WordPress is a developer nightmare, with 67% of developers surveyed by Stackoverflow stating that they dislike working with it due to its outdated PHP language and poor architecture. Moving to a headless CMS can solve these issues and provide a better developer experience.
And that's a developer experience. WordPress is also popular because of the customer experience. The customer experience with WordPress is far less intimidating than that of a headless CMS. "I log in here, I edit pages here, and there are the pictures I uploaded". Those people are the ones who provide a market for paid plugins, themes, and make up the bulk of the WordPress administration community.
As devs, if we ignore that and push people towards solutions that are significantly harder in our customers minds to manage, we lose them as customers and the space as a whole suffers.
As a bone of contentions "it's outdated php language" is nothing but personally biased nonsense. I say that as a non php developer with no dog in this fight.
> As a bone of contentions "it's outdated php language" is nothing but personally biased nonsense. I say that as a non php developer with no dog in this fight.
As I understand it (disclaimer: not a WP dev), the thing with WordPress is that they have a goal to never break backwards compatibility. This is good for their users, given that (as you say) most of them aren’t developers. However, it also means they’re stuck with design decisions they made ten or twenty years ago.
and it is therefore much easier to maintain. updating wordpress itself can and will cause issues as well, but it is usually plugins and themes that lack behind and break the site on updates.
Everytime I read something negative about WordPress it's about the developer experience - why is no one focusing on the fact it's actually pretty good for non-technical website owners?
Time is money is opportunity cost though. If a proprietary provider is able to get you up and running faster then that's more time you have to spend on other things, like the rest of the business. Let's be real, the chances of getting shutdown if you're not in a grey area is pretty slim - if you are, eg crypto, porn, cannabis; then I'd not use a proprietary provider - what is "beat" is time spent on the product instead of upgrading WordPress plugins.
What would be better for them? Like, maybe there's something technically better, if everyone switched, but as an individual, what else would you use, that has the same level of accessibility for non-technical people, open sourceness, and wide acceptance that makes it easy to find someone who can work on your stuff, plus one click setup type cloud providers?
As someone who is sometimes called to step in and help these non-technical people, I particularly enjoyed the moment when GDPR was implemented.
Non-technical people running wordpress asked me what cookies their website is setting and how to make the sites comply. I asked them on which basis they select and install the plugins they are running and how they know what these plugins are actually doing.
It's fun to hate popular things, and it's fun to think about how you would do it better if you could do it from scratch, but these things persist because users deem the cost of switching to outweigh the benefits. Being able to find a solution or a plugin or a theme for almost anything because everyone uses WordPress is a benefit.
There are instantly deployable containers everywhere.
All of the criticisms of WordPress are valid, but they just underscore how valuable its "community" is.
Every systems turns to shit over time. Any power designed into it ends up abused and then we have to live with the abuse or the mitigations. Political systems, regulations, technology platforms.... We can't have nice things because we can't trust everyone with power.
So a blog post about how bad Wordpress is, a lot of hand-wavy examples with no data, no info on alternatives and really just a hidden ad for their product.
Except it's essentially the only CMS with a decent user experience, and plenty of plugins to add the functionality needed without ever looking at any code.
If a WordPress alternative shows any code to the user, it has already failed at that.
I use Grav on my personal site, it's ok. The editor is the main weak point, editing in markdown instead of a full page drag and drop editor like WPBakery is much harder and slower.
It's a struggle for me to even figure out basics, like how do I set up a contact form and embed that, or how do I set up an HLS/DASH video embed.
Grav has it's own paradigms and ways of doing things, but for most simple sites it can provide a much better user experience if you build custom backends like these.
Wordpress does one thing much better than headless CMS tools, which is that it empowers the non-technical folks who actually own the website to be able to change all of the site without friction. Headless CMS tools work well for writing content like blog posts and templatized webpages, but say someone in marketing or PMM wants to iterate/refine the text on the homepage - that requires them to have the developer make those changes.
(You could give them GitHub access and let them use the editor, but in practice they might use it for urgent situations but not more regularly than that. They have 50 other important things to do and editing in GitHub is going to feel awkward.)
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 56.1 ms ] threadAs devs, if we ignore that and push people towards solutions that are significantly harder in our customers minds to manage, we lose them as customers and the space as a whole suffers.
As a bone of contentions "it's outdated php language" is nothing but personally biased nonsense. I say that as a non php developer with no dog in this fight.
As I understand it (disclaimer: not a WP dev), the thing with WordPress is that they have a goal to never break backwards compatibility. This is good for their users, given that (as you say) most of them aren’t developers. However, it also means they’re stuck with design decisions they made ten or twenty years ago.
Non-technical people running wordpress asked me what cookies their website is setting and how to make the sites comply. I asked them on which basis they select and install the plugins they are running and how they know what these plugins are actually doing.
The short of it: they have no idea.
There are a few projects and products that fall into this. Jira and Jenkins come to mind.
Nobody uses them without a bunch of plugins, but the plugins become its biggest problem.
If a WordPress alternative shows any code to the user, it has already failed at that.
It's a struggle for me to even figure out basics, like how do I set up a contact form and embed that, or how do I set up an HLS/DASH video embed.
It's decent for very simple personal sites.
Grav has it's own paradigms and ways of doing things, but for most simple sites it can provide a much better user experience if you build custom backends like these.
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Cool "article."
(You could give them GitHub access and let them use the editor, but in practice they might use it for urgent situations but not more regularly than that. They have 50 other important things to do and editing in GitHub is going to feel awkward.)