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Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever tried to customize or add functionality to Wordpress? Because if it’s anything like Drupal or other PHP based tech of a certain era, it’s hell

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Yes, a few months ago, it was ridiculously easy. It literally took me 20 minutes to customize how the side bar was working and embed some new dynamic content. I even inherited off a parent theme so any updates to the theme wouldn't over-ride my changes.

I've never even written much PHP in the past. I even added it into the the theme editor so the client could change the text/etc. themselves.

Not sure what you did, but you clearly did it wrong if you think it's hard. It just worked.

That's one problem with Wordpress' default renders; it sends developers down those relatively narrow paths of customizing existing output. It's easy if requirements are flexible enough to allow that, but not the right CMS for truly customized content architecture and presentation.

> truly customized content architecture and presentation

Can you give an example of something like that which is not possible with WordPress?

Customized presentation is possible by starting with a blank template. Most do not do that, so if they want to customize, they spend time modifying and working around the default views. This has an effect of constraining the look. The difficulty emulating controller-like behavior means that adding multiple pieces of content to a view takes extra work.

As for the content architecture, Wordpress cpt are limited in their ability to relate to others and to define flexible custom fields (even with ACF.) It’s possible to hack together something like what a more flexible CMS or application framework can do, but it’s fragile and takes a lot of boilerplate, which, similar to template customization, steers the developer towards a similar architecture to other sites.

For these reasons, increased development and maintenance cost make it unlikely that an attempt to develop something truly customized on Wordpress will be successful. That said, many only know Wordpress development so may still get further with it than with a closer fit to their project.

It is hell, but there are also millions of contractors that still sit in that webmaster space between designer and developer who will do it cheaply.

add_shortcode is incredible. It's probably my favorite part of wordpress, and writing a plugin is so easy, just a single file zipped up or scp'd. Especially with custom post types or adding a new table.

> just a single file zipped up or scp'd

And now your page displays a white page. Error in the log is an exception with no stacktrace/location. This was my experience in production a few times.

It's a fun system if it works, but without a testing pipeline and a staging environment it's a lottery with a possible mystery breakage on every update/change.

> It's a fun system if it works, but without a testing pipeline and a staging environment it's a lottery with a possible mystery breakage on every update/change.

That describes every platform, programming language, layer of the stack, etc. that I've ever worked with.

At the end. All of our tooling sucks. Although I have to say generally the apache error log guides me to the right place.

There's a whole possible scale of responses and of encouraged workflow though.

Wordpress and a lot of php community does actually like the "drop in some code and it usually works" approach. This encourages continuing on that path.

On the other side, the failure can be handled in many ways. "This module could not be loaded and will be ignored." is one. Ensuring some preparation / validation is needed before upload is another.

Let's not go to extremes like "you're expected to have a staging environment for your personal blog because the framework cannot possibly help you".

If your log only shows an exception without any kind of stack trace or location, I’m sorry but Wordpress is not the problem.

It's not the main problem, but it also could do better. A system encouraging drop in additions could have a way of validating them and blocking plugins which fail.

I agree completely and think that’s a great idea!

drupal is much better, IMO, and assuming you actually know how the framework is designed. Wordpress has the 'loop' you hook into and everything happens in it. Drupal has more of a pub/sub model with hooks which seemed much easier to build standalone plugins. At the end of the day I'd say the most important part is understanding how they are built and where you are supposed to spend your time as a dev to make your users happy.

Add feature to WP should be easier than Drupal. In WP, you only write pure PHP. (Lack of APIs for common elements) But in Drupal, mostly you have to interact with Drupal APIs.

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