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Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

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Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#31

Post by gifmenger »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #11
karaterobot wrote: post #10

Counterpoint: I've had a Wordpress blog for almost 20 years, I've never paid anyone a dime. I don't know PHP, and I only use two plugins, both of them free. With a little bit of Googling you can just hack together whatever you need, because there is a lot of documentation for Wordpress. The author is a web dev, so I'm surprised their first thought was that they needed a plugin to load a font.

It's because customizing a Wordpress theme is a daunting task at first, especially if you try and use the builtin editor instead of taking a theme and stripping it down. WP's page layout and templating is... Different. Which is why it's turned into its own specialism / industry.

Yet using it as a headless CMS allows any dev to just circumvent it's theming dialect altogether.

I think that really illustrates Wordpress' versatility.

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#32

Post by lolinder »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #11
karaterobot wrote: post #10

Counterpoint: I've had a Wordpress blog for almost 20 years, I've never paid anyone a dime. I don't know PHP, and I only use two plugins, both of them free. With a little bit of Googling you can just hack together whatever you need, because there is a lot of documentation for Wordpress. The author is a web dev, so I'm surprised their first thought was that they needed a plugin to load a font.

It's because customizing a Wordpress theme is a daunting task at first, especially if you try and use the builtin editor instead of taking a theme and stripping it down. WP's page layout and templating is... Different. Which is why it's turned into its own specialism / industry.

Again, though, we're talking about a web dev who had previously been managing their own hand-rolled blogging solution.

Something like sticky menus should be trivial for any web dev: find the menu you want to make sticky in the web inspector. Modify the styles inline until you make it work. Grep the theme for the selector that you modified. Copy your modifications.

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#33

Post by calibas »

Saris wrote: post #18
sonicanatidae wrote: post #7

Let's not forget the horrific number and level of vulns identified in WordPress.

Surprisingly I've run a handful of WordPress sites for 10+ years now, some with quite a few plugins for e-commerce stuff, and haven't had any issues with sites getting hacked. I mostly think it's due to updating quickly, generally I update the next day and manage it all with a central service, and just not using unknown plugins that don't get updates.

I used to fix hacked Wordpress sites, top causes were:

* Using a plugin written by a someone who has no idea how SQL injection attacks works.

* Failure to update WP/plugins after a known security vulnerability.

* Poor general security practices. Tip: don't use your domain name with the "o"s replaced by "0"s. Also, don't create a secret backdoor into your site because the owner has trouble remembering his password.

* Your web host itself has been hacked (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/godaddy-hacke...)

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#34

Post by jrm4 »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #30

As someone who is on a, uh, "sabbatical" from programing after 10 years making WP work for gov, edu, and various businesses I have worked on many hundreds of WP sites. I still use it for my personal blog and for marketing my various projects. The article doesn't have a lot of meat, but I think the title alone was interesting. My primary issue with the WP ecosystem is how folks end up paying for GPL software. Leaving…

That's kind of weird, the whole thing strikes me as a reasonable fudge around the GPL (which I agree is incredibly important.)

Do your homework in the ecosystem and you can get that experience, or just pay to get around it seems reasonable, if definitely not ideal?

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#36

Post by sonicanatidae »

josefresco wrote: post #24
sonicanatidae wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hasn't happened to mine, so it's all bullshit. FTFY. Quick, now tell us how secure Adobe products are.

"mine" That critique would be fair if I was talking about my one WordPress site but I'm talking about hundreds, maybe even a thousand if you count sites I've built that came and went. It's a pretty decent sample size (IMHO) both for the number of instances but also the time period (10+ years). And it's also not 300 clone sites, each one was built unique, and each has their own mix of plugins & themes.

Unless you manage every Wordpress site out there, you're biased.

YOU, are a technical person and understand the value of updates, vetting plugins, etc, yet a majority of these sites aren't run by people like you/me. They are run by end users, with all of the baggage.

You have a point, to an extent. I wholly disagree with your stance on WP though. It's got issues, numerous issues, and a majority of the sites aren't professionally managed.

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#37

Post by mpol »

erellsworth wrote: post #6
camillomiller wrote: post #4

Is this post talking about hosted wordpress? Because it makes no sense at all otherwise (and even then…) Wordpress is fully customizable. Why would you need a plugin to make a menu sticky? Either I am missing something here or this OP was trying to much with its Star Trek references to actually understand how Wordpress works

They're talking about WordPress.com, not self-hosted WordPress. It's not a good comparison, in my opinion.

No, not wordpress.com, but a managed hosting provider. That means that wordpress core is managed by the hosting company, but you can install any plugin or theme. In the article they compared it to wordpress.com, so I'm sure it's not about that.

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#38

Post by mdgrech23 »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #30

As someone who is on a, uh, "sabbatical" from programing after 10 years making WP work for gov, edu, and various businesses I have worked on many hundreds of WP sites. I still use it for my personal blog and for marketing my various projects. The article doesn't have a lot of meat, but I think the title alone was interesting. My primary issue with the WP ecosystem is how folks end up paying for GPL software. Leaving…

I started my career on Wordpress. In a lot of ways it was where I learned to program. I'm surprised you stuck w/ it as long as you did, guessing the cash must of been pretty good. To me once you're deep into the internals and writing your own plug-ins you might as well just build something custom. I think it's a good middle ground for someone technical and willing to put in a lot of time but not the know how to truly make something custom.

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#39

Post by Saris »

calibas wrote: post #33
Saris wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly I've run a handful of WordPress sites for 10+ years now, some with quite a few plugins for e-commerce stuff, and haven't had any issues with sites getting hacked. I mostly think it's due to updating quickly, generally I update the next day and manage it all with a central service, and just not using unknown plugins that don't get updates.

I used to fix hacked Wordpress sites, top causes were: * Using a plugin written by a someone who has no idea how SQL injection attacks works. * Failure to update WP/plugins after a known security vulnerability. * Poor general security practices. Tip: don't use your domain name with the "o"s replaced by "0"s. Also, don't create a secret backdoor into your site because the owner has trouble remembering his password. *…

All good points, I've seen some sites with every plugin years out of date when I've helped friends with theirs, weak passwords, that sort of thing.

I've always done my own hosting too, just a minimal setup of nginx, php-fpm, and mariadb on a 1GB RAM VPS. That way I can keep the server side up to date with security patches, instead of relying on a webhost that may not do it.

Backups run nightly offsite, and I monitor the sites with Change Detection so if a plugin update does break something or in the worst case a site gets hacked, I know fairly soon and can either fix it or roll back to a backup.

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#40

Post by oooyay »

When I was younger and much more into PHP as a language WordPress was a great fit for me. WordPress templating was rather obtuse for what's supposed to be a view layer and plugins made use of some pretty exotic APIs that I found hard to understand when not being knee deep in WordPress-land.

Recently I moved my static blog (what it's been since the WordPress days) to Django and Wagtail and my experience has been night and day. I think a big part of that is that Python is one of the languages I code in with some regular amount of frequency and that Django is one or two layers of abstraction below a thing like WordPress, which is much more appealing and intuitive for me as a programmer.

That's to say, pick a platform in a language you like and an abstraction layer that ensures you'll continue to have fun.

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