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The complicated futility of WordPress

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Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#141

Post by chris_wot »

camillomiller wrote: post #116
akerr wrote: post #74

WordPress keeps getting better and 5.9 was a big leap forward. The OP should try using a vanilla WP install, use or build a (child) theme that supports blocks, add WP Super Cache to get static site level performance and stop worrying about complex layers of third-party cruft. If you're worried about 'marketing interns' messing with the site, don't give them 'Administrator' roles!

This is a well know issue though. For client work there's just no way that clients don't want to have an Admin user for themselves, in case you part ways etc... Which is absolutely fair. The problem is when the intern forgets its password and instead of resetting it, they get the admin credentials from their boss (been there, done that!).

Well, that’s not a Wordpress failure, that’s an organisational failure.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#142

Post by throw0101a »

seanwilson wrote: post #21

Are there any good options for an open source headless CMS that works with a static site generator that has a page builder that has quick and accurate live previews before you deploy? E.g. so you can build new landing pages from header, testimonial and contact form blocks. There's lots of options if you just want Markdown but this isn't enough for heavily branded business websites where you need to check how complex…

> Are there any good options for an open source headless CMS that works with a static site generator that has a page builder that has quick and accurate live previews before you deploy? E.g. so you can build new landing pages from header, testimonial and contact form blocks.

WordPress with a plug-in that spits out the static site? E.g.:

* https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/

Edit/update via GUI, generate the static site, view it locally, rsync it to your hosting provider.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#144

Post by throw0101a »

o_m wrote: post #111
imilk wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Directus is an amazing open source tool that you can self host as easy as deploying a Node app. You can setup content types with a nice UI, very configurable roles so a client can't break the site, a media library that can hook into S3/DO Spaces, a REST or Graphql API built in, webhooks, revisions, works with many different DBs, and a bit more I'm not thinking of. I'm not affiliated with them at all. Was just very pl…

A basic feature all headless CMS's don't have is nested pages/documents. It is how the web works, so why have they all agreed to not have the feature?

Nesting is not necessary for the web to work.

Wikipedia/Wikimedia does not have nesting: each page/topic is its own top-level article without hierarchy. Meanwhile BookStack, another open source wiki platform, does have hierarchical organization.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#145

Post by Nextgrid »

sdze wrote: post #83
raylus wrote: post #72

Django [ https://www.djangoproject.com/ ] + Wagtail CMS [ https://wagtail.org/ ] have been great alternatives for our team.

Why did you choose this over WP? Or was WP not even considered as a candidate? I mean the ecosystem of WP seems to be a magnitude greater.

I would never want to host or be responsible for a WP site just because of the security vulnerabilities and potential for abuse (it could start serving spam/malware/etc), but especially not under my/my company's domain and put my reputation and users on the line.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#146

Post by vgb2k18 »

seanwilson wrote: post #21

Are there any good options for an open source headless CMS that works with a static site generator that has a page builder that has quick and accurate live previews before you deploy? E.g. so you can build new landing pages from header, testimonial and contact form blocks. There's lots of options if you just want Markdown but this isn't enough for heavily branded business websites where you need to check how complex…

Wagtail - https://wagtail.io/

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#147

Post by raylus »

sdze wrote: post #83
raylus wrote: post #72

Django [ https://www.djangoproject.com/ ] + Wagtail CMS [ https://wagtail.org/ ] have been great alternatives for our team.

Why did you choose this over WP? Or was WP not even considered as a candidate? I mean the ecosystem of WP seems to be a magnitude greater.

I've used WP for years and still have stores and sites humming along just fine with my own theme and minimal plugins (pre-gutenberg), it had been my tool of choice throughout the start of my professional career. Those WP sites proudly filled my resume and PHP was my go to backend language until around 6 years ago.

Honestly, I was skeptical of Wagtail before developing blocks to work with their StreamField concept and diving into how clean and clear the Python models can be written as well as how all the data is clearly typed. Our team has decoupled implementations where we use Wagtail's GraphQL API and a modern Javascript frontend, along with traditional Django template driven sites. The ecosystem for Wagtail and Django is larger than you may think, but you are correct it that may take a few weeks to build out some integration that could have been plug-and-play in the WP plugin ecosystem, I usually take weeks to vet any off-the-shelf plugin and look into all of its code anyways.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#148

Post by ratww »

danjac wrote: post #122
bsder wrote: post #10

> Sites that have been painstakingly, designed and built, reviewed and refined to the last detail And this misses the point . Many/most businesses gain zero business value from a website. Most businesses don't need a bespoke website. They need a website that looks like every other business website, allows marketing to throw a new whitepaper up every couple of months, and maybe allows people to send marketing/sales an…

I suspect Wordpress developers make bank from the Everest-sized amount of bikeshedding from non-developers that goes the average bog-standard corporate website.

Yeah. Most WP developers and Wordpress itself agree with GP, but it is businesses asking for six-figures websites that require a designer to get made, despite developers and Wordpress saying the contrary.

I've seen it happening a thousand times: businesses asking for extremely intricate websites (despite better advice), only to fail to deliver the content they needed room for and having to hire copywriters for fluff. At some point they don't care about money anymore, it's all about the thrill of the bike shed.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#149

Post by jrochkind1 »

I'm not a serious WordPress user, so this comes from a perspective of not quite understanding what OP is describing. But.

"From the beginning [using wordpress for complicated non-blog sites] has felt like a hack – WordPress is, and always has been a blogging platform at heart," but once WordPress decides to "pull away from this use case completely" [wait, what use case?] to "move the platform to a fully fledged site builder"... that's the problem? Because it sounds like they're intending to be moving toward the OP's use case, not away from it?

Can someone explain what i'm seeing as tension here?

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