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Comment by pmlnr | Hacker News Reader

I seriously dislike the fact that an exteremely wide-spread open source project - wordpress.org - is driven by a for-profit company, wordpress.com. I guess there's no way around it, given Automattic employs most contributors, but this is not the first time when community requests and doubts are ignored (see emojis, half-baked media library refactoring, etc).

On the other hand, I'd welcome if these forced changes would revive half-forgotten CMS systems - Typo3, Silverstripe, concrete5, or boost newcomers, like Grav, ProcessWire. Maybe this will break the WordPress monoculture.

(downvoting an opinion, that is not how discussions should be made.)

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I seriously dislike the fact that an exteremely wide-spread open source project - wordpress.org - is driven by a for-profit company, wordpress.com.

Every major open source project from the Linux kernel to a popular web framework has corporate sponsors that profit from the work done on it. Profit is a powerful motivator.

There's a difference when there are multiple contributors, as such with the linux kernel; in that case, the power is not with one single entity.

And in WordPress' case, the issue isn't just that so much power is with one entity, but that said entity seems to be trying to push the software in a direction and at a pace that's convenient for them, regardless of what the rest of the community think about it.

For example, Gutenberg is being pushed into core quite a bit before it's really ready, and to some degree it feels like it was designed for WordPress.com to compete with Wix and Squarespace rather than WordPress.org users.

The problem isn't WordPress having a large company contribute it to it, nor just that Automattic has so much power. It's because Automattic are running WordPress to solve their business needs at their pace, everyone else be damned.

WordPress also has multiple contributors — it's just mostly under the control of Automattic, just like React is Facebook, TypeScript is Microsoft, and Go is Google.

I think the difference is the latter three had internal projects the OSS'ed them. On the other hand, WordPress was built on the back of a "community." There is a lot of distrust, and rightfully so, from how Automattic put itself first and the WP community a distant third.

I've been looking hard for an open source replacement for the backend that would let my users edit as simply as with WordPress, but not tie my hands with PHP and an odd API for creating the front end. But so far, I haven't found anything that meets users needs like WordPress does. I wish there were more competition in this space. The closest I've seen--different services that let you create content and provide a GraphQL API--are all SaaS and not very cheap. Maybe the financial incentives to create a viable WordPress competitor that's open source just aren't there anymore...

When you say "not very cheap", you're illustrating the problem: people don't want to spend money in their CMS.

Companies spend hundreds (or more) a month on various SaaS services but are looking for dirt cheap for something as critical as their public facing website.

I don't think that's it, though. I think the issue is moreso that they have to pay for the CMS and then, typically, for someone to customize it for them to make it what they want it to be. You're essentially paying a very high price for the development and paying another cost on top of that for just the platform might seem excessive to those who don't really know how it all works. People don't mind spending money on a CMS as long as they know how it fits into the project. The issue is that most developers just pick a CMS and don't pay for it because they want to keep more of the money from the client rather than because they know what they're doing and it's the best choice for the project.

If you want it cheap, you self-host it, don't you..?

Have you looked at wagtail.io ?

I use Wagtail CMS for my sites. It’s the best CMS I have found so far. It’s built on Django. Instead of looking for plugins you just integrate with other services with Python libraries or standard REST calls.

It has something similar to Gutenburg’s block based content editor called Streamfield. Which makes it easier to theme rich content compared to rich text editors. Craft CMS has something similar.

One thing that is missing in Django though is asset digests you find in Rails - anytime an asset like an image updates it should give it a new name so it’s not served by the cache.

There are a lot of companies with a proprietary CMS in the general publishing space (TownNews, GTXcel are both popular), but you can bet that their customers and prospects are always considering a switch to WordPress for various reasons. Financial, extensibility, the fact that most people just know how to use it, not being tied into a 3 year contract, feature list, great reputation, existing users, etc.

It's not easy doing what WordPress did. Other major CMSs like Drupal and Joomla came and mostly went because maintaining the level of product quality and community is harder than it looks.

Hi, check out Ghost.

https://ghost.org/

- It's a blog engine with support for static pages.

- It's open source (NodeJS)

- It's self-hostable.

- It's beautiful out of the box.

- It's entirely customizable.

- It's markdown-powered with a great WYSIWYG editor.

- There's no data lock in; excellent import/export support.

I could go on. Just give it a shot. "Ghost Pro" (https://ghost.org/pricing/) from the official team is a bit pricy if you're saying you want something cheap, but Digital Ocean has a two-click-setup droplet for a self-hosted version (seriously, I tried it, it's ridiculously simple). Referral link with $100 DO credit if you are interested: https://m.do.co/c/ea4165209ae0

Some examples of small customizations of the default "Casper" theme:

https://articles.hsreplay.net/

https://spreadprivacy.com/

https://blog.mozvr.com/

More of their customers: https://ghost.org/customers/

There are loads of content management systems that follow the same model.

My favourite is Umbraco, which to date is still my favourite editing experience. If you can stomach .NET, it's probably the best choice for an open-source CMS available right now.

Check out WriteFreely: https://writefreely.org/

It's written in Go, is federated (ActivityPub), and is easy to set up and run.

Check this: https://appdrag.com It's a cloud CMS and backend It's also crazy fast and serverless.

It’s not the opinion that is being downvoted, but the implication— that open source backed by service driven companies is a bad thing. Without the enterprise Linux companies, Linux would likely be more of a niche since developers at their day jobs wouldn’t typically be using it, so you necessarily reduce the talent pool of people willing to contribute or adopt. Also, developing software takes money. WordPress in my opinion is a good model. The idea that for profit support is bad doesn’t seem to be supported by evidence. Look at Swift for example, or Go, or React or Redis. Even Rails gets substantial intellectual and practical support from Basecamp and wouldn’t even have existed if it weren’t for a for-profit company. Many of the great features of Rails came out of a Basecamp business need. Wordpress is similar. Wordpress isn’t perfect, but thank you Automatic for working on it.

I up-voted you because you mentioned Processwire. Holy God is that a wonderful piece of work. We're getting ready to deploy an enormous amount of content using this platform and it's been a real pleasure working with it.

Driving an open-source project is not the same as controlling it. WordPress has already been forked as ClassicPress and calmPress. If you don't like the direction WordPress is going, you have plenty of options.

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