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The complicated futility of WordPress

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Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#81

Post by sdze »

JimDabell wrote: post #59
dinkleberg wrote: post #51

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…

Carrd and Webflow are popular for non-technical founders who want a basic marketing site these days. WordPress or DIY are not even close to your only choices, there are a huge amount of platforms out there for this. Developing a marketing site by hand is almost never the right choice for an early-stage startup. Pretty much everything else on your to-do list is a more useful thing to spend your time on than hand-craft…

Why would I choose these niche alternatives, when I have an huge wordpress developer ecosystem at my fingertips? At least here in Europe Webflow is virtually unknown.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#82

Post by Krasnol »

I tried to find a local web developer for a friends small company last year and wasn't able to find anybody in his region who would work with anything else. Even though I needed a mostly static page with a news module.

We ended up hiring a student who just typed the solution himself...

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#83

Post by sdze »

raylus wrote: post #72

Django [ https://www.djangoproject.com/ ] + Wagtail CMS [ https://wagtail.org/ ] have been great alternatives for our team.

Why did you choose this over WP? Or was WP not even considered as a candidate? I mean the ecosystem of WP seems to be a magnitude greater.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#84

Post by andrei_says_ »

seanwilson wrote: post #38
andrei_says_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CraftCMS is great and free for single admin. Can’t recommend it enough. If combining with a static site generator you can find craftcms hosting for $5/month.

Doesn't seem to be open source: https://github.com/craftcms/cms/blob/develop/LICENSE.md

I believe the source is available on github and the team accepts pull requests. Single user license is free.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#85

Post by pupppet »

I’ve easily built hundreds of WP sites and Gutenberg makes me sad. Anyone raving about the block editor has clearly never used one of WP’s paid page builder plugins like Beaver Builder and Elementor, they’re in a whole different league. You of course can continue using these plugins, but the absolute chasm in quality separating these plugins and Gutenberg highlights Automattic doesn’t have the technical or design know-how to push WP forward. And with WP being my bread and butter, that’s a little scary.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#86

Post by JimDabell »

sdze wrote: post #81
JimDabell wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carrd and Webflow are popular for non-technical founders who want a basic marketing site these days. WordPress or DIY are not even close to your only choices, there are a huge amount of platforms out there for this. Developing a marketing site by hand is almost never the right choice for an early-stage startup. Pretty much everything else on your to-do list is a more useful thing to spend your time on than hand-craft…

Why would I choose these niche alternatives, when I have an huge wordpress developer ecosystem at my fingertips? At least here in Europe Webflow is virtually unknown.

Niche? They are both well-known successful unicorns.

As for why you would choose them over WordPress, please just read the conversation. I was replying to somebody who had already tried to start with WordPress and gave up on it.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#87

Post by sdze »

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…

> 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.

What "backend spaghetti" ? What endless backdoors and security issues? https://www.opencve.io/cve?vendor=wordpress&cvss=critical&se...

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#88

Post by scarecrowbob »

bsder wrote: post #10

> Sites that have been painstakingly, designed and built, reviewed and refined to the last detail And this misses the point . Many/most businesses gain zero business value from a website. Most businesses don't need a bespoke website. They need a website that looks like every other business website, allows marketing to throw a new whitepaper up every couple of months, and maybe allows people to send marketing/sales an…

I do a lot of WordPress hosting. I more or less agree with you: I really don't think most orgs are served by having custom theming.

I've done several websites at the low 6 figure range.

I've seen a lot of work go into fine details. To me that's fair: good design is just a lot of tiny tweaks iterating toward something simple, and that's what the designer I work with does well. If that makes the people we're working for feel good, then yay.

If it helps, most of that cost actually goes into data modeling, migrating/ cleaning the data, training users on the admin system, or connecting the site to an ERP and writing functionality to render that data. Or requirements gathering, process documentation, publication strategies, or whatever.

Another side is that most of the off-the-shelf stuff I see won't pass our a11y audit. Which is important to me not just from an ass-covering direction but because I really think that blind folks ought to be able to use the web.

As to the author's point, just locking down what users can do should be good enough. I've been crapping out WP sites in an hour for my musician friends, and my hope is that full site editing gets good enough that I don't need a theme, just a good plugin.

But yeah, in general you're right. I tell folks that they should concentrate on finding some good content, and then the rest of the crap doesn't matter.

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#89

Post by [deleted] »

taubek wrote: post #77
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 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…

[deleted]

Re: The complicated futility of WordPress

#90

Post by MattieTK »

I used to work for a major multinational media company.

A few years ago the CTO at that media company looked to slash costs. They have a bunch of newspapers all over the world, and they had just acquired an Indian software development agency with experience in WordPress.

You can see where this is going.

Soon, a programme to launch WordPress globally to every publisher as their CMS.

But of course you would be allowed some flexibility. You could bring your own CDN if needed, you could bring your own frontend to read off the API, you could harness some identity management system for login, you could even build your own content store.

At that point "using WordPress" just became modifying Gutenberg. I feel sorry for the staff still there who have to constantly fight against Automattic's clear direction in building a Squarespace competitor, to build a tightly locked down and limited editor against the frustrations of the rest of the WordPress ecosystem.

WordPress is great, if you realise what WordPress wants to be, and don't fight that.

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