How WordPress Ate the Internet in 2016 and the World in 2017
forbes.com
forbes.com
Sorry, that's kind of silly. WordPress can be incredibly frustrating, for sure, but there's a multitude of migration, deployment, and local development options.
We use Roots tools exclusively -
Contrast to many 'better built' frameworks which require you to know more than basic copy and pasting/very old school procedural programming and you've got a system which while less liked by professionals/experts is exactly what your amateur coder or hobbyist wants/can easily get used to.
Kind of like why HTML 5 won out over XML in the end. Because one was simple enough to get used to and met average Joe's needs and one was a bit of a pain in the ass that only 'experts' were patient enough to use.
So yeah, it doesn't follow a lot of recommended patterns and has an archaic coding style and all that, but it comes with the plus side that it's easier to develop stuff for.
However, this has some consequences: Clients expect that there is a free or cheap plugin that will solve every single problem. And they often install dozens of them to try to solve it themselves. Maintaining a client site after it has been online for more than a few months is often very painful for a developer: plugins bring style overrides, sometimes break your routing, often miss translation.
Also, a professional Wordpress instance is far from free: you need ACF Pro for good custom fields, Admin Columns Pro to get a useable backend, Relevanssi Pro for proper search, WP Migrate Pro for migration. And you quickly end up with 500$ for a basic setup. And recurring fees. Yes, there are free alternative, but they are not always reliable (I so often had issues with Wordmove migrations...)
As nice as Wordpress is for the editor, it is no fun for the developer and designer: you can get separation of concerns (and Twig templating) with Timber but its nowhere near supporting all functions (password protection does not work, for example). Also, no underlying framework makes creating and working with plugins guesswork.
PHP is a good choice for CMS, but Craft (Yii) or the excellent open source Bolt CMS (Symfony, Twig) bring joy to all involved - editors, designers, coders.
If you ignore the security implications, the plugin mechanism is astonishingly productive - I needed some 301 redirects, so I searched the plugin dashboard for "redirect", clicked "install" and instantly had a new control panel for setting custom redirects.
The variety and quality of available themes is even more impressive. I'm beginning to understand why the overall ecosystem is such a powerhouse, especially as a tool to enable technical-but-not-software-engineer people to build and deploy their own complex sites.
Its vast ecosystem of plug-ins is essentially a moat against all competitors.
I know, it caters to different kind users, and libraries are typically meant for code consumption (and show the source code up-front and encourage peer contribution), but there is a similar vector here.
That's the entire advantage, surely?
There are lots of small businesses that are dedicated to creating WordPress sites for their clients. They just download a theme (sometimes pirated) and add info relevant to the client, then charge them for the work (once), for every modification and for the hosting every year.
Make yourself a friend of the owner of that business and every time one of their client's sites gets hacked, that's going to be the easiest buck you'll ever make--download the entire FTP tree and hunt for the obvious.
"WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world and is used by nearly 75 million websites. According to WordPress, more than 409 million people view more than 23.6 billion pages each month and users produce 69.5 million new posts and 46.8 million new comments every month. It also powers more than 25% of the world's websites."
"According to WordPress..." what does that even mean? According to the foundation? Automattic?
I'm surprised this article is even posted here, my guess is the author posted it himself.
I posted it and am not the author. WordPress is interesting from the business point of view even if the tech is a bit ropey.
Author this bloke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug8un9XCo-g&feature=youtu.be...
In spite of your sarcasm you pretty much nailed it, except the guy doesn't work for Forbes. He's part of the contributor network, which is essentially a few thousand bloggers that get paid based on how much traffic they generate for the site.
Do your homework next time.