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A case for something, anything more simple than WordPress

colin.getbarley.com

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Re: A case for something, anything more simple than WordPress

#31

Post by jamesbritt »

ZoFreX wrote: post #28
homosaur wrote: post #24

I'm so weary of people pitching the solution to WordPress and then tossing a proprietary cloud hosted thing at me. That's a complete non-starter. All the time I hear from fellow devs "oh don't advertise you use WordPress, it's irrelevant to clients." Tell that to my bank account and all the jobs I've stolen from agencies who wanted to use their BS proprietary CMS. I sell WordPress like this: when you want a rebuild i…

So the advantage of Wordpress isn't anything you could find by looking at Wordpress itself... it's the popularity and huge amount of support that brings? Makes sense. So the "next Wordpress" won't be able to be the next Wordpress until it's popular. It'll have to be good for other reasons until then.

Yes. People who say they are creating a Wordpress replacement need to make clear what they understand Wordpress to be and what exactly they are replacing.

Re: A case for something, anything more simple than WordPress

#33

Post by zapt02 »

Karunamon wrote: post #20
jamesbritt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also very easy to extend. True. I hadn't done any PHP coding in many years, and knew essentially nothing about how WP worked, but Google + tenacity = useful results. Shortcodes, for example; super cool. There are plenty of WTF moments in PHP and Wordpress but nothing that prevents pragmatic results.

Worth mentioning though, that level of easy extensibility, combined with Wordpress' absurd popularity, makes it very easy to get into trouble. It's the Internet Explorer of the blogging world. Consider: http://wpmu.org/why-you-should-never-search-for-free-wordpre...

Your link has nothing to do with building themes or plugins though..

Re: A case for something, anything more simple than WordPress

#36

Post by dabernathy89 »

homosaur wrote: post #24

I'm so weary of people pitching the solution to WordPress and then tossing a proprietary cloud hosted thing at me. That's a complete non-starter. All the time I hear from fellow devs "oh don't advertise you use WordPress, it's irrelevant to clients." Tell that to my bank account and all the jobs I've stolen from agencies who wanted to use their BS proprietary CMS. I sell WordPress like this: when you want a rebuild i…

Not to mention - if the problem you're trying to address is the admin area / interface, and not the codebase, then a plugin is all you need.

Re: A case for something, anything more simple than WordPress

#37

Post by lobotryas »

ZoFreX wrote: post #28
homosaur wrote: post #24

I'm so weary of people pitching the solution to WordPress and then tossing a proprietary cloud hosted thing at me. That's a complete non-starter. All the time I hear from fellow devs "oh don't advertise you use WordPress, it's irrelevant to clients." Tell that to my bank account and all the jobs I've stolen from agencies who wanted to use their BS proprietary CMS. I sell WordPress like this: when you want a rebuild i…

So the advantage of Wordpress isn't anything you could find by looking at Wordpress itself... it's the popularity and huge amount of support that brings? Makes sense. So the "next Wordpress" won't be able to be the next Wordpress until it's popular. It'll have to be good for other reasons until then.

You got it! The same Catch-22 applies to many other products like social media (facebook), online auctions (ebay) and the email protocol.

Re: A case for something, anything more simple than WordPress

#38

Post by Karunamon »

zapt02 wrote: post #33
Karunamon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth mentioning though, that level of easy extensibility, combined with Wordpress' absurd popularity, makes it very easy to get into trouble. It's the Internet Explorer of the blogging world. Consider: http://wpmu.org/why-you-should-never-search-for-free-wordpre...

Your link has nothing to do with building themes or plugins though..

Building, no. Using, everything. A non trivial amount of plugins/themes an average user is likely to install are major security risks.

Re: A case for something, anything more simple than WordPress

#39

Post by kartikkumar »

> Some sites are blogs, others are small business web sites, others are photo galleries, others are one pagers of information, and some are pages that let you buy things. There shouldn't just be one tool to build all of these.

I find that above text a bit odd. Maybe I'm misinterpretting it, but why exactly shouldn't there be one tool to build all of those websites? It might very well be that Wordpress is not suited to build all those things, but it doesn't follow logically that there should not be a "mastertool", no matter what.

I understand the general sentiment of "horses for courses", but I also think that it's important to make sure that your tools are performing well, rather than trying to make a blanket statement about what web dev tools should and shouldn't do in general.

Re: A case for something, anything more simple than WordPress

#40

Post by rocky1138 »

gmays wrote: post #30

Here's a crazy idea: You're a developer. If it's too complex for your customer, then simplify it. Fight the urge to build something new just because you can. You're really the only person that cares that you built it, everyone else just wants something that works. I understand why you're following 37signals' simplicity model, but those markets didn't have flexible CMS' to start with like we do. The beauty of WordPres…

In my experience developing websites for clients, I've found the ones that ask for simplicity up-front (or ones I assume will need simplicity) end up requiring other more complex features down the line, making WordPress a great choice to start with and then expand into without much rework.
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