A bit fluffy. I think that WordPress will continue to see strong adoption and the rest API will definitely help things, but I don't see it taking over the world.
> No, of course not. Some guy at Forbes just decided to wake up one morning and extol the virtues of WordPress.
In spite of your sarcasm you pretty much nailed it, except the guy doesn't work for Forbes. He's part of the contributor network, which is essentially a few thousand bloggers that get paid based on how much traffic they generate for the site.
The opening paragraph is just an unadulterated train wreck. Forbes continues its path down being nothing more than a mouthpiece for PR folks.
"WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world and is used by nearly 75 million websites. According to WordPress, more than 409 million people view more than 23.6 billion pages each month and users produce 69.5 million new posts and 46.8 million new comments every month. It also powers more than 25% of the world's websites."
Having built Wordpress CMS systems in a variety of scenarios I find it an incredibly frustrating piece of technology. For common framework expectations / patterns in 2016 it feels at least 5-10 years behind. It's difficult to migrate, have multiple environments, deploy, and so much more. In almost every respect I find alternatives such as Craft CMS (php/yii) or Wagtail (Python/Django) vastly superior and much easier to customize. The only reason I find it continues its momentum is that it has word of mouth for managers, mindshare with editors / content managers who know the admin ui well and expect more of the same, and it has a very large plugin/theme ecosystem for people who want to get started very quickly. The problem, especially with some of these themes is that they are almost impossible to extend and maintain and they are very bloated. I find that lately I either choose a flat file CMS for a client (Kirby, Grav) or if its a very simple site I use either Squarespace or Webflow and for other cases I choose Craft CMS, Wagtail or others which need a database backend.
> It's difficult to migrate, have multiple environments, deploy, and so much more.
Sorry, that's kind of silly. WordPress can be incredibly frustrating, for sure, but there's a multitude of migration, deployment, and local development options.
Still, if someone asks what CMS to use, and their needs are better met with a CMS vs. [online site generator] or [real web stack], it's hard to recommend something other than Wordpress in good faith. Standard is standard.
I don't think you understand what WordPress is about. It's about easily clicking together a blog site like lego, where every feature is just a search away in the plugins section. You could probably recreate everything in python django to work as efficiently as possible, but who cares? It's just work for the sake of work at the end of the day.
To some degree, I'd say the archaicness of WordPress (is that a word?) might be part of why it's so popular. Because it's coded in a way that anyone can (fairly easily) figure out how to code themes or add ons without needing to know a lot about programming.
Contrast to many 'better built' frameworks which require you to know more than basic copy and pasting/very old school procedural programming and you've got a system which while less liked by professionals/experts is exactly what your amateur coder or hobbyist wants/can easily get used to.
Kind of like why HTML 5 won out over XML in the end. Because one was simple enough to get used to and met average Joe's needs and one was a bit of a pain in the ass that only 'experts' were patient enough to use.
So yeah, it doesn't follow a lot of recommended patterns and has an archaic coding style and all that, but it comes with the plus side that it's easier to develop stuff for.
Yes, from a content editor perspective, Wordpress is a great choice. Quite a few clients even want their new site based on Wordpress rather than on more heavy weights like Typo3 or Drupal. Wordpress has made many editors more self confident and yes, also interested in what a CMS can do for you (instead of: you needing hours of training to do basic edits).
However, this has some consequences: Clients expect that there is a free or cheap plugin that will solve every single problem. And they often install dozens of them to try to solve it themselves. Maintaining a client site after it has been online for more than a few months is often very painful for a developer: plugins bring style overrides, sometimes break your routing, often miss translation.
Also, a professional Wordpress instance is far from free: you need ACF Pro for good custom fields, Admin Columns Pro to get a useable backend, Relevanssi Pro for proper search, WP Migrate Pro for migration. And you quickly end up with 500$ for a basic setup. And recurring fees. Yes, there are free alternative, but they are not always reliable (I so often had issues with Wordmove migrations...)
As nice as Wordpress is for the editor, it is no fun for the developer and designer: you can get separation of concerns (and Twig templating) with Timber but its nowhere near supporting all functions (password protection does not work, for example). Also, no underlying framework makes creating and working with plugins guesswork.
PHP is a good choice for CMS, but Craft (Yii) or the excellent open source Bolt CMS (Symfony, Twig) bring joy to all involved - editors, designers, coders.
I helped a local non-profit launch a WordPress site recently, having not kept up to date on WordPress for about a decade.
If you ignore the security implications, the plugin mechanism is astonishingly productive - I needed some 301 redirects, so I searched the plugin dashboard for "redirect", clicked "install" and instantly had a new control panel for setting custom redirects.
The variety and quality of available themes is even more impressive. I'm beginning to understand why the overall ecosystem is such a powerhouse, especially as a tool to enable technical-but-not-software-engineer people to build and deploy their own complex sites.
To play the devil's advocate, how fundamentally different is it from searching for a gem that allows some function and copy-pasting some example other than that a non-software engineer can do it?
I know, it caters to different kind users, and libraries are typically meant for code consumption (and show the source code up-front and encourage peer contribution), but there is a similar vector here.
Check out drupal. It offers a lot of flexibility compared to any other cms that I've seen. And ~all modules are open-source and meant to work together, building blocks. Though it's been some years since I've used it, it was at the time.
It was a one-click install - I clicked a button in the Wordpress admin panel and I could start using the functionality. No text editor, no SSHing anywhere, everything happened in my browser. Definitely fundamentally different from copy and pasting code or installing a gem.
It's reached the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" stage; Wordpress has sufficiently high name recognition and base of users that it's the default choice. In fact, it saves a lot of research and frustration. Don't worry about what your needs are, just install wordpress.
I love WordPress. The security of the core software and its ecosystem of plugins is so horrible that's it's guaranteed a steady source of income for me for years from dozens of clients.
There are lots of small businesses that are dedicated to creating WordPress sites for their clients. They just download a theme (sometimes pirated) and add info relevant to the client, then charge them for the work (once), for every modification and for the hosting every year.
Make yourself a friend of the owner of that business and every time one of their client's sites gets hacked, that's going to be the easiest buck you'll ever make--download the entire FTP tree and hunt for the obvious.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadIn spite of your sarcasm you pretty much nailed it, except the guy doesn't work for Forbes. He's part of the contributor network, which is essentially a few thousand bloggers that get paid based on how much traffic they generate for the site.
Do your homework next time.
"WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world and is used by nearly 75 million websites. According to WordPress, more than 409 million people view more than 23.6 billion pages each month and users produce 69.5 million new posts and 46.8 million new comments every month. It also powers more than 25% of the world's websites."
"According to WordPress..." what does that even mean? According to the foundation? Automattic?
I'm surprised this article is even posted here, my guess is the author posted it himself.
I posted it and am not the author. WordPress is interesting from the business point of view even if the tech is a bit ropey.
Author this bloke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug8un9XCo-g&feature=youtu.be...
Sorry, that's kind of silly. WordPress can be incredibly frustrating, for sure, but there's a multitude of migration, deployment, and local development options.
We use Roots tools exclusively -
https://roots.io/
Contrast to many 'better built' frameworks which require you to know more than basic copy and pasting/very old school procedural programming and you've got a system which while less liked by professionals/experts is exactly what your amateur coder or hobbyist wants/can easily get used to.
Kind of like why HTML 5 won out over XML in the end. Because one was simple enough to get used to and met average Joe's needs and one was a bit of a pain in the ass that only 'experts' were patient enough to use.
So yeah, it doesn't follow a lot of recommended patterns and has an archaic coding style and all that, but it comes with the plus side that it's easier to develop stuff for.
However, this has some consequences: Clients expect that there is a free or cheap plugin that will solve every single problem. And they often install dozens of them to try to solve it themselves. Maintaining a client site after it has been online for more than a few months is often very painful for a developer: plugins bring style overrides, sometimes break your routing, often miss translation.
Also, a professional Wordpress instance is far from free: you need ACF Pro for good custom fields, Admin Columns Pro to get a useable backend, Relevanssi Pro for proper search, WP Migrate Pro for migration. And you quickly end up with 500$ for a basic setup. And recurring fees. Yes, there are free alternative, but they are not always reliable (I so often had issues with Wordmove migrations...)
As nice as Wordpress is for the editor, it is no fun for the developer and designer: you can get separation of concerns (and Twig templating) with Timber but its nowhere near supporting all functions (password protection does not work, for example). Also, no underlying framework makes creating and working with plugins guesswork.
PHP is a good choice for CMS, but Craft (Yii) or the excellent open source Bolt CMS (Symfony, Twig) bring joy to all involved - editors, designers, coders.
If you ignore the security implications, the plugin mechanism is astonishingly productive - I needed some 301 redirects, so I searched the plugin dashboard for "redirect", clicked "install" and instantly had a new control panel for setting custom redirects.
The variety and quality of available themes is even more impressive. I'm beginning to understand why the overall ecosystem is such a powerhouse, especially as a tool to enable technical-but-not-software-engineer people to build and deploy their own complex sites.
Its vast ecosystem of plug-ins is essentially a moat against all competitors.
I know, it caters to different kind users, and libraries are typically meant for code consumption (and show the source code up-front and encourage peer contribution), but there is a similar vector here.
That's the entire advantage, surely?
There are lots of small businesses that are dedicated to creating WordPress sites for their clients. They just download a theme (sometimes pirated) and add info relevant to the client, then charge them for the work (once), for every modification and for the hosting every year.
Make yourself a friend of the owner of that business and every time one of their client's sites gets hacked, that's going to be the easiest buck you'll ever make--download the entire FTP tree and hunt for the obvious.