The complicated futility of WordPress
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The complicated futility of WordPress
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Re: The complicated futility of WordPress
#2The blog author complains about the loss of control over the editing experience with the recent changes to WordPress.
Personally I found Drupal to be a much better system for their use case, to provide client 'content editing' that does not disrupt the front end design (allowing user to edit content but limit novice users changing styles or branding).
Drupal has got quite a lot better over the past few years but gets overlooked as it has a bigger learning curve.
Re: The complicated futility of WordPress
#3I was recently doing some electrical work on my house. The past owner had really jacked things up. I couldn't figure out and had to call an electrician. I'd imagine the majority of their work is DIY'ers who've f'ed up and had to call a pro. To me that's what going to happen here - marketing will continually screw and tinker w/ shit till it's broke and then they'll call you to fix it.
I also want to add this is a good example of why marketing should probably just be using tools like Insta, Twitter, FB etc to get their message out. Now if you actually have a good company blog w/ good resources than that's different but I think that's more the exception than the norm.
Re: The complicated futility of WordPress
#4I’ve been a WordPress dev since 3.0.
It is a tool. And a very good one. Its market share dominance it not because it is proprietary (it is not) or because of vendor lock in (there is none). It is because it works very well, it is lightweight, it runs pretty much on any host, and is friendly to devs and end users.
Part of being a good dev is knowing which tool to use (and when to not use a tool) and how to get the most out of the tool.
Re: The complicated futility of WordPress
#5I feel like the intent of the Gutenberg editor and all the 'blocks' is basically "we want to make the specialization of 'bespoke website developer' obsolete".
Whether it's there or not, I have no idea; I only use WP for my personal site, which runs on templates I kludged up myself years ago. But my less-technical friends? If they have a site it's usually something built with some kind of sitebuilder. Gutenberg's trying to serve their needs.
Re: The complicated futility of WordPress
#6This must explain why WordPress has been losing market share every year for more than a decade, right?
Re: The complicated futility of WordPress
#7It looks like the chief complaint is that full site editing will make it so you don't have to call in a developer - or a WordPress power user to change something in the footer. This has really been needed for a long time. At the same time, it's kind of amazing that WordPress is the best we can do for making publishing to the web easy for everyone. It's really good, but is sure seems like something better should be possible...
Re: The complicated futility of WordPress
#8I hope more people stop building bespoke websites and start building tools for regular people to just make things. It's 2021. It should not be this hard for a regular person to update a website.
If you can make a powerpoint presentation with MS PowerPoint, why can't you make a website that way?
Re: The complicated futility of WordPress
#9I'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 and things are still terrible today with a constant stream of backdoored plugins and themes being available. 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. It's all too much for me now and I'm keen to get out of the Automattic/WordPress ecosystem.
One option is ClassicPress which has forked v4 of WordPress but I'm not 100% confident that they will stick around. Apart from that, there are limited options out there that can replace the multisite features of WordPress. All I know is that the future of WordPress will be what Automattic want to do with it and I don't think they'll care if nobody outside of wordpress dot com uses it.
Re: The complicated futility of WordPress
#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 email from a form.
That's it. Nothing more.
Most businesses don't need a $100,000 website. They don't need an optimized UX experience. They simply need a "good enough" web experience because not having a web experience is considered a faux pas even if your web experience is a gigantic waste of your time and brings no value to the business.
A Wordpress hosting company is perfect for this.