Ask HN: Where After WordPress?

I think there's a realistic future where Matt steps away and things go back to being okay. As we've learned, the Foundation is intrinsically integrated with himself and Automattic. And the backdoors they have into authentication and plugins and etc are deeper than we expected.

Matt would basically have to sell the company and the only buyer would be... cough cough ... private equity!

Forking the code is easy, forking the infrastructure and community not so much. It would be a lot of work and with an apparently capricious founder any splinter project has a high likelihood of getting bogged down in drama. My guess is no code fork gets traction, business continues mostly as usual but the supporting service providers and dev ecosystem start moving to alternatives that have more stable governance. Eventually this means the de facto death of WP as a brand and technology.

This is all avoidable if Matt can restore confidence in WP's governance and give the community a sense of a positive vision for the future. That would probably have the side effect of being financially beneficial to Automattic and bring WPEngine into the major contributor fold.

I'm not sure how likely the good version of this is but for everyone's sake I hope WP ends up with some kind of positive resolution.

I think just cede is fine here vs. secede

Payload is tight as hell, but it's tough to recommend a headless CMS as a Wordpress replacement without, you know, a "head."

Drupal is very popular with major enterprises, but it doesn't have the same ability to stand up sites quickly with plug-and-play features and update them automatically.

> you could customize the backend. I have always hated WP's backend.

Ironically, this is something the Wordpress Foundation has made worse over the years.

Drupal is still a thing. It's actually really great, but it suffers from two things:

1. You need a deep knowledge of Drupal to put together something good. It's not beginner-friendly, you will build a couple clunkers before things click.

2. The mind-share is not there like it was for Drupal 7 - the devs still contributing are great, progress is being made, but if you're used to Wordpress plugins or an NPM package being available for whatever you need, Drupal can be frustrating.

No. Drupal is only suitable if an organization requires open source. To develop a fully customized site still saves more time than using Drupal. And your maintenance path will be much simpler.

Likewise. The vast majority of what I've seen so far on this debacle amounts to mob mentality. A lot of people are adding their commentary about Mullenweg, but it strikes me as very surface level and unthoughtful: just saying something to say something because they know what WordPress is.

I don't think the drama will kill Automattic or any of the other involved orgs either. The post-WordPress thing for me, I think, is going to be something that successfully ejects the Gutenberg editor and builds around it. Probably something that borrows from what Drupal has done with Gutenberg and what Corcel has done with WordPress models.

For a small site with relatively technical administration, Grav is unsurpassed. I've been using it for years for my portfolio and various side projects, and it is a joy to build with.

For a larger site with multiple contributors, I'd probably still stick to Wordpress, though. Its admin experience and ecosystem are just too mature to not take advantage of.

In terms of features or users? For the latter, I hope no company can capture as large of a market as WordPress has. For the former, I wish them all the luck in the world

I've been using Statamic for a few months now. I've often worked with Laravel, so I tend to really like Statamic. The static content by default feature means you can skip a database altogether if you'd like. Theming and content management is a little bit more of a learning curve, but so much more powerful than something like Wordpress.

I do have one complaint. It can be remarkably difficult to learn how to use Statamic properly. The documentation is a bit lacking. I often struggle to find a solution to a blocker only to find out there's a simple solution that wasn't documented very well. I think this is one of those things that will likely improve as the community continues to grow and mature.

Unrelated but that landing page is probably one of the best I've read and seen.

Source available (?) and licenses get expensive quick it looks like (?)

When I last did my survey of what I could use as a CMS I ran into this, looked at the licensing and walked away quickly.

But I may be wrong since I didn't do any more research, .

There's is Ghost as well. Which I think was started by some ex Wordpress people from what I remember back in the day.

There are also the so called "universal CMS", which are headless but with a frontend SDK to achieve the same WYSIWYG, but with a modern frontend framework and deciding exactly what content editors can do. See for example React Bricks.

Seconded. Use it as the full CMS for one blog, as a headless CMS for a company site for another. Great either way.

I recall this being mentioned before and I thought I’d take a look. One thing missing on this site is a clear pricing page and pricing link in the menu and/or footer. Only the license page mentions that it is not free and that a paid license is required.

11ty is okay, but it is by no means an alternative for WordPress unless you are a developer, using it only for yourself, and are fine writing a custom backend for literally any basic functionality beyond serving static content.

I’ve tried to document the most relevant happenings and writings: https://duerrenberger.dev/blog/2024/10/08/timeline-of-the-wo...

> tl;dr After Matt Mullenweg, BDFL of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, has dragged WP Engine publicly through the mud for not paying a ludicrous amount of money or contributing (enough) to the open source project, WP Engine is suing Automattic and Matt Mullenweg, while Automattic claims misuse of WordPress trademarks.