Technology

Wordpress is not a good fit for their complex web application

Seriously. People want to shove everything into Wordpress then get cranky when you can't make Wordpress into a ecommerce store, marketing platform, personal blog, file sharing service, and NFT marketplace.

And then it gets hacked because they needed 14 SEO plugins, 2 different form plugins, and were not going to pay for managed updates because that's easy they can do it themselves.

Wordpress is the Excel of CMSs. It can do just about anything, but at this point it barely manages content well.

I haven't done web work for well over a decade and recently was surprised to learn that Wordpress is still very relevant. I remember back then, seeking alternatives as we expected it to become more of a legacy thing a few years down the track, so we were on the lookout for future-proofing client sites with a better foundation. At that point it was a decade old and annoying af because it morphed into a messy way of doing websites because people misused it's original purpose. Brain had to think like a blog and then trick it into doing what you want, kind of like using tables to structure pages before CSS-P saved the day.

I've been pushing Squarespace for most people who come to me asking about setting up a small store or just simple business website.

Yeah, it's closed source and blah blah blah, but the end of the day, it's not about my opinions on software, it's about the most cost-effective, simple, usable option for the client who is asking me for my expertise, which is almost always not something they're going to have to keep paying me to maintain.

Like if you really really want Wordpress, I'll get you set up, and then quote you a couple thousand a year for maintenance.

Unshockprisingly, very few people think that's the right choice once they see what the keep-it-from-being-exploited cost is.

(And for anyone who thinks that's an unreasonable amount, okay cool. But maintaining a staging environment and testing updates and then pushing everything into production assuming there's no regressions you have to address takes a lot of time.)

Depends on if you need a CMS, or if you can use a static site generator.

For a CMS, I'm still a fan of Ghost and it has (mostly) not enshittified to the point it's unpleasant to use.

If you don't need the whole CMS thing, there's an awful lot of options. (And hosting them is super simplified since you can just stuff the output into a S3 bucket/Cloudflare Pages/Github Pages/a dozen other providers for basically free.)

There's Contao, Drupal, Blogger, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace...

They're very obviously using the trademark in a manner that implies endorsement.

That is absolutely trademark infringement.

This is accurate, but also, "minimal" here is 40 hours of code contributions per week compared to Automattic's near-4000. Additionally, WP Engine is the biggest Wordpress.com competitor.

Exactly what I thought. I'd love to sit a young person today in front of that blank blue screen with the blinking cursor. Now, I have to go take my pills before bed.