I would argue otherwise. I stopped using Wordpress for my personal blogs because they radically changed the writing tools and unless you self-host you are stuck with them. It isn't fun to write on a Wordpress blog any more.
They are also 'chasing the money' and adding more tools and features for 'professional bloggers' who want mailing list tools, more SEO tools etc.
Fair enough, they will never make money from folks like me but they seem to have gone all in with that market and made it difficult for anyone else to use the tools for a more traditional blog.
I moved to Hugo and Markdown and am happy but I know that for a lot of amateur bloggers that isn't going to be a solution.
Thanks. Now tell us what to do instead that is better but still has tons of knowledge out there, a huge plug-in ecosystem, and an easy to use UI for publishing.
I've used OctoberCMS[1] for a smaller project, and this looks similar on first glance. (Might just be the Lavarel underpinnings.)
What I really like about October is the ability to quickly spin up small CRUD database functionality (index + detail pages and simple backend updates for "custom" objects like staff members, white papers, etc.) using their Builder plugin. Any idea if Statamic offers something similar without diving into custom code?
However, October seems to be a little stagnant: you search, and most of the forum discussions are from 2016, and many plugins are no longer maintained well.
Do you still think that the Wordpress UI is a good publishing tool? I think it has become too complicated for the average user. The taxonomy also seems to have been pushed into the background
Hexadesigns, I don't want to be rude, but, first learn how to spell WordPress properly. You are still using PHP for your website? You can make WordPress secure if you have have expertise.
How much expertise do you need though? The minute you start installing plugins you're putting in a way to hack the site. WordPress core is pretty well examined for bugs at this point but the ecosystem is rife with security issues
Remove write access so the web user can’t write files and run a cron job.
this is what I run overnight personally:
```
wp plugin update-all;
wp theme update --all;
wp core update;
wp language core update;
wp language plugin update --all;
wp language theme update --all;
wp core update-db --network;
```
Removing write access creates a metric ton of its own issues, not limited to hosing the ability for content creators to upload data (without specific exceptions).
You're also in a space where few actually tread. Even technologists on HN.
It's true about anything having a plugin or module system though, not just WordPress.
The age of WordPress + the massive community around it might make the risk higher than some other technologies but that doesn't make this problem specific to WordPress.
Most Wordpress users are not developers and they are not reading the source code of the plugins they buy/download and install. Though most real developers do not read the source code of the framework or npm packages they install either and developers dhould actually read from time to time but who pays us for understanding the dependencies instead of finishing the next feature/bug fix.
Lotta black and white, half truths, and unnecessary harsh rhetoric in this article. You get a lot "for free" with WP, but yeah it's generally miserable to maintain. I'd counter that WordPress can be acceptable for a Serious Business website, in certain scenarios.
I would say the flaws lie deeper with PHP but that would remotely imply there is a "fix" for webdev, which is the last thing i'm gonna say.(though wasm looks pretty interesting, but at that point you're better off spinning a desktop application, which would be faster and more secure)
Without providing alternatives, this is simply a rant.
Of course, CMS system like WordPress has all sorts of problems. However, it makes one person or a small team can start and test business idea easily. Not everyone wants to start a business with hiring someone to build a custom website even before they know what the website should look like.
The fact that it is hard to fix a WordPress website with loads of plugins is because it is expensive to hire someone to write a custom website with all the functions of the plugins.
It may not be great, but it did get us to our Seed Round. There are a lot of low cost contractors you can hire to maintain and customize a Wordpress site. This was a boon for us when we were very small. As we grew we upgraded to Hubspot, but Wordpress is what got us started.
This is a fairly terrible article covering well-trodden ground through lots of hyperbole and nonsense. I mean, I get it, Wordpress can be awful, especially if you don't know what you're doing, load it up with a 100 plugins of dubious quality, don't cache, etc. it's going to be an awful experience.
However, having managed a woocommerce business for about 2 years now, I can't say I have seen absolutely anything that would be better for a small business, aside from getting myself into a SaS situation with Shopify, which would have cost many times more and actually been less flexible. Yes, you probably can't set WP up well without any technical competence, you're going to run into all sorts of issues. In which case, yeah, don't use it. Pay Shopify what they ask, and call it a day.
Now as it happens, I know PHP reasonably well, I know how to put up a website. I know how to do the basics. I wouldn't call myself a web designer (none of this is my day job), but I also know I wouldn't touch these guys' commerce solution with a ten foot pole, I'll stick with Automatic thanks.
So what's the situation with hosted WP, what's the best in class for "I don't want to worry about reacting to vulnerabilities" in WP SaaS and how do you compare / evaluate this? Or, are there 3rd party services you can contract to scan your WP setup?
A toxic article that offers no actual solutions to replace WordPress--It just boils down to being a clickbait troll's post to say "your dev is trash hire us instead because your dev is trash. also you are trash and so is your budget". People/companies like this give the community a bad name.
- "Dynamic Websites": "The term implies to the fact that the you, as the owner of the website can change the content on the website as per your will or requirement. This is a great selling point for the "not so knowledgable web designers".
--No, it's a great selling point to avoid wasting valuable time as a Publish Monkey whenever a client wants a new blog post or image
-"Wordpress websites are more likely to break down every three to four months."
--None of my current company's WordPress sites have ever gone down unless it was an error on our end. Not WordPress's fault in any way.
-"considering the lameass budget you will have"
--Insulting the reader is surely wonderfully productive when seeking out quality clients.
--Why am I bothering to counterpoint a clickbait article?
I did a cup of coffee at an agency that built with WordPress this year. I hadn't been around the ecosystem in awhile, and I was really impressed at how some modern frameworks (Themosis) and helpful plugins (Advanced Custom Fields) could give you a reasonable code base and the ability to do pretty much anything you want.
Its biggest drawback is that it's too easy for laymen to add whatever. Which is part of its strength, I suppose: anyone can do anything. But I saw how a clean staging environment could turn into a wacky, bogged down production environment just by adding a dozen plugins that do everything from site caching to hiding the title from a blog post.
Had I stayed around, I would have looked into keeping end users from adding plugins, and maybe being more restrictive about the bits that we didn't account for when developing our themes.
Wordpress just works for most people. A lot of freelancers and agencies also make good money making and maintaining websites on WordPress. Admittedly it's not the best code ever written but it does a job quite well.
There are a few issues on which they are correct but the main issue from their perspective seems to be people getting crap websites from a designer and then coming to the author to try to fix it. I have been there and it is a shitshow. I did it for some friends and would never want to do it as a professional.
I used to use Wordpress to develop sites primarily because I liked how extensible it was and I was familiar with the API and could tweak it enough to make it work for most clients. It was pretty easy to add document types and then build features based on those. Good clean fun.
I have been out of that business for some time and if I was getting back into it I would be looking for an alternative because I think that Wordpress has suffered from their popularity and become too bloated.
Having managed a dozen WordPress sites with eCommerce, half of which are multimillion dollar businesses, this is a obviously a blatantly false tirade.
Like everything else, its greatest weakness is its greatest strength. PLugins make and break it (literally). The key to a successful WordPress site is having the flexibility of the plugin infrastructure, without abusing it.
Just this week I migrated an eCommerce site with 75 plugins down to 12 plugins, and it looks 10x better and loads 4x faster and has way more functionality. Test different plugins, get to know them, and stick to a few key ones.
My experience with WordPress ended a few years ago but it was with a few news blogs with 10k daily visitors with 50k page loads.
The first "trouble" with WordPress was that I had to fiddle with the config files of Apache, php and MySQL to improve the performance in a old i5 where the websites where hosted.
The worst part of WordPress is that the main redactor (the boss) was continuously installing plugins and themes developed by monkeys that ended more than a few times with the website with "nice and shiny" webshells installed by remote hackers. The most recurring culprit was that the themes used JavaScript libraries that where years old and even if the developers of such libraries updated those for security, the developers of the themes never updated the themes.
I'm looking to create a personal blog and most probably I'll go with WordPress with a official theme.
PS and Edit: I'm not a developer but even I can recognise that accepting inputs from the users without checking that the user only uses text and not special symbols is a bad idea.
34 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 82.9 ms ] threadThey are also 'chasing the money' and adding more tools and features for 'professional bloggers' who want mailing list tools, more SEO tools etc.
Fair enough, they will never make money from folks like me but they seem to have gone all in with that market and made it difficult for anyone else to use the tools for a more traditional blog.
I moved to Hugo and Markdown and am happy but I know that for a lot of amateur bloggers that isn't going to be a solution.
What I really like about October is the ability to quickly spin up small CRUD database functionality (index + detail pages and simple backend updates for "custom" objects like staff members, white papers, etc.) using their Builder plugin. Any idea if Statamic offers something similar without diving into custom code?
However, October seems to be a little stagnant: you search, and most of the forum discussions are from 2016, and many plugins are no longer maintained well.
[1] https://octobercms.com/
this is what I run overnight personally: ``` wp plugin update-all; wp theme update --all; wp core update; wp language core update; wp language plugin update --all; wp language theme update --all; wp core update-db --network; ```
You're also in a space where few actually tread. Even technologists on HN.
The age of WordPress + the massive community around it might make the risk higher than some other technologies but that doesn't make this problem specific to WordPress.
1. Wordpress is used by a lot of people, and 2. A lot of people are dumb, ergo: 3. Wordpress is used by a lot of dumb people.
This isn't an indictment of Wordpress, it's a rephrasing of Sturgeon's law: ninety percent of everything is crap.
I would say the flaws lie deeper with PHP but that would remotely imply there is a "fix" for webdev, which is the last thing i'm gonna say.(though wasm looks pretty interesting, but at that point you're better off spinning a desktop application, which would be faster and more secure)
Of course, CMS system like WordPress has all sorts of problems. However, it makes one person or a small team can start and test business idea easily. Not everyone wants to start a business with hiring someone to build a custom website even before they know what the website should look like.
The fact that it is hard to fix a WordPress website with loads of plugins is because it is expensive to hire someone to write a custom website with all the functions of the plugins.
However, having managed a woocommerce business for about 2 years now, I can't say I have seen absolutely anything that would be better for a small business, aside from getting myself into a SaS situation with Shopify, which would have cost many times more and actually been less flexible. Yes, you probably can't set WP up well without any technical competence, you're going to run into all sorts of issues. In which case, yeah, don't use it. Pay Shopify what they ask, and call it a day.
Now as it happens, I know PHP reasonably well, I know how to put up a website. I know how to do the basics. I wouldn't call myself a web designer (none of this is my day job), but I also know I wouldn't touch these guys' commerce solution with a ten foot pole, I'll stick with Automatic thanks.
- "Dynamic Websites": "The term implies to the fact that the you, as the owner of the website can change the content on the website as per your will or requirement. This is a great selling point for the "not so knowledgable web designers". --No, it's a great selling point to avoid wasting valuable time as a Publish Monkey whenever a client wants a new blog post or image
-"Wordpress websites are more likely to break down every three to four months." --None of my current company's WordPress sites have ever gone down unless it was an error on our end. Not WordPress's fault in any way.
-"considering the lameass budget you will have" --Insulting the reader is surely wonderfully productive when seeking out quality clients.
--Why am I bothering to counterpoint a clickbait article?
According to the HN's comment guidelines, this post is a 'crap link': https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
Its biggest drawback is that it's too easy for laymen to add whatever. Which is part of its strength, I suppose: anyone can do anything. But I saw how a clean staging environment could turn into a wacky, bogged down production environment just by adding a dozen plugins that do everything from site caching to hiding the title from a blog post.
Had I stayed around, I would have looked into keeping end users from adding plugins, and maybe being more restrictive about the bits that we didn't account for when developing our themes.
There are a few issues on which they are correct but the main issue from their perspective seems to be people getting crap websites from a designer and then coming to the author to try to fix it. I have been there and it is a shitshow. I did it for some friends and would never want to do it as a professional.
I used to use Wordpress to develop sites primarily because I liked how extensible it was and I was familiar with the API and could tweak it enough to make it work for most clients. It was pretty easy to add document types and then build features based on those. Good clean fun.
I have been out of that business for some time and if I was getting back into it I would be looking for an alternative because I think that Wordpress has suffered from their popularity and become too bloated.
Like everything else, its greatest weakness is its greatest strength. PLugins make and break it (literally). The key to a successful WordPress site is having the flexibility of the plugin infrastructure, without abusing it.
Just this week I migrated an eCommerce site with 75 plugins down to 12 plugins, and it looks 10x better and loads 4x faster and has way more functionality. Test different plugins, get to know them, and stick to a few key ones.
The worst part of WordPress is that the main redactor (the boss) was continuously installing plugins and themes developed by monkeys that ended more than a few times with the website with "nice and shiny" webshells installed by remote hackers. The most recurring culprit was that the themes used JavaScript libraries that where years old and even if the developers of such libraries updated those for security, the developers of the themes never updated the themes.
I'm looking to create a personal blog and most probably I'll go with WordPress with a official theme.
PS and Edit: I'm not a developer but even I can recognise that accepting inputs from the users without checking that the user only uses text and not special symbols is a bad idea.