Live data from Hacker News

The complicated futility of WordPress

coderjerk.com

71–80 of 241 posts

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#73
> The Gutenberg editor has been a disaster and now the full-site editing looks like it will generate the same type of spaghetti-HTML that the other page builders have been doing for years.

This is not the case at all. The HTML generated by the core blocks is much cleaner than what is generated by most page builders out there, and the new (site) editor just makes use of them.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#74
WordPress keeps getting better and 5.9 was a big leap forward. The OP should try using a vanilla WP install, use or build a (child) theme that supports blocks, add WP Super Cache to get static site level performance and stop worrying about complex layers of third-party cruft. If you're worried about 'marketing interns' messing with the site, don't give them 'Administrator' roles!

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#75
post #45
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely sure it's fair to blame WordPress directly for the quality of 3rd-party products (and their security).

It's fair to the extent that you're required to rely on 3rd-party products to get something done. If WordPress-the-Technology uses WordPress-the-Ecosystem as a main selling point, then its their choice to bundle their reputations together.

Interesting concept: reputation bundling. In this instance of the technology and its ecosystem, but potentially useful in describing other situations as well.

Is this something you came up with on the spot? I haven't come across this idea in communications literature and a cursory search only brings up other types of bundling in economics/business/strategy.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#76

Just today I was looking for a quick way to build a marketing site for my startup that would allow my not super technical co-founder to do the majority of the building. It has been a while since I had used WordPress regularly so maybe there are new sources out there, but I defaulted to checking out ThemeForest to find a decent theme to start with. I consider myself fairly decent at design (though I'm far from an expe…

You could use Blocks.app for that, its a visual site builder. It can even generate a WordPress theme. There's other similar tools like Bootstrap Studio or Coffecup Designer — or Pinegrow, if you are a little more technically inclined.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#77
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 love WordPress. It is kind of a universal tool: you can make simple web sites, you can use it to build complex systems. It is always better if you have developers that know what they are doing. WP development is not installing dozens od plugins to achieve some effect on your web.

I guess that WP wants to become "one to rule them all". This means that they strive for even bigger adoption rate among users. FSE is the direction of that. I can totally understand that professional developers are feeling frustrated with the way things are going in WP ecosystem.

When Gutenberg was introduced it produced more pain that good things that it has brought at that time. A lot o money is floating around WP and investors want to get their share of the cake. Did you notice all of the investments in WP or plugins that have changed their owners?

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#78
post #62

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.

Only for interesting definitions of "doesn't matter." The number of security exploits for WordPress websites seems to differ.

https://www.cvedetails.com/product/4096/Wordpress-Wordpress....

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#79

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…

Why would it be WP's fault? Maybe your competence level wasn't on the necessary level to automate WP.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#80

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…

Yes, Strapi ( https://strapi.io/ ) though I'm not sure about previews. https://www.sanity.io/studio is open source, but some parts of the CMS aren't I don't think. Possibly there could be an adapter to use Sanity Studio w/ Strapi?

strapi is an exciting project that is trying to do too much, but I don't think they are a good alternative to WordPress. They need to stop adding features and start making it work stable.
Post reply on HN