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The complicated futility of WordPress

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Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#61

Post by askbill »

We’re a custom dev shop with expertise in WordPress. Our biggest clients are ones that built a substantial business on WordPress then outgrew their site / dev / hosting and came looking for us. Gutenberg will never stop that evolution.

I’m thrilled they’re lowering the bar to manage sites and stay competitive in the marketplace. It’s enabling new businesses and filling a fresh pipeline for us.

WP isn’t limiting us at all. Build pipelines, bundlers, edge workers, js frameworks. It’s all the same. I don’t have to try to sell the advantages of a new CMS. And as a bonus, we already speak the same language as I’m building them a tailor fit WP that they’re already familiar with.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#62

Post by muglug »

For at least the last 10 years WordPress has been an OSS tool whose serverside internals make hardened software engineers recoil in horror, but which nevertheless continues to deliver incredible value for the majority of its customer base.

It's a reminder that if you build something that people really want, how you build it doesn't matter, as long as you have plenty of duck tape at the ready.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#63

Post by jawngee »

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…

+1 Directus

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#64

Post by jawngee »

ivanmontillam wrote: post #54
eric4smith wrote: post #52

I absolutely hate Wordpress, but I completely understand why it's popular. The reason why it's bigger than other publishing tools, is because there's almost nothing out there that has the deep network of plugins that can do almost anything. Sure, the backend of spaghetti PHP, HTML, MySql and endless backdoors and security issues are a nightmare, but there are really not that many alternatives to what Wordpress can do…

My business partner and I hit a wall when we tried to automate WordPress. We tried to implement a plugin where Events in WordPress would be triggered, evaluate Conditions and then execute Actions (Send email, Trigger Webhook at Zapier, Update fields over the triggered record, etc.) Turns out, WordPress is not architecturally ready for this much evolution. And that's when we got disenchanted from WordPress and went to…

This doesn't make any sense or you are explaining it badly.

You are basically describing how every WordPress plugin already works via filters and actions (collectively referred to as hooks).

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#65

Post by seanwilson »

imilk wrote: post #50
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…

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…

Any links to how page building and live previews look?

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#66

Post by imilk »

prog5 wrote: post #56
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…

This looks amazing thank you. I'm curious about the REST API part. Have you used that before? How configureable is it? It sounds like a scaffold of some sort... but, what if I needed to do some custom data processing on the data before returning it in the API, are there hooks for that?

I'm not an expert since I used it for a few projects about a year ago. But the web hooks are mostly for when items are added/updated/deleted.

They have pretty useful API parameters for transforming images. But my initial instinct is to say that you'll have to do custom data processing in the front end or somewhere else, since the API it generates just mirrors the structure of your database. The nice thing about this approach is that you can always remove Directus from a project and your database will function as normal.

They also have pretty use docs which you can check out for your usecase:

https://docs.directus.io/reference/introduction/

edit: I should also add that you can add your own custom modules, but I never really explored that too much.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#67

Post by imilk »

seanwilson wrote: post #65
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…

Any links to how page building and live previews look?

You can make a page builder using it, but you're going to have to create content types for each block with many to many relationships to pages. It's not going to function like a WP page builder, but it also would allow you more control over what a client can add to a page.

Don't think there are live previews, but I might be wrong (people can create custom modules, like plugins, and I haven't checked in on it for a year or so).

One use case we made is a place where a non-tech savvy marketing manager at a chain of retail stores can enter/edit the store info & deals for each location. Then the info & deals then get updated on the stores' app, website, and on site displays from a single UI.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#68

Post by marc_io »

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…

Stackbit can do that in its premium plan. It's not open source, unfortunately.

https://docs.stackbit.com/conceptual-guides/modeling-storing...

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#69

Post by weird-eye-issue »

Full site editing has to be explicitly enabled by the theme. By default it is off.

I recently upgraded my WP sites to 5.9 and nothing really changed at all. Because the theme I'm using does not opt-in to full site editing. This whole post seems to be a knee jerk reaction that isn't based in reality.

TLDR: Nothing has actually changed for this person or their clients

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#70

Post by DamnInteresting »

amanzi wrote: post #9

I've been working with WordPress for a long time and have run a blogging network built on Wordpress since 2005-ish. Over the last few years, it's felt like I've been swimming upstream fighting against WordPress as they have tried to morph into a general website publishing tool (in order to compete with Wix, SquareSpace, etc) rather than their initial blogging roots. Security has never been a WordPress strong point an…

I am in almost exactly the same boat. I built my first Wordpress-based website in 2005, and it is still online today. I've had to employ a constellation of plugins (some third-party, some home-grown) to keep Gutenberg from mangling my content. Gutenberg could have (and in my opinion, should have) been just another official plugin. Instead it's trying to break my site's bones so they will re-heal in a new configuration. Begone unwelcome meddler!
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