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The complicated futility of WordPress

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Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#31

Post by mgkimsal »

theteapot wrote: post #11
amiircoal wrote: post #4

I’ve been a WordPress dev since 3.0. It is a tool. And a very good one. Its market share dominance it not because it is proprietary (it is not) or because of vendor lock in (there is none). It is because it works very well, it is lightweight, it runs pretty much on any host, and is friendly to devs and end users. Part of being a good dev is knowing which tool to use (and when to not use a tool) and how to get the mos…

Wordpress is lightweight? 5.9 download is +19.7M zipped and that's without any plugins. The lock in to the Wordpress framework. Not sure whether that qualifies as "vendor" lock in but it's pretty big dep that's impossible to break out of if you go beyond simple blog.

You can easily get locked in to some theme builder or UI toolkit. half the WP folks I know swear by X (genesis theme, etc) and will just rewrite everything in theme X if they take over a project. You're not 'locked in' to WP, you're 'locked in' to themes and plugins.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#32

Post by andrei_says_ »

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…

CraftCMS is great and free for single admin. Can’t recommend it enough.

If combining with a static site generator you can find craftcms hosting for $5/month.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#33

Post by Karunamon »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #20
jshwlkr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely sure it's fair to blame WordPress directly for the quality of 3rd-party products (and their security).

Third-party plugins are subject to WordPress's security model and implementation. Automattic could create a PluginV2 system with tightened security and new requirements for plugin developers, then put a plan in place to deprecate and remove support for v1.

...and face a fully justified user/dev revolt that makes Mozilla's worst day look like a single angry tweet. Remember that there's a massive paid ecosystem around WP plugins & themes, not to mention the stuff Automattic sells (hosting, their own plugins, etc.)

They can't afford it, and most people don't want it. I think history shows that taking flexibility away from something popular because of its flexibility is not good business. At least you can install a plugin now and completely sidestep this awful 'site builder'. If that goes away, hoo boy.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#34

Post by lucas_codes »

seanwilson wrote: post #28
hunterb123 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Strapi ( https://strapi.io/ ) though I'm not sure about previews. https://www.sanity.io/studio is open source, but some parts of the CMS aren't I don't think. Possibly there could be an adapter to use Sanity Studio w/ Strapi?

Looks like Strapi has paid only features. Are these significant to most sites? https://strapi.io/pricing-self-hosted "Free...Up to 3 default roles" https://strapi.io/blog/introducing-strapi-enterprise-edition... Sanity.io doesn't seem to be fully open source: https://github.com/sanity-io/sanity/issues/978 "You can only run the Studio connected to the Sanity hosted backend. There is no option for connecting the Studio…

I'm using it. The docs leave a little to be desired if you're customizing (they just released a new major version), but you can customize and replace the rich text editor with your own, add a preview button, add a deploy button, etc.

If you want a wordpress replacement though, there will be a big learning curve as it's a general-purpose CMS, not specifically for blogs.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#35

Post by joshvm »

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…

Depends how complex you want. Jekyll --watch is fine for testing blogs and reloads very fast with --incremental builds. We have it set up with a self hosted netlify for editors - updates get pushed to a repo by netlify, the repo is watched by Google cloud build and the site is automatically updated on save. All on free tier services. Frequent updates will hammer the build server (if you build on each push) so could eg push to a dev branch and merge-to-main with a cron job every so often.

You could run a dev server and port forward the preview if necessary.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#36

Post by gwern »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #20
jshwlkr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely sure it's fair to blame WordPress directly for the quality of 3rd-party products (and their security).

Third-party plugins are subject to WordPress's security model and implementation. Automattic could create a PluginV2 system with tightened security and new requirements for plugin developers, then put a plan in place to deprecate and remove support for v1.

Yes, after 18 years of WordPress development, the architects' excuse of blaming bad actors in plugin ecosystem has begun to wear thin, especially when contemporaries or predecessors like Firefox or Debian never had remotely the same level of problems with their users being hacked constantly by plugins/packages.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#37

Post by rtpg »

indymike wrote: post #7

It looks like the chief complaint is that full site editing will make it so you don't have to call in a developer - or a WordPress power user to change something in the footer. This has really been needed for a long time. At the same time, it's kind of amazing that WordPress is the best we can do for making publishing to the web easy for everyone. It's really good, but is sure seems like something better should be po…

In defense of Wordpress, even getting to what Wordpress is requires having a decently designed system allowing for the flexibility that allows people to ship like... recipe maker plugins or the like.

I think a lot of CMS stuff start at first principles of "OK you need posts, and all this other stuff" but really Wordpress seems to be currently structured around the realization that the hard stuff is all the things that aren't shared between WP instances.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#38

Post by seanwilson »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #32
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…

CraftCMS is great and free for single admin. Can’t recommend it enough. If combining with a static site generator you can find craftcms hosting for $5/month.

Doesn't seem to be open source: https://github.com/craftcms/cms/blob/develop/LICENSE.md

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#39

Post by zrobotics »

anon23anon wrote: post #3

I was recently doing some electrical work on my house. The past owner had really jacked things up. I couldn't figure out and had to call an electrician. I'd imagine the majority of their work is DIY'ers who've f'ed up and had to call a pro. To me that's what going to happen here - marketing will continually screw and tinker w/ shit till it's broke and then they'll call you to fix it. I also want to add this is a good…

Question-if marketing is solely restricted to social media, then what is the point of having a website at all? In the original article the author indicated they develop sites for medium-large industrial corps; and that most of these sites are brochure sites.

So if the marketing team at acme co want to sell customers on their new line of coyote-seeking anvils, what is the point of having a website if they can't update the site with all the features of the new anvils? If they can only put the updated copy on Facebook and Instagram, then they will actively avoid linking to the site, since the copy there talks about the v2 anvils that don't have the new vision based coyote acquisition targeting system.

I've worked in similar roles, and I don't like having to always be involved every time marketing needs to tweak the copy on a page. However, that led me to improve the site infra so they could make those changes themselves rather than wait for a developer to do it for them. And unsurprisingly, removing the forced delay and friction allowed them to vastly improve the page, sales noticed that they were getting more inbound leads. Turns out that having to reach out to another department was causing marketing to delay or cancel minor changes since "it didn't seem like a big enough difference to bother IT with". Telling marketing that they should only be using social platforms sounds like a good way for a developer to talk themselves out of a job, since then accounting will start thinking "why are we even paying this expensive salary if our customers aren't even visiting the site?" Sure I have the engineers typical disdain for marketing, but I do realize that it is a useful function and a necessary evil.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#40

Post by BarryMilo »

Karunamon wrote: post #33
TimTheTinker wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Third-party plugins are subject to WordPress's security model and implementation. Automattic could create a PluginV2 system with tightened security and new requirements for plugin developers, then put a plan in place to deprecate and remove support for v1.

...and face a fully justified user/dev revolt that makes Mozilla's worst day look like a single angry tweet. Remember that there's a massive paid ecosystem around WP plugins & themes, not to mention the stuff Automattic sells (hosting, their own plugins, etc.) They can't afford it, and most people don't want it. I think history shows that taking flexibility away from something popular because of its flexibility is no…

Death by a thousand cuts it is then.
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