WordPress is at a Crossroads

On the topic of the prevalence of freemium plugins in WordPress ecosystem: I really detest this. Given the huge effort that has gone in to WordPress itself - freely provided to the community - it's ridiculous for small plugins - that in many cases just filter some function already provided as a hook in WordPress by the core developers - would ask for money. A few years ago I set up an online labbook for my research group using a bunch of plugins to make WordPress behave the way I wanted. I had to search really hard for plugins that didn't spam end users to "upgrade" to unlock arbitrarily disallowed features, and furthermore plugins which were well written and didn't contain silly hacks or security vulnerabilities (in the process I ended up submitting patches to a few of them to fix obvious flaws). It was even difficult to find plugins that use the proper settings page infrastructure, instead of adding their own top level menu item in the admin panel and not conforming to the WordPress core look and feel. What a mess.

Somehow discouraging freemium junk from the plugin library wouldn't be a bad thing from my perspective. It would surely decrease the sheer volume of plugins available, but would undoubtedly increase the quality. Perhaps this could be achieved with some sort of rating system for the code quality, judging based on how much the code relies on WordPress APIs, properly handling unexpected input and errors, properly sanitizing user input, etc.

Incidentally, I am now developing a plugin to combine the behaviour of all the plugins I previously used for the academic labbook [1] (if anyone is interested in using it, I would like to know!). In the process I've learned a lot about the WordPress code base, and have come to appreciate that it is on the whole well written - it's mainly just plugin authors that produce junk, and hope to make a quick buck off the back of the hard work of volunteers in the process.

[1] https://github.com/SeanDS/alp

Good article. This problem is, of course, much larger than just WordPress; the open libre Internet where you can just run your own instance of whatever you need is increasingly being threatened by walled gardens of every kind because it's more fiddly work to do it yourself.

Is it possible for a libre tool to be easier to use than one from a walled garden? Can we make running your own Medium easier than signing up for Medium and starting a new post?

This is the challenge.

What a long winded article. It gets to the point in the last few paragraphs: WordPress needs to add more options for free customisation, and is doing so with Gutenberg, but some people don't like it.

I’m working with WordPress since 2005 both as a theme designer and plugin developer. The experience is the same today as it was at the beginning.

And that experience is famously broken. Code mess, theme mess, customisation mess, etc.

If WordPress powers one third of the internet, and, Automattic is such a success story how they couldn’t create a framework in which designing and developing can give you a little satisfaction?

Many times I left WordPress for others like Ruby on Rails, Yii, static site generators, Contentful, etc. but I’m always returning to it. My clients need it. They think it is a standard in CMS and the hosting is stable and affordable.

But non-businesses, individuals are abandoning it. The promise is huge: pay a few dollars for hosting, get a pre-installed WordPress, choose a theme from that 5,000 free themes and you are done.

The reality is that WordPress theming is broken. None of those 5,000 free themes can satisfy a single need in 100% percent. People realise they need an expert to customize and make it work, and from that moment their project either is migrated somewhere else or just bitterly abandoned.

I wonder how many of that ‘30% of total websites are powered by WordPress’ is an abandoned site?

TLDR: WordPress lost it’s individual user base; still good for small businesses who can afford customization; awful as experience for designers and developers;

WordPress is not at crossroads but in chaos. Gutenberg, the only big change since it’s inception is not well received by designers and developers. If they flock they’ll take away with them the small businesses.

You could say a lot of the same things about SharePoint. (I was never a fan, personally.) This seems like the natural progression of any CMS that tries to be infinitely extensible and flexible. It becomes very difficult to evolve or simplify your product without breaking its add-on ecosystem and your most entrenched customers.

Interesting article! Gutenberg itself is also on a different road than before as you can't run it self hosted. To use it on a self hosted blog you would need to install jetpack and use WordPress.com as the main UI, which isn't self hosted. His point regarding commercial plugins are also to the point. There are great plugins out there, but setting up a site with these can easily cost over $1000 in yearly subscription fees and the free versions are often too basic or require tweaking to add required features. Still think WordPress make sense for organizations that can easily pay for premium plugins and support, or hackers that know how to code and find the great free plugins.