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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

#61

Post by Gazoo101 »

oooyay wrote: post #40

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…

Good advice. For me, I found that I would on occasion just have large blocks of time away from my site, meaning any sufficiently complex contextual understanding to maintain it withered away. Hence my move to Wordpress which I plan to detail next.

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

#62

Post by Gazoo101 »

RobotToaster wrote: post #42

Basically my experience of it, I've never seen an open source project so hostile to open source. A huge amount of features that should be in core are locked behind the proprietary "jetpack" SAAS. The plugins repository is a hive of scum and freemium, with no way to search for only GPL compliant plugins.

I wonder if 'hostile' is the right word, but I certainly agree that very functional things felt oddly missing. It is definitely super subjective as to what's 'very functional' and part of a basic package, but I'd definitely prefer an entry level cost and then have a more expanded base version of Wordpress.

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

#63

Post by Gazoo101 »

lioeters wrote: post #20

I hope the author goes more in detail about how the plugin "Loops & Logic" solved their need of listing the newest blog posts. Looks like it's a flexible templating system. https://loopsandlogic.com/

I'll make a note of that for part 3 - thanks for the suggestion!

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

#64

Post by mbakke »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #55
mbakke wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My primary issue with the WP ecosystem is how folks end up paying for GPL software. Why is that a an issue? Sounds like WP has solved a problem that an entire industry has wanted to achieve since the invention of the GPL. Red Hat also sells GPL software. The problem for them is that customers are simply rebranding Red Hat at a cheaper price point, becoming competitors. I'm kind of surprised this is not happening in…

Except it doesn't really solve the problem. You might as well just have whatever normal for-pay license. The reason it is an issue is that not just that it's not legitimate GPL (which is ethically wrong to me- it's literally stealing from a community). The issue is that it splits up the repos which messes with the upgrade structure. That's fine until you get a security issue and the community can't collectively updat…

So selling GPL software is unethical, but selling proprietary software is? That's an unusual point of view!

I don't have WP experience and don't understand what "splits up the repos which messes with the upgrade structure" means. I can sort of understand the argument that not buying a new license can prevent upgrades, but, I still think it's within the spirit of the GPL. As a user of said plugin, you can choose to make the necessary changes yourself (or hire someone for it). Or look for a gratis alternative.

To me it sounds like the GPL is doing exactly what it was designed for.

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

#65

Post by Gazoo101 »

ramesh31 wrote: post #45

>"For each of these design problems, I eventually found a fee-free solution:" Sticky – WordPress 6.2 (released in March this year) adds native sticky support. Non-standard font – Twentig plug-in. Latest 3 blog posts – Team Tangible‘s Loops & Logic plug-in. Gallery Lightbox – dFactory‘s responsive lightbox and gallery plug-in. And here's the problem with WordPress. That's literally 4 lines of CSS and two lines of PHP,…

I'll grant you the sticky, the font, and heck, I'll even toss in the latest 3 blog posts too, but how in the heck is a gallery lightbox anywhere near 4 lines of CSS and two lines of PHP?

And unless I'm missing something, doesn't injecting PHP either require a plug-in or actively building on to a wordpress component?

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

#66

Post by Gazoo101 »

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

I'm talking about using native Wordpress functionality on a managed service. Yes, Wordpress is customizable of course, but the goal was to consider the functionality provided in its basic form without payment, and which features required payment.

Granted, changing the CSS is straight-forward, but not necessarily for everyone switching to Wordpress.

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

#67

Post by Gazoo101 »

erellsworth wrote: post #41
mpol wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, you're right. It looks like they are talking about some other managed service. That makes the post even more meaningless since they don't even say what managed service they are using. It seems they are complaining about what some unnamed managed service is charging them and framing it as criticism of WordPress.

The point is to comment on vanilla Wordpress itself. I fail to see how the managed service I'm using is relevant?

Where exactly in the article am I complaining about being charged for having someone manage my backend?

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

#68

Post by FireBeyond »

Gazoo101 wrote: post #59
FireBeyond wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promising potential. > June 9, 2023 > This post is the first in a three-part series about migrating from a self-built PHP-based Laravel backend to a managed WordPress backend. Cool... > But it’s still worth it. Find out next week part two in this series, same bat-time, same bat-website… Excellent. Let's go find parts two and three! Oh. There is no part two. Or three.

A fair point - I had the intention of publishing them all together and got distracted. I thought I'd share the post here, as I now actually do have all the parts lined up and will have them ready within the next 2 weeks. Happy to ping you with them if you're still keen.

Awesome! I will keep watch! And thank you :)

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

#69

Post by fragmede »

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 you don't want to leave a pile of shit for the next person to clean up. If you're maintaining code, and a function seems to be returning the wrong value for the ticket/bug you're investigating, do you comment out the whole function and just return $right_answer, or do you investigate what's going on so that the function is returning the wrong answer for a given set of args.

By that same extension, a custom hacked up theme is the "return 4; /*" of site maintenance.

By using a plugin, the person that follows you doesn't have to be a webdev who could float a css div blindfolded.

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

#70

Post by ramesh31 »

Gazoo101 wrote: post #65
ramesh31 wrote: post #45

>"For each of these design problems, I eventually found a fee-free solution:" Sticky – WordPress 6.2 (released in March this year) adds native sticky support. Non-standard font – Twentig plug-in. Latest 3 blog posts – Team Tangible‘s Loops & Logic plug-in. Gallery Lightbox – dFactory‘s responsive lightbox and gallery plug-in. And here's the problem with WordPress. That's literally 4 lines of CSS and two lines of PHP,…

I'll grant you the sticky, the font, and heck, I'll even toss in the latest 3 blog posts too, but how in the heck is a gallery lightbox anywhere near 4 lines of CSS and two lines of PHP? And unless I'm missing something, doesn't injecting PHP either require a plug-in or actively building on to a wordpress component?

>but how in the heck is a gallery lightbox anywhere near 4 lines of CSS and two lines of PHP?

Most implementations are massively bloated as a legacy from the jQuery days when that was neccessary. CSS is incredibly powerful now, and the browsers are all evergreen, so it's pretty trivial to implement a pure CSS/HTML gallery:

https://css-tricks.com/css-only-carousel/

This is fully featured, with indexing, scrolling, animation, etc., but you could slim that down even further to just a few lines for a simple automated slider. Obviously doesn't work if you need managed control, but 99% of gallery use-cases are just flipping through a homepage hero like the OP.

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