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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

The “elephant in the room” I couldn’t find answered on the site: if I’m going to use a PHP CMS, why would I not use WordPress or Drupal? They both have an enormous community of developers, plugins, documentation, and users. At the moment, this feels like yet another PHP CMS that will become abandonware within months.

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WordPress is a nightmare as soon as you have to go beneath the surface. The community around it definitely has value, but the tradeoff is a bloated monolith that you have to become an expert in if you want to do any customization beyond drop-in plugins.

And maintaining the security of your installation, when using any plugin, is almost a practical impossibility.

Personal experience, but I developed a few WordPress sites a few years ago and it was an absolutely horrendous experience. The codebase was awful, fixing things was finicky, and design consisted mostly of trying to get rid of automatically generated HTML or overriding poorly scoped (or just bad) CSS. Also, it was more configuration and patching than development. (But took just as long anyway.) Wasn't my cup of tea.

Development has always been much faster in Kirby for me, even when I need to write features from scratch that WordPress has a plugin for. I've personally never missed WordPress's larger community.

Perch has been around for a decade. You never know when or if something will become abandonware, but Perch isn’t something new.

I didn’t realise it had been around for so long. Thanks for pointing that out.

Just a shoutout to Rachel Andrew, the co-founder of Perch, member of the CSSWG and imo the Champion of CSS Grid.

https://rachelandrew.co.uk/

As far as i know agencies try to get off Wordpress and Drupal because it is just horrible dev experience. What gets used most are modern CMSes like Craft, Twill, Kirby, Bolt or Processwire. They are much closer to mvc frameworks. If you want to do something highly custom wordpress will just be in way.

Drupal is a great dev experience, in my opinion. WordPress's code is a dumpster fire, but the recent rewrite of Drupal in Composer is a pleasure to use. A bit of a learning curve, but it is powerful and extensible, plus it has a great community.

This statement can not be left on HN without contradiction. It says more about your dev experience than about Drupal.

Drupal is still horrible. They did not learn from the security issues of the past, they still put lots of php files into document_root, just to mention two basic things.

They are doing it wrong in many ways, and there is no hope the "community" will ever learn, because people with competence already moved away long time ago.

Let a developer with some experience with different languages and frameworks (Java, Ruby, Python, Elixir) - not some single-eyed PHP-only beginner - work for one day with Drupal and then ask her what she thinks about it.

Perch is in a class of CMSes that doesn’t need a lot of that community because the developer doesn’t have as many problems to solve (security, unwanted default behavior, programming against strange old code.) It more “gets out of the way.” The result is lowered cost of development for freelancers and agencies.

Craft CMS is another good example of how it’s possible to successfully compete against Wordpress and Drupal by making the development and maintenance experience much better.

Perch was first launched in 2009 and is very different in architecture from WordPress or Drupel.

https://grabaperch.com/news?page=33

It’s little. I think perch has been around for about 10 years or more.

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