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Comment by jonny383 | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that doesn't like WordPress anymore? The concept was great, but it has basically become a "website builder" and not really a piece of blogging software anymore.

Throw on top of it the architecture of plugins (no sandboxing!) and the culture this has developed for websites being "built" with a combination of 50+ outdated plugins and it frankly becomes a nightmare. Of course this can occur with any huge software project, so I somewhat concede this point.

The real turning point for me was the push to move to the "block" editor and effectively turn WordPress into Wix or Squarespace or whatever

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Anymore? I stopped liking Wordpress before 2010, especially being a PHP programmer (back then) in small town Midwest where 90% of gigs I landed was fixing some monstrosity that some guys nephew threw together made up of a dozen+ plug-ins that had since been hacked on by a series of online personalities and a theme they purchases three years ago that they had paid five different people to “customize.”

Yeah sure I’d be glad to quickly change over this theme to match new designs. Wait every plug-in also has to be fought with since the templates for those have also been “customized.” Wait I have to match the HTML almost to a tee because the chrome plugin no one else has ever heard of says you have perfect SEO (despite only getting first page results with a highly specific query no human would ever type) and you think this will lower your score? :(

I’ll take a stressful 10 hours at a startup over that any day.

> Wait I have to match the HTML almost to a tee because the chrome plugin no one else has ever heard of says you have perfect SEO (despite only getting first page results with a highly specific query no human would ever type) and you think this will lower your score? :(

That's hilarious. I'm assuming it would not have gone well to try to tell them otherwise?

Most of these people owned mom and pops or online stores; they weren’t tech savvy and tended to believe what they read on google (usually blogs trying to sell them Wordpress plugins, SEO guides and the like) so yeah it would have fell on def ears. It is funny, now that I don’t deal with it anymore.

Apparently, lots of people want a website builder.

We in the startup culture often forget that the market for building bespoke webapps using the latest and greatest frameworks is only a tiny part of the web. The vast majority of people who order websites just want something that works out of the box, and they want it yesterday.

I don't think anybody is particularly fond of WordPress's medieval internal structure or its byzantine plugin ecosystem. For the time being, though, I'm glad that there exists a well-known, open-source, self-hosted alternative to Wix and Squarespace.

There was a time when lots of people wanted something bloggish. Now that time is over, and WordPress has pivoted accordingly.

The core WordPress codebase has been polished until it's sorta OK. It's got some quirks, but many of the obvious problems have been patched over the years.

The plugin marketplace, on the other hand, is a disaster area. Plugins are marketed to non-software people who don't understand security and don't know how to evaluate products for it, even though they might care in the abstract. The result is that the typical WordPress installation is a festering mess of insecure plugins, and sites get hacked all the time.

There are definitely a lot of people who do not like WordPress anymore, there are people who complain about the same things as you do. There just is no other tool that fills the same niche that WP does, semi-easy to use for people without any technical know-how, to add new pages and content.

To me WordPress is a relic of a time long gone, of internet that does not exist anymore, and sometimes wish I could get back to - it enabled so many people to just put out things that they wanted, without having to learn HTML

I suspect you’re no longer in the circles that WordPress is targeting: it’s still a fairly common “no-/low-code” platform for people who just want to put together a site for themselves. I think that what’s going on is that programmers generally don’t encounter it as much in “real programming jobs” because it has been so successful in making programmers unnecessary for a whole swath of websites.

There's plenty you can do with WordPress as a developer. There are also no-code tools like Pinegrow that attach dynamic WP functions to static HTML templates.

Automattic's failure IMO is making Wordpress.com feel like a blog platform for far too long. A lot of what users would consider reasonable functionality for a website was not provided in WP core but by the plugin ecosystem. So people just defaulted to plugins for everything, which eventually gave WP a bad name, because plugins were often janky and poorly supported.

>The concept was great, but it has basically become a "website builder" and not really a piece of blogging software anymore.

You can definitely turn it into practically anything, and it quickly becomes a mess due to the fact that it was never meant to be an application platform. But WordPress is still best in class at what it was meant to do; a simple self hosted blog.

WordPress is highly complex... it has plugin extension points, convolutes HTML building into application logic, and regularly has new security vulnerabilities discovered and exploited.

A guy I know runs a blog for his non-profit on WordPress. At one point he asked me for help because pages were loading extremely slowly. It turned out the blog had been hacked and was being used to host gigabytes of junk pages with SEO boosting links to really trashy websites.

I used to recommend WordPress wholeheartedly for self-hosted blogs, but these days I strongly prefer something that doesn't have any back-end code that the site owner has to maintain and/or update -- a static site generator, a JAMStack-based blog, etc. Or consider using someone else's hosted blog platform (someone you really trust to host a secure platform).

Best-in-class for a simple blog is something more like Ghost I would say.

Or better yet, any static site generator (Hugo is nice) + Netlify.

I agree, unfortunately. For me, it's been on a decline since wordpress.com came along and from then it's felt more and more like Automattic is driving development to suit their business model. I still run a large-ish blogging network that uses WordPress Multisite, but I would love to migrate away from the platform if there was a suitable alternative.

I think there is a sizeable market for a basic 'none blocks' wordpress clone with a limited range of options for themes and plug-ins.

Anyone who needs to install a plugin to add a table or to do a redirect is already well catered for.

I have discovered ClassicPress - https://www.classicpress.net/

They have forked from WordPress 4.9. I'm not sure yet about their long term feasibility.

> Am I the only one that doesn't like WordPress anymore?

I stopped using WordPress over a decade ago. I use other website//blog platforms now. I may go back if there is nothing better available, but I have a control-streak in me.

At the time I started WordPress I just didn't have the knowledge coupled with just needing to start something quick.

I moved on.

I’m newish to wordpress. The Gutenberg block editor is really word presses answer to squarespace( they said so at a talk word camp Boston a couple years ago).

But it still has the ability to just type away and write stuff without ever leaving the keyboard. I think it’s not bad. And it gives the graphic designers some control.

It’s a weird ecosystem though, you need a solid theme to start and finding those is a little hit or miss. Same with plugins, it’s hard to tell the great from the ok sometimes.

>The real turning point for me was the push to move to the "block" editor

Yep, this as well as seeing random ads appear in my blog while scrolling through my posts. Recently, I tried going back to WP, but only if I could use the classic editor but they made it so confusing to find it and use it that I gave up. Too bad. I was a happy customer for many years prior to the block thing.

Even with people moving to walled gardens, many people still want to build and collaboratively author websites.

WordPress is still best in that, even when it kind of sucks.

I myself prefer the "static builders" for small websites, like Hugo/Jekyll, but WordPress also have built-in editor and access control; with small websites it's whatever, but with bigger websites, it comes handy.

With you 100% on the 'block' editor. Instead of offering a decent alternative to regular site builders they have changed the landscape so someone may as well us wix or squarspace since wordpress is now offering nothing better?

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