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Comment by wadetandy | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem I see with the proposed solutions at the bottom is that the author arrives on the two node-based solutions as the preferred path forward. The reason Wordpress has become so successful over the years is that even the least expensive hosting provider has mod_php installed and you merely have to drop your installation files on the server via FTP. This is easy enough for many less technical people to accomplish. Node, ruby, and the like typically require more advanced and expensive hosting solutions, in my experience.

Of course I haven't used any of these cheap hosting solutions or setup a Wordpress site in a couple years so I might be out of date on the state of things.

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"is that the author arrives on the two node-based solutions as the preferred path forward."

That's the generous interpretation. A more jaded reader might have started reading the article thinking 'mention of Angular... 3... 2... 1... ah there it is! suggesting node... 3... 2... 1... ah there it is! Well at least he managed to contain himself until the next to last paragraph'.

It's technology-centered myopic navel-gazing. Yeah nobody uses Wordpress because PHP in templates is not 'clean'... Oh wait, half the world does use Wordpress because everybody and their dog has a server with PHP and because it's dead simple to hack up something working by cramming some PHP into a template you bought for 5$. For 95% of all websites, who cares about maintenance? Just do a new one in 3 years with whatever is hot then.

This article (and many like it, not singling this one out) reads like people who call themselves 'real' woodworkers, lamenting that people won't fork over $2500 for a hand-crafted oak dining table and instead get a $100 Ikea one. The popularity of 'Ikea hacks' amongst the crowd that tends to author articles like this is ironic in that sense...

Have you ever tried to modify a wordpress theme? It's a nightmare. And we are proffessional developers. Imagine the pain this must be for mere webdsigners.

Fixing the mess that is wordpress is a very nobel goal.

Write your own and keep it simple. It's not that hard.

The ones you can buy however are a nightmare for sure, so are most of the copy-pasted-glued-together ones.

Admittedly, it was a few years since I looked at the inside of wp, but it was horrible, with php api calls inside the template code, bad/missing/misleading documentation and non-existing database structure.

Come on, nightmare? It's kinda annoying, fussy and handle-turning, but taking a page that has been designed and fitting that into the template tags is really not all that bad for a days work.

I had to clone a website, then make a few tiny adjustments (like change the site name), and it took me several days.

I have, and I somewhat disagree. I agree that it can feel dirty to your programmer sensibilities when you start from the base template one and go "building from the ground up", but if you set expectations accurately with the client (and yourself) wrt the amount of flexibility a theme gives and what type of work you're going to be doing, you can get some pretty high quality themes (where "quality" here refers to the template's ability to fulfill the goal of offering a feature-rich GUI to non-techies). Some themes are so elaborate that you can change virtually every aspect of the template down to the most granular levels directly from the admin interface.

And where wordpress really shines is in the ecosystem. Subscription list popups, SEO, social media integration etc are just a few things that clients commonly want that take far less time to integrate into wordpress than building from scratch (because it's fairly common that authors of less popular developer-centric CMS'es didn't think to implement those things).

> Have you ever tried to modify ikea furniture? It's a nightmare. And we are professional carpenters. Imagine the pain this must be for mere hobbyists.

Bad analogy. My brother (who is a non-carpenter web designer) shortened an IKEA bed recently. Apparently it wasn't a big deal.

> And we are proffessional developers

In my experience, WordPress is not built for developers or designers. It's built to be simple and extensible from the end-user's point of view. Most end-users don't expect absolute perfection and accept that it will do 90% of what they want. As long as it keeps doing that, no one will care what a "mess" the insides of it are.

> no one will care what a "mess" the insides of it are.

...except the poor bastard who will have to build the website and maintain it.

That's all true, and there's no reason why Wordpress couldn't continue to service the users who want a simple solution for setting up a website ... But that doesn't preclude creating a new solution for professionals setting up websites for other people that's based around modern techniques and languages.

The fact that Wordpress is used by developers setting up a CMS and being paid thousands of dollars for it is what could be improved upon.

Yeah, I was with him up until that point. That's a huge negative, and something that could be avoided very simply by using a framework other than React.

>Of course I haven't used any of these cheap hosting solutions or setup a Wordpress site in a couple years

I think what you'll find has changed in the last few years is that "cheap" hosting isn't limited to shared cPanel type accounts any more.

The basic Linode is $10 per month, and presents a VPS with vastly more capabilities than your basic Bluehost plan.

It's hard to argue such things exist due solely to pricing these days. Rather, they exist largely due to the contingency of developers requiring features such as "1-Click Wordpress install".

You honestly wouldn't believe how often a helpdesk gets a call from someone saying "I'm a web developer and I've sold a website I built to a company on your host. Apparently I need to install something called Filezilla, can you help me with that?"

And that's why Wordpress will never run on Node.

> The basic Linode is $10 per month, and presents a VPS with vastly more capabilities than your basic Bluehost plan.

Which works great if you have an in-house sysadmin to keep those servers in working order. Otherwise, going with managed hosting is much better for a client.

I don't disagree, but that plays into my point that you didn't choose based on what it was cheap.

Re:PHP. That's, this is why Wordpress won on the web.

The host I have a few business wesbites on supports Node, Ruby, PHP, Python, Redis, Memcached, MySQL, and MongoDB on all of their hosting packages except the very cheapest one. I think I'm paying like $100/year, although these are small/low traffic sites so I dont need or get a lot of disk or bandwidth.

Then again I went out of my way to find a good host after dealing with so many terrible ones.

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