Just reading this again gives me a backflash of the horrors of working with WordPress. If you haven’t seen the source, you don’t know just how god-awful the code is - and it just won’t die, because of all the ecosystem traction it has.<p>Even the PHP developers have chosen to ignore WordPress in language evolution considerations, as the WordPress community refuses to do accept kind of progress for their project - they still use the unsafe, outdated mysql-API without parametrised queries, for example.<p>Whatever you do in 2023—if you can avoid it, don’t use WordPress as a CMS.
WordPress is plain crazy.<p>Marketing people insisted on WordPress so we reluctantly put it off in its own isolated network and expected bad things to happen. And, they did...<p>- WordPress consultant hired by marketing people while "editing the theme" introduced an infinite loop which caused OOM killer. That's when we learned <i>you can point-click your way to editing actual php code in the admin web interface!</i> Complete and total chaos and anarchy.<p>- Content manager "upgraded the SEO plugin" which downloaded from the Internet some hot-new code which used some language features beyond the version of php we were running, and <i>bam, the whole thing was 500s, and everyone freaked out!</i><p>- Content people messed up the syntax editing the theme trying to change contact info in the footer, site wouldn't load anymore, they panicked and reverted the whole theme back to the stock default, and then ops people had to help them resurrect from the <i>daily git check-in of the 1gb docroot</i> they set up after the last time this happened.<p>It's a rough ride all around...
What advantages does WordPlate have over Bedrock[1], some of whose packages WordPlate also uses?<p>[1] <a href="https://roots.io/bedrock/" rel="nofollow">https://roots.io/bedrock/</a>
Wow, Wordpress still use MD5 hashes for passwords? That's really taking backward compatibility with old PHP versions too far!<p><a href="https://github.com/roots/wp-password-bcrypt#readme">https://github.com/roots/wp-password-bcrypt#readme</a>
<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21022" rel="nofollow">https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21022</a>
Adding composer to WordPress isn’t gong to fix it. The problem is more fundamental - WP was conceived as a blog engine and has proven itself constitutionally incapable of truly moving beyond that frame.<p>* features
People say that “you can just add a plug-in” for whatever, and that’s true. But so many things that should be core are not (advanced custom fields, forms) and other features have no place in modern WordPress (comments). Gutenberg is an incomplete answer to page builders. While the page builders are impressive, they still have a pretty substantial learning curve.<p>* cost
I’ve been using WordPress for over a decade and it’s fallen woefully behind other CMS’s. Recently I spun up a site for a client and the plug-ins cost over $1000 just to get them going. That isn’t _WordPress’s_ fault, but it doesn’t help.<p>* speed
WordPress inexplicably gets slow after about a year unless it’s managed by someone with masters-degree level skill. It’s like the system gets tired. The caching plug-ins help, but why doesn’t WordPress offer better caching itself?<p>* deploying
Recently, I decided I’d had enough. I was doing a one-day build for a small marketing site and it took two hours to deploy because the “yoast” plug-in broke the WP CLI’s ability to search and replace the database for URL’s. Not to mention that source control is a nightmare because people can install their own plug-ins from the dashboard.<p>I’m writing an open source visual page builder for Laravel. It fixes the problems I see with WordPress for building marketing sites. Think of it as a blend between the visual ease of Webflow and the programmatic power of Laravel. By default, it’ll run off of SQLite (but any sql db will work), so they’re awe only two things living outside source control - the SQLite database and the uploads folder. That makes managing transitions from dev to production an absolute breeze.<p>I’m very excited about it! It should be ready for beta testing in a few weeks…if anyone wants to give it a shot, let me know.
Congrats on releasing, we built something similar (WP/composer) for our stack, you can see the details here: <a href="https://docs.altis-dxp.com/getting-started/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.altis-dxp.com/getting-started/</a>
A lot of this seems to be change for change’s sake. Creating something non standard for anyone used to working with wordpress for no big benefit. The main benefit of wordpress is the compatibility and the number of people who know it inside out.
To be honest it smells like a project by a bored agency wordpress dev who would rather eat their own head than code another custom theme so spent a few weeks throwing this up instead. Every big wordpress agency has devs like this.
Favoriting this for any possible WP project in the future, thanks. Would want to take a closer look to see how it compares to stuff like Roots’ Sage project.<p>I’m glad I’ve been able to develop on <a href="https://wagtail.org/" rel="nofollow">https://wagtail.org/</a> for the past few years though. Usually such a pleasure to work with.
I always wonder, at what point is it easier to just ditch Wordpress completely and instead spend the time to add an admin theme that looks & behaves like it for familiarity of users, and maybe add whatever magic functions your favorite framework might be missing.<p>This isn't a critique, I use WP intensively, and we heavily modify and extend it as well, but the familiarity of the team (in dev, seo and content) is pretty much the only selling point, because we shut down most extra features (feeds, rpc, json-rpc, emojis, gutenberg, comments etc etc etc), use a complex varnish-setup, do image optimization etc outside of it and most plugins aren't really good, so we roll out something custom instead. Getting rid of it it isn't an option for us because we're so committed and have built so much custom stuff around it, but with a green field, I'm not sure.