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Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

lasselaursen.com

71–78 of 78 posts

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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What do you even mean by vanilla wordpress? Get a hosting service with a DB for a couple bucks a month, install wordpress, do whatever you want with it by following the wonderful documentation that is anywhere on the internet. What else is there to talk about?

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

#72

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.

Do you manage the Wordpress blog installation yourself? As part 2 will detail, the whole purpose of switching to Wordpress was to reduce the work load of building/maintaining the site. I fully agree, Wordpress is swimming in tutorials, docs, and sometimes guides disguised as advertisements for a paid theme. Re. changing fonts - My actual first thought was 'Surely I just need to find the settings in WP that let's me c…

Originally Wordpress 6.4 was supposed to introduce a native way to change fonts through the Font Library addition, but it’s been postponed until 6.5.

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/59166

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

#73

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.

Huh, all plugins in the plugin repository are GPL compliant. If you can find one that isn't, please notify the plugin team, they will deal with it.

What you might mean is that there are GPL plugins that you can use with a third party service that you have to pay for. And yes, that is a grey middleground that is allowed at wordpress.org.

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

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, if you're talking about vanilla WordPress, the article doesn't make any sense. Vanilla WordPress is completely free. There are no fees for adding different fonts or any of the other things you say you were charged for. So if it's not a managed service charging you those fees, where are they coming from?

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

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ani…

Appreciate the link. I agree that CSS has come a long way. Not sure I agree this carousel covers 99% of the use cases, if that's what you meant?

Regardless, my motivation was to implement as little as possible, as the whole motivation to switch to Wordpress was to not minimize what I'd have to build. I will make a note to detail that better in the future. Appreciate the candor.

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, if you're talking about vanilla WordPress, the article doesn't make any sense. Vanilla WordPress is completely free. There are no fees for adding different fonts or any of the other things you say you were charged for. So if it's not a managed service charging you those fees, where are they coming from?

The fees are coming from turn-key solutions that offer to solve the issues I note in the article, e.g. paid themes or paid plug-ins.

I've made sure to more explicitly motivate the intent of switching to Wordpress being to reduce custom code and on-going maintenance, in the article.

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you manage the Wordpress blog installation yourself? As part 2 will detail, the whole purpose of switching to Wordpress was to reduce the work load of building/maintaining the site. I fully agree, Wordpress is swimming in tutorials, docs, and sometimes guides disguised as advertisements for a paid theme. Re. changing fonts - My actual first thought was 'Surely I just need to find the settings in WP that let's me c…

Originally Wordpress 6.4 was supposed to introduce a native way to change fonts through the Font Library addition, but it’s been postponed until 6.5. https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/59166

Ah, very interesting!

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Part 2 is available now: https://www.lasselaursen.com/post/the-virtue-of-selective-ig...
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