Adding composer to WordPress isn’t gong to fix it. The problem is more fundamental - WP was conceived as a blog engine and has proven itself constitutionally incapable of truly moving beyond that frame.
* features
People say that “you can just add a plug-in” for whatever, and that’s true. But so many things that should be core are not (advanced custom fields, forms) and other features have no place in modern WordPress (comments). Gutenberg is an incomplete answer to page builders. While the page builders are impressive, they still have a pretty substantial learning curve.
* cost
I’ve been using WordPress for over a decade and it’s fallen woefully behind other CMS’s. Recently I spun up a site for a client and the plug-ins cost over $1000 just to get them going. That isn’t _WordPress’s_ fault, but it doesn’t help.
* speed
WordPress inexplicably gets slow after about a year unless it’s managed by someone with masters-degree level skill. It’s like the system gets tired. The caching plug-ins help, but why doesn’t WordPress offer better caching itself?
* deploying
Recently, I decided I’d had enough. I was doing a one-day build for a small marketing site and it took two hours to deploy because the “yoast” plug-in broke the WP CLI’s ability to search and replace the database for URL’s. Not to mention that source control is a nightmare because people can install their own plug-ins from the dashboard.
I’m writing an open source visual page builder for Laravel. It fixes the problems I see with WordPress for building marketing sites. Think of it as a blend between the visual ease of Webflow and the programmatic power of Laravel. By default, it’ll run off of SQLite (but any sql db will work), so they’re awe only two things living outside source control - the SQLite database and the uploads folder. That makes managing transitions from dev to production an absolute breeze.
I’m very excited about it! It should be ready for beta testing in a few weeks…if anyone wants to give it a shot, let me know.