Comment by jawngee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jawngee | Hacker News Reader

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This article is mostly nonsense.

I've found there are various gradations of WordPress developer and the "pro" guys are a very competent and very pragmatic bunch.

- Most "pro" guys limit the number of plugins they use.

- They use ansible or similar for provisioning and deployment.

- They use sane theme frameworks like sage, timber or stem.

- They know how to do caching without using clunky caching plugins

- They try to adhere to 12-factor where possible

- They do their own devops

I mainly consider myself an iOS/Cocoa developer but I do my fair share of web development including WordPress. I even sell a pretty technical WordPress plugin (https://mediacloud.press). I don't recommend or choose WordPress because it's a great platform, but because it can be a solid pragmatic choice considering all things like time and budget and client experience.

But for the average joe, it sure provides plenty of ways to shoot yourself in the face. That said, what other options exist for them if Wix isn't enough?

Article rings true for every WP instance I've seen and managed.

No doubt there are pros who do it the way you described, but what percent of WP installations do you think are managed by people like that?

There are many developers more skilled than "average joe" but below the level you describe, and they have plenty of other options: https://headlesscms.org

Just chiming in to say this article isn't saying "WordPress is terrible because ..." but "watch out for these traps that are all-too-easy to fall into."

The article might sound non-sense (to you, a power-user?), but most people do require a simple to setup and use software, too. That's how usually things are. Photoshop was great, but then came along Sketch and Figma. Lotus was great, then came along Word and Docs; but there's market for plain-text editors like notepad++ / cot-editor, too.

The other day I saw a ms-excel to webpage builder shared on news.yc voted to the front-page, there's also a google-sheets to app builder that did YC last year... I wonder if there's a market for notepad / word / docs to webpages, too? This article makes it seem like there might be one.

If GitHub Wiki could get image pasting like issues, or GitLab Wiki could make it your own domain name, something simple like the wiki could be really useful for non-techy crowd that wants a simple web presence where they can insert/update/delete content.

Posterous was genuis: Blog posts over emails. Its primary competition, tumblr, grew big with super easy sharing mechanics. Notion.so now with its Swiss army knife of products, esp with wiki-like semantics, has taken off as not only an Evernote alternative but for documentation, as well. And there's of course, Netlify that turns GitHub repos to websites; plus tilda.cc and the like are growing, too. This area (low-code websites) is ripe with budding upstarts.

I personally use https://1mb.site for simple pages, but it still isn't easy to use.

The article isn't nonsense, it's just written for the kind of person who isn't comfortable writing their own plugins.

I'm an average joe (literally) and I've been using TypePad for my blog since 2004. From what I read, I may be their only customer.

Agreed. Plugins make it flexible and extensible, and if you use too many of them you're an idiot. Attack surface is a problem everything has, so that's not even valid, and considering you can only use the plugins you need, WP has a smaller attack surface. Live changes? I'm sorry, it's Wordpress's fault you don't have a dev environment?

Themes, yes, that's valid, they can be constraining. So is buying the wrong type of automobile. Deal with it.

Dev environment for WordPress is really hard to achieve. Or more precisely, testing changes on one deployment and then pushing them to another instance without wiping all the other state.

As someone who has been developing for WP for over ten years, no, it's not difficult at all. It's just a very minor about of planning, and working with a process.

I believe the point in the article was about changes to the website itself. So what's the process here? Let's say you want to move some boxes around on the site, while another person writes a new post. You've got the change in dev and a new post queued in production - how do you merge that? Custom, partial db sync?

Theme changes don't affect the content DB. You'd make your change in dev, verify it, then change the prod theme without worrying about content.

Wordpress is PHP (and html/css/js/etc)and SQL. WP does not inherently do staging, so you set up a dev environment. You sync content from prod to dev, make code tests on dev, then copy them to prod. It's not hard.

No, I get it, but that's not what I meant. I meant changes to page layout/design which is in the db.

Unless you have people making multiple layout changes at the same time you shouldn't have collisions. It's 2019, you don't need to lock an entire DB to make changes to tables. You can sync those changes while content changes are being made if you so choose.

Do you have a certain process or library to version control a WP code base/database? TIA

https://github.com/versionpress/versionpress might be worth checking out.

> works fine on simpler sites [...] but it is not production-ready yet

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