freelancing site.

Then we just let our marketing guy (also can't code) and some interns loose putting up content. It took a few weeks of their spare time and we had a great looking, functional website.

Since then, the marketing guy has installed a hundred different 'Joomla plugins of the week' and brought the site down a bunch of times, trying to make it into a blog, newsletter, signup sheet, web store...

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#55

Post by jordanlev »

jsdalton wrote: post #7

To paraphrase Churchill, Wordpress is the worst CMS -- except for all the others. I'd love to find an open-source CMS (preferably in Python or Ruby) with clean, secure, elegant code and a well-organized framework that comes with a friendly admin and active, responsive development community like Wordpress, but so far I've got nothing. (If anyone has any suggestions, please do feel free to share them!)

I discovered Concrete5 ( http://concrete5.org ) a few years ago after building many Wordpress sites (large and small), and totally fell in love with it. It's not perfect, but it's much better than any other CMS out there for end-users, designers, and developers:

* Editing UI is on the front-end -- users just go to the page they want to edit and click on things to edit them, which is much more intuitive than a back-end dashboard

* Content on pages is a collection of "blocks", so each portion of content on the page can be edited separately (as opposed to one WYSIWYG editor for the whole page). I've even built a free addon that lets designers compose their own custom block interfaces ( http://concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/designer-content ), so if you have a "employee bio block" (for example), you can have an image chooser, a textbox for a headline, a wysiwyg editor for the description, and a page chooser for a link instead of requiring the user to fidget with alignments, floats, and custom styles in TinyMCE/FCKEditor.

* Create themes from your existing design / markup -- the CMS flows around your design as opposed to you having to construct your design around the requirements of the CMS (this is much more of a problem with Drupal than Wordpress, but still gets annoying in WP for non-blog-like designs).

* Underlying architecture is fairly sane -- definitely has some idiosyncracies, but nothing like Wordpress (or Drupal or Joomla). There's a simple MVC pattern going on so you separate your model / controller / view code, and the underlying system has a decent "API" for working with pages, content, users, files, etc. Also, if you have very customized functionality, you can just create a separate page in your site and tell the system to not do anything... that you will handle everything yourself on that particular page or area of your site.

The only downside is that it's not as popular as wordpress so the documentation is lacking and there are not as many free plugins and tutorials available (but hopefully this will continue to change as time goes on).

But it has made building CMS-based websites so much more fun for me. Hit me up ( concrete@jordanlev.com ) if you want to discuss further or have any questions.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#56

Post by jiggy2011 »

booruguru wrote: post #11
jiggy2011 wrote: post #3

I'm yet to inherit a PHP project that does not contain a file called "functions.php" and it always makes my heart sink when I see it. What I don't get is the demand for all kinds of stuff to be built on top of wordpress that doesn't really have much to do with content management or blogging. For example online games, CRM systems, auction sites etc. Seems a bit like asking for a CMS system that has been implemented as…

People treat WordPress like a Swiss Army Knife because they can. Why build an online directory or CRM or auction site from scratch when you can just use WordPress? It can be a bit sloppy, code-wise, but it works and you can get the job done a lot faster than it would take to do it from scratch. Consider an online business directory. You could just build one from scratch or use some script designed for that purpose bu…

Granted I'm not a WP expert but something like CRM seems like something that would be a different category of problem to what WP is intended to solve. It would seem like fitting a square peg into a round hole, where most of the existing functionality wouldn't even be very relevant?

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#57

Post by andybak »

Jgrubb wrote: post #42
riccardoforina wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at django-cms.org The "automagical installation" is something that can be done, but it's up to the provider to do it. A Python website (as well as for Ruby) ain't a bunch of files served by Apache, but something more... smart.

Call me crazy, but being able to drop files into a docroot of an apache install and have them Just Work seems like a much smarter market strategy for uptake of your product than what can currently be done with either Python or Ruby. Then again maybe you had a different idea of "smart".

Yes, it's a better marketing strategy for new developers and the extra hassle to deploy Python and Ruby sites probably does put people off.

But I'm not sure if 'good at attracting new developers' is the only criterion worth evaluating when picking a framework.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#58

Post by chc »

JVIDEL wrote: post #53
chc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, most of the free plugins are awful. Many of the paid ones are as well, in fact. Many plugins can bring your site to its knees as soon as five people look at it sideways.

And the templates, some are simply STUNNING it makes you wonder why pro designers charge you so much for stuff that barely holds a candle to stuff you see on WP. Then you install the template and everything goes to shit, you have to read some of the stuff support writes to users, it boils down to "we sold you a broken product and now we will give you just a hint about how to get it to almost work". Still lightyears a…

> Still lightyears ahead of templates on other CMSs...

Yup, but I think that's primarily because WordPress has a stranglehold on the market. Nobody will use another CMS because WordPress has all the stuff, and nobody will develop mass-market stuff for another content management system because WordPress has all the users. The network effect is strong, and displacing WordPress wouldn't be profitable enough to be worth the effort to counteract that effect.

(Obviously this is a slight exaggeration — somebody uses another CMS — but I think it's pretty accurate from a bird's eye view.)

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#59

Post by JVIDEL »

FilterJoe wrote: post #46
jsdalton wrote: post #7

To paraphrase Churchill, Wordpress is the worst CMS -- except for all the others. I'd love to find an open-source CMS (preferably in Python or Ruby) with clean, secure, elegant code and a well-organized framework that comes with a friendly admin and active, responsive development community like Wordpress, but so far I've got nothing. (If anyone has any suggestions, please do feel free to share them!)

Mezzanine is quite nice: http://mezzanine.jupo.org/ It's Python (a Django app). BSD license. It has many advantages over Wordpress that I won't get into here, but all this is offset by one massive disadvantage: It rests on the Django framework. Django is a nice framework for web development but it takes at least a few months to learn for someone starting from scratch. The installation process for Mezzanine requires s…

Some cloud providers have auto-installers, its all paid though.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#60

Post by andybak »

programminggeek wrote: post #45

PROTIP: If you want to get rid of wordpress, make something that will run on cheap hosting with one click installs, and be easy enough that a non-technical user can setup their own site with it.

Cheap hosting gets better and one-click installs get smarter.

Dreamhost and Webfaction have a Django one-click installer. There's no reason why other shared hosts can't do the same.

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