91–100 of 183 posts
I have come across a situation, where an automatic Wordpress update (need to keep up to date, against vulnerabilities) made a site I maintain violate the law: I used a unicode symbol for something in text. Wordpress out of nowhere and by itself decided, that it would be better to replace that symbol with a bloody svg, that is loaded from some third party. At first I could not believe my eyes, then it dawned on me, ho…
I'm not saying it is or it isn't, but I do wonder how many people are doing business with WP while never considering a donation or whatever value add for the project. At the same time maybe you do pay, maybe they already swim in money.
My sister co-owns a very basic architecting firm, and they have figured out WordPress based on online materials to design a website that suits them pretty well. Maybe that is not the long term solution for them, but it is a very productive place to start for a small business.
- The core update process. It's long been one-click. Almost no other CMS or self-hosted framework offers as smooth an update process. (With Laravel, for example, I end up paying for Laravel Shift and even then it requires manual intervention that would be hard for a non-dev to handle.) For WP, services now exist to do automated updates with health checks and rollbacks to counter potential plugin incompatibility[1].
- The plugin ecosystem. WP went from "democratizing publishing" to "democratizing user-owned sites and businesses". From learning management systems to stores to paid newsletters, it's pretty cool what people with no programming experience can spin up.
Things I'd love to see for WP in the next 21 years (that we'll probably get sooner if enough people contribute):
- Built-in multilingual support. The web is global but WP isn't really, yet, except via third-party plugins. It's on the roadmap[2] but it's been a long time coming.
- Improved education around Full Site Editing (FSE) and the new editor. The tools are getting good now, but there's still an education gap. Lots of people are helping to close this, though. Jamie Marsland's YouTube videos do a great job of showing what's possible with FSE, for example. [3]
- Background batch processing/queues. These are only available via third-party solutions (and bundled with things like WooCommerce), but should probably be built into core.
- SQLite support. Already pretty good but not officially supported in core yet.
- Built-in site migrations. Also on the roadmap.[4]
- Enhanced Playground tech. Distributing WP as a single binary for dependency-free local development (i.e. without Node.js) feels achievable and worthwhile.
- Version control. It's too hard to store a WP site's state in a git repo and keep that synced with production and staging environments, especially when those with admin access can install and upgrade plugins independently of the repo.
[1] Like Automattic's own scheduled updater on WP.com (https://wordpress.com/blog/2024/05/20/scheduled-plugin-updat...) and WP Engine's Smart Plugin Manager (https://wpengine.com/smart-plugin-manager/).
[2] Current state of multilingual sites in WP: https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/word...
[3] I like Jamie's videos showing how to recreate famous layouts with FSE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrdXCSIP578
[4] Site Transfer Protocol: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/60375
I just wish WordPress actually adhered to development standards, not actively tried to break them. Using globals everywhere and encouraging spaghetti code with its classic themes, and with its new themes it evidently learned nothing and is encouraging JSON inside HTML comments which obviously has no editor support, is very prone to errors, besides being just plain stupid (like seriously, some senior engineers I assum…
If you adhere to development standards your users aren't locked in to your platform. They could move to better working, more manageable CMSes instead of begrudgingly having to pay someone or, better yet, move to your hosted solution to keep the platform from tripping on its own feet. Unfortunately that could negatively affect your "Our platform powers 43.4% of all websites" marketing pitch.
Quick judgments and strong opinions have unfortunately become part of the community. Having spent the last 2-3 months working excessively on WordPress development, I would like to say a word about the excellent isolation of code with blocks ("Gutenberg"). As standalone plugins or in combination with Advanced Custom Fields, these allow for perfect, modular websites and development flows (design system), where even the…
What's the best skeleton theme to build your own theme on in 2024, that supports Full site editing, Gutenberg etc? After a decade away from WP I wanted to set up a new site. The default 2024 theme doesn't meet my needs, and I couldn't find a modern skeleton theme where I could add in Tailwind and build what I wanted. I've used https://roots.io/sage/ previously but they're moving further and further away from the WP w…
WordPress is not the blogging solution humanity deserves, but the one that was needed. Customising a base and installing plugins as opposed to devving a blogging platform allows a huge portion of people to create internet businesses who otherwise wouldn't. I get that there are supposed better solutions now, but this was not the case a few years ago. And there is a lot of WordPress content out there for novices to lea…
What better solution for self-hosted websites that can be jump started by anyone and provide the kind of flexibility that WP provides?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a handful of different personal web apps spinning away, and other critical-path ones for work. Nothing though gives me the feeling of dread that I get when my partner's business WP site goes down and she asks if I can take a look.
It's amazing how much lock-in you get by developing ecommerce sites with WP for clients. Her site was recently down, just didn't load. She paid a few hundred for the agency to take a look, they said they updated plugins and "removed viruses" and all is good again. If you're someone not technical or without a huge sum of money to pay someone to replicate the functionality to migrate off WP you're on the hook for the l…
If I hadn't named the exact issue for her in her communications I'm sure a consultant would have happily shaken her down for the same.
To be fair though, we get the same at work with Salesforce consultants
WordPress is my favorite example of "It doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to work" So many cool projects die because people over-complicate the first steps. You can always make it better later if people start using your thing, but first you gotta ship.
Funny, I think it proves the contrary. Wordpress effectively made their whole code base the public API, so now they’re stuck with the legacy code they have for eternity, unable to meaningfully improve it, as plugins may depend on the existing state. It’s so bad, the PHP language developers are unable to implement some features/fixes in the language, as the Wordpress team refuses to migrate their code, which makes for…
My gf has a WP ecommerce site that her business revolves around, it was built buy some local guys doing WP development who have an agency solving problems just with WP. She told me how fast they were able to iterate and solve all their problems. The site has a bunch of plugins integrating various social services, ad tracking, SEO and whatnot. The site generates PDF shipment labels for parcels, one day her sales got h…
4GB? Those are rookie numbers. I have a site where /wp-content/ is 20GB. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of images that have been auto generated by WordPress because of how thumbnails and minifaction works, but also converting images to WebP. And if you delete old posts or any other content, the images stay. And it’s my understanding that there is no safe way to remove unused images. I have tried to do it using the…
In my eyes it's more optimal to just don't worry and take the WordPress site as simply a tool - yes, it will break after 5 years, but by that time you would have needed new site anyway.