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WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ

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Re: WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ

#81

Post by dpkonofa »

leonk wrote: post #41

No mention here about Gutenberg's lack of support for accessibility standards. They pretty much went full steam ahead and left the accessibility team behind. See: https://rianrietveld.com/2018/10/09/i-have-resigned-the-word...

Is the summary of that article basically "No one on the accessibility team knows React so we can't help?". If so, then that's more the accessibility team's fault than it is the rest of the dev team. Granted, accessibility should be a priority for the whole team, but when it's your team's job to do that singular part of the development, maybe you should be resigning and let someone who knows what they're doing take over...

Re: WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ

#82

Post by dpkonofa »

eloisant wrote: post #4
tvanantwerp wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been looking hard for an open source replacement for the backend that would let my users edit as simply as with WordPress, but not tie my hands with PHP and an odd API for creating the front end. But so far, I haven't found anything that meets users needs like WordPress does. I wish there were more competition in this space. The closest I've seen--different services that let you create content and provide a Grap…

When you say "not very cheap", you're illustrating the problem: people don't want to spend money in their CMS. Companies spend hundreds (or more) a month on various SaaS services but are looking for dirt cheap for something as critical as their public facing website.

I don't think that's it, though. I think the issue is moreso that they have to pay for the CMS and then, typically, for someone to customize it for them to make it what they want it to be. You're essentially paying a very high price for the development and paying another cost on top of that for just the platform might seem excessive to those who don't really know how it all works. People don't mind spending money on a CMS as long as they know how it fits into the project. The issue is that most developers just pick a CMS and don't pay for it because they want to keep more of the money from the client rather than because they know what they're doing and it's the best choice for the project.

Re: WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ

#83

Post by matthiaswh »

andy_adams wrote: post #76

Is anyone else impressed with WordPress/Automattic's willingness to "just ship" despite things not being perfect? As someone who struggles shipping software that basically nobody uses, I don't know if I'd have the guts to say "it's good enough" on a project as big & widely used as WordPress.

Quite the contrary. "Just ship" is a great approach for individuals or startups. WordPress is a behemoth that powers a significant portion of the web, including numerous enterprise corporations, and is the lifeblood of thousands of freelancers and agencies. They should hold themselves to a much higher standard.

When WordPress ships a bug, or a security vulnerability, or drastically and negatively alters the user experience the repercussions are vast and long-lasting.

I can't imagine how many man-hours and how many millions (billions?) of dollars it costs every time this happens.

Re: WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ

#84

Post by lucideer »

agumonkey wrote: post #34
GeneralMaximus wrote: post #14

I know a lot of people dislike PHP and WordPress, but I haven't found _anything_ that comes close to it in terms of sheer extensibility and plugin ecosystem. There's a plugin for pretty much anything you might want to do with a platform. I even moved my personal Jekyll-powered blog to WordPress a few years ago. My favorite thing about WordPress is that it's a known quantity. There's an easy to follow tutorial teachin…

Just don't look into plugin sources. Maybe it improved since, but in 2011 it was frightening. hundred line long nested for loops with an almost exact copy just below but not really. Then commented code in the published source. In a top 20 plugin at the time.

Still the same

Re: WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ

#85

Post by andy_adams »

matthiaswh wrote: post #83
andy_adams wrote: post #76

Is anyone else impressed with WordPress/Automattic's willingness to "just ship" despite things not being perfect? As someone who struggles shipping software that basically nobody uses, I don't know if I'd have the guts to say "it's good enough" on a project as big & widely used as WordPress.

Quite the contrary. "Just ship" is a great approach for individuals or startups. WordPress is a behemoth that powers a significant portion of the web, including numerous enterprise corporations, and is the lifeblood of thousands of freelancers and agencies. They should hold themselves to a much higher standard. When WordPress ships a bug, or a security vulnerability, or drastically and negatively alters the user expe…

I know what you're saying, but on the flip side: How many billions (trillions?) of dollars has been created by WordPress? And it keeps growing!

I feel that this "shipment" has been fairly responsible, with the Classic Editor plugin as a fallback for people who don't want Gutenberg.

Re: WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ

#86

Post by lucideer »

GeneralMaximus wrote: post #14

I know a lot of people dislike PHP and WordPress, but I haven't found _anything_ that comes close to it in terms of sheer extensibility and plugin ecosystem. There's a plugin for pretty much anything you might want to do with a platform. I even moved my personal Jekyll-powered blog to WordPress a few years ago. My favorite thing about WordPress is that it's a known quantity. There's an easy to follow tutorial teachin…

> I know a lot of people dislike PHP and WordPress, but I haven't found _anything_ that comes close to it in terms of sheer extensibility and plugin ecosystem

You're right about everything there except one word: "extensibility".

Wordpress has a comprehensive hooks system that makes it seem like it's very extensible, but that's only there to make up for the godawful mess that is the codebase itself. PHP (which is a fine language and owes much of its bad press to wordpress tbh), like most modern programming languages, is designed for building easy to extend applications, where devs can leverage simple, testable, reliable language features instead of hooking into the tacked on callbacks API of a core app that's so inconsistent that you never really know for sure if anything's going to work long term.

There's three types of devs who interact with WordPress:

1. people who build "spec-and-deliver" sites for clients, with no ongoing maintenance, and love wordpress because they never see the mess their website turns into.

2. plugin devs who typically don't have to deal with client website maintenance, and definitely don't have to deal first-hand with their own plugins' incompatibilities with other plugins

3. people who have spent time actually maintaining wordpress sites and never want to touch it again

4. (non-dev) amateur bloggers who throw up an install with some plugins, and never look at code, and never update, and don't need any features, and are really the only appropriate audience for this platform... until their site gets hacked for the 15th time...

Re: WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ

#87

Post by ricardonunez »

josefresco wrote: post #39

As someone who hosts over 150 WordPress websites for small businesses ... I'm not thrilled about this release and the work it will entail given the editor overhaul. Another user posted this: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/06/5-0-gutenberg-sta... Also this posted by the author of Advanced Custom Fields, a very popular plugin: https://twitter.com/wp_acf/status/1070089217479307264

I manage a fair amount of WordPress sites. You need to add all your websites to a WordPress manager like ManageWP. Install the classic editor. That will give you time. We will not use Gutenberg for now. I'm creating a training to help everybody use it.

Re: WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ

#88

Post by Vanderson »

Will Gutenberg actually help Wordpress? I don't think so. Why? Most site owners aren't designers and don't do layout or content building well at all. Maybe I am short sighted on this though.

Much of my business has been replacing sites that run on Wordpress with my own CMS Archetype. Even though it lacks a lot of the power of mass of WP plugins, it makes up for it with simplicity of production and ease of use.

Some site owners want more control/power over layout building, and others would be overwhelmed by the extra features of Gutenberg.

Will Gutenberg become a core complaint of WP in the future? Maybe. The biggest complaints I've gotten about Wordpress are these:

1. Can't hand it off to clients to edit their own content, because it's too hard to learn. Or if you do train someone, it turns into a cycle of retraining. (though this seems to be Gutenberg's real target goal)

2. Updating is painful. Plugins break on a regular basis.

3. Security, WP sites get hacked alot. Think this is primarily because most WP sites aren't run by professionals, but individuals.

But also, #2 applies here, there's motivation to _not_ upgrade because of the possibility of breaking the site.

There are others, but Gutenberg would not solve these 3 largest problems with WP that I have run into.

Re: WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ

#89

Post by jjeaff »

rob wrote: post #80
joekrill wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right. The big issue (for me, at least), is that it's a security nightmare. At least last I used it. It seemed there were security exploits popping up every day. Either from the core codebase, or from some random plugin everyone seemed to be using. I think that was just the nature of how their plugin system works? I'm not sure if anything's changed, but _maintaining_ a WordPress install is not fun a…

> but _maintaining_ a WordPress install is not fun and requires constant - almost tiring - oversight. This isn't true. I've been running and managing 15+ WordPress websites for over 5 years now and not once run into any issues like you're describing, and I certainly haven't lost sleep or become 'tired' over it. Using a good tool like ManageWP (or InfiniteWP, or any of the others, take your pick) makes managing multip…

The fact that you even mention that you get security updates "every morning" is an indication of how much work keeping a WordPress site secure can be.

I think it is just wordpress' ubiquiti that has made it a security issue though. Attackers are quick to build exploit bots the moment a new vulnerability is found and they scour the web for unpatched sites.

So if you don't stay on your toes, you will get pwned sooner or later with a wp site.

Re: WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ

#90

Post by agumonkey »

lucideer wrote: post #84
agumonkey wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just don't look into plugin sources. Maybe it improved since, but in 2011 it was frightening. hundred line long nested for loops with an almost exact copy just below but not really. Then commented code in the published source. In a top 20 plugin at the time.

Still the same

Even after the symfony bundle era ? I was hoping too much maybe.
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