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Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

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Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#31

Post by ericcholis »

pathartl wrote: post #30

I was a WP dev for 5-7 years before moving on to bigger and better things. It's easy to hate on the platform, for both justified and unjustified reasons. As a writer, it's good not great. As a low code dev, it's the best because you can do 99% of what you need to do with no licensing costs. As a regular beginner dev it's a great platform to learn on. As an experienced dev it's just terrible to get anything done and t…

I think your two points about Xdebug and PHP naming conventions aren't a fair lense on PHP as a whole. Seems that they're framed around how wordpress uses PHP (poorly) for some of the more basic abstractions.

You aren't likely to find those issues in any modern PHP Framework out the box.

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#32

Post by waynesonfire »

dmje wrote: post #27
waynesonfire wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very vanilla wordpress, it was a basic blog site. I think the only plugins I used were google analytics and some basic theme. I would keep it updated whenever I remember but maybe it wasn't often enough. Not exactly sure what the vector was and from whatever quality of analysis I did, the system didn't appear damaged beyond the changes made to the wordpress folder and luckily, the damage didn't seem to escape the www…

I'm gunna suggest compromised hosting. The issues I've seen (once plugins / core / php is up to date and obvious stuff sorted) has been almost entirely on shared hosts.

Oh, interesting, indeed could have been php.

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#33

Post by noisymemories »

I've worked mainly on Wordpress themes and plugins for the last 7-8 years, and I've yet to see anything resembling common best practices regarding testing, CI/CD or even deployment coming from Automattic, especially regarding themes. That would be very nice to have.

Most of the issues regarding the instability and lack of security of the platform come straight from the mantra "upload the file using ftp and the edit them straight on production server" advertised by Automattic. This is not a serious answer from a platform that allegedly controls roughly 30-40% of the websites around.

What I'm afraid is that most of those choices (not moving to current development and deployment standards, doing the bare minimum in terms of upgrades to core functionalities of the platform, forcefully intertwining data, content and appearance of the website in the same SQL tables) are well intentional, and Automattic is "pulling an Internet Explorer 6", making sure that most users are locked-in on their platform by staying very away from any modern tech that could somehow make easier for developers to move to a different platform.

It's very, very complicated to move anything written on Wordpress on a different platform without losing some content along the way .

When your website is actually just a huge ball of: pictures loosely related to your content by their dynamically generated file name, textual content placed inside layout-defining shortcodes all stored together inside a single SQL query and dinamically rewritten by some inline php written in a single functions.php file, forget about moving anything to Squarespace, Ghost, Hugo or whatever without having to actually rewrite by hand all of your posts.

Oh, and also - I'd love to see some actual moderation in the Plugin marketplace. It's become incredibly common to find a plugin being acquired by another developer and being completely replaced between versions with a completely different plugin having just a very passing resemblance with the original set of features but also integrating a slew of unrelated paid "marketing" services and subscriptions. Just today I found out a "maintenance page" plugin has just morphed into a full visual builder who immediately started nagging about having a subscription for the inevitable "pro version".

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#34

Post by deltarholamda »

pathartl wrote: post #30

I was a WP dev for 5-7 years before moving on to bigger and better things. It's easy to hate on the platform, for both justified and unjustified reasons. As a writer, it's good not great. As a low code dev, it's the best because you can do 99% of what you need to do with no licensing costs. As a regular beginner dev it's a great platform to learn on. As an experienced dev it's just terrible to get anything done and t…

>Using methods like get_post or the_content are great examples of why people hate PHP

The big problem with people getting into PHP via Wordpress is that Wordpress isn't, really, written in PHP. It's a WP-flavor subset of PHP, and a lot of it goes way, way back to when PHP could only be written with a hammer and chisel. It's been kept because a lot of things depend on it not changing. (I give the devs credit for not breaking a whole lot over the years.)

But compared to anything that's a bit more modern, or even writing something from scratch, it's a bit of a slog.

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#35

Post by dgb23 »

michaelbrave wrote: post #16
skrowl wrote: post #10

Port it to a modern language so PHP can finally die, add support for PostgreSQL and MS SQL

I've not played with it yet but I've heard good things about the newest version of PHP, could anyone confirm?

There is a bunch of relatively new stuff in place that really help: Enums, match, readonly (classes), attributes for metadata, union types in function signatures (very useful), improved destructuring. Also some issues with traits and interfaces have been resolved since a while.

Those kind of changes are good for PHP, because they give you more tools to write compact, simple code that plays nicely with some of the legacy builtins/libraries and so on. It's remarkable how much it has been improving.

However, it's still a clunky language, because almost every feature has its weird caveats and limits that a more modern, well designed language just doesn't have.

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#36

Post by 4oo4 »

dmje wrote: post #27
waynesonfire wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very vanilla wordpress, it was a basic blog site. I think the only plugins I used were google analytics and some basic theme. I would keep it updated whenever I remember but maybe it wasn't often enough. Not exactly sure what the vector was and from whatever quality of analysis I did, the system didn't appear damaged beyond the changes made to the wordpress folder and luckily, the damage didn't seem to escape the www…

I'm gunna suggest compromised hosting. The issues I've seen (once plugins / core / php is up to date and obvious stuff sorted) has been almost entirely on shared hosts.

Php is a beast of an attack surface. On every php install I try to do as much hardening as I can, especially with `disable_functions`, since you can make it much harder for someone to get a useful reverse shell, or other nasty things, like the built in `shell_exec` function.

https://www.madirish.net/?article=229

I'm betting most WordPress shared hosting doesn't do that, nor give people the means to set up a web app firewall in front of it. Without these things I'd never want to expose a WordPress install to the internet :)

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#37

Post by snowwrestler »

mszmszmsz wrote: post #6

The biggest mess IMO is the media library. Unsustainable, chaotic, impossible to keep in order if you happen to publish more than just a few images. It’s not a library. It’s a file dump. If you want to reuse an asset on a non-trivial site, it’s easier to reupload the file rather than to find it in a flat list of thousands of thumbnails. Folders, please. And the four hopeless fields to provide an image with textual me…

Folders have problems too, inflexible and depend on people managing them well. If the team can’t be bothered to namespace files and fill in metadata properly, I doubt they will manage folders well either.

It’s 2022. There’s got to be something more sophisticated than folders, something content-aware that reliably finds the desired image in the library and suggests it when someone tries to upload a dupe. How do we have computer vision reliable enough to recognize people on our phones and steer a car, but we’re still relying on metadata and folders to find images in a web CMS?

But the truth is, storage is cheap so there is no compelling reason to solve this problem. If the site ends up with 27 copies of the same JPG, who cares? Oh no, we used 30MB we didn’t have to.

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#38

Post by chiefalchemist »

dmje wrote: post #2

The thing I want to see, above all else (and it is coming, but slowly and without any kind of apparent over-arching strategy - which it badly needs) is designer / developer control. Gutenberg gives remarkable agency to editors, which from one angle is great - lovely to be able to add a column, shift a block upwards, pad that image over to the right without any technical skills. On the other... I don't know a web desi…

That was also my initial reaction (read: disappointment) to Gutenberg. So much so, I opened an issue on GitHub, the reply was (effectively), "What's a style guide?". That wasn't a good sign.

As for progress, the fact that you still can't define color combo pallets is (to put it kindly) weird. It like the GB Core team forgot about MySpace and what happens when the design-blind have no guardrails.

Yes, it kinda getting better. But it still feels like too much trust and responsibility is put on the user and not the tool. It's like having a text input on a form for email and not doing validation because well...you trust people will get it right. Who does that in 2020+?

The last couple of years has been a reminder of how much WP .com means to Automattic. And how little other use cases (e.g., content entered via say ACF because that's all the client wants / needs) matter to them.

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#39

Post by chiefalchemist »

dmje wrote: post #26
vgb2k18 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know a web designer in the world who wants to give their editors complete control. I'm thinking this might be aimed squarely at scenarios where the editor, designer and admin are all the same person.

Some truth in that, for sure. I think they're clearly aiming at the Squarespace / Wix market which is probably the scenario you describe.

Yes, that market via an overhaul of WordPress.com.

Re: Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core

#40

Post by ldiracdelta »

Vanderson wrote: post #5
dmje wrote: post #2

The thing I want to see, above all else (and it is coming, but slowly and without any kind of apparent over-arching strategy - which it badly needs) is designer / developer control. Gutenberg gives remarkable agency to editors, which from one angle is great - lovely to be able to add a column, shift a block upwards, pad that image over to the right without any technical skills. On the other... I don't know a web desi…

I hesitate to even post here about my software, but "web designer first" is a key idea behind the CMS I've worked on for some time now. https://archetypewebsites.com/ A key premise is that the designer decides where things go, and the content editors really just want forms to fill out to get content where the designer says it should go. But like any system, there is full WYSIWYG editable regions as well. (where the p…

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