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Comment by JacobSeated | Hacker News Reader

Well, people need to learn not to depend on redundant Wordpress plugins.

The plugin-landscape in Wordpress is plagued by bugs and ads, some spamming you to update or pay for a premium version. That is not something you would accept for professional CMS solutions.

If you consider yourself knowledgeable in SEO, then learn to walk the talk and stop relying on phony third-party plugins!

SEO is such a small part of owning a website, and ideally, any technical SEO that is needed should be integrated in the core CMS by developers and not fiddled with at random by clueless bloggers or SEO gurus.

Since Wordpress is such "crapware" out-of-the-box, you can easily create a Yoast replacement plugin to handle what is really needed. The rest is just useless bloat and clutter.

I would not touch Yoast in my wildest dream. It is totally redundant for people who can code themselves.

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> It is totally redundant for people who can code themselves.

Not really, it saves time. I have my own website and I am a profesionnal developper, but I don't want to spend time learning wordpress programming. The few things I had to code for WP was very off putting.

'Since Wordpress is such "crapware" out-of-the-box, you can easily create a Yoast replacement plugin ...'

The cynic in me wonders why such basics are not already included by now?

It is because a lot of functionality is now bundled as part of the Automattic Jet Pack plugin. I guess the plugin is technically open source (due to the GPL) , but a lot of functionality depends on Automattic's server and requires a subscription.

Because of Matt Mullenweg's strange philosophy of keeping only barebones features in "core" Wordpress and having all other functionality be delivered by plugins. This means that even to have a basic site, you just have to install various plugins to deliver key features, which leads to the bloat, instability and security problems that Wordpress is infamous for.

> strange philosophy

He likes to avoid bloat and keep things modular. That's not a 'strange' philosophy

Modularity isn't free. Wordpress' obsession with it – and bad implementation of it – leads to bizarre, 80000+ recursion level deep callback hells even on simple pages once you have 3-4 plugins running.

> This means that even to have a basic site, you just have to install various plugins to deliver key features,

You can run a perfectly fine blog using core.

Do you do actual WP development? How many clients do you have? How much Yoast functionality does your plugin cover?

There are certain plugins that deliver so much value that developing and maintaining them yourself is nonsense for most devs out there. Unless your agency manages thousands of plugins and you have some very specific needs, you don't need to re-implement everything from scratch. Even then, it's probably far cheaper and easier to re-use their GPL code as the basis for a less bloated plugin rather.

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