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Comment by hnrodey | Hacker News Reader

Commenting w/o reading the article. WordPress triggered me.

Last month I created a brand new site using WordPress. I followed a 90 minute video on YouTube where I was instructed step-by-step on what to do. The result is that I'm happy with the finished product and learned a lot about WordPress along the way.

However, I would have NEVER got there on my own absent this remarkable YT video. WordPress is too complex, too bloated, too filled with messages from plugins, too reliant on magic, too reliant on plugins to do anything advanced beyond setup a post or page.

I hate WordPress so much. I'll still use it because it's entrenched, and because it's less time that coding a Jekyll site to equivalent functionality.

But I hate it. Thoroughly.

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> that coding a Jekyll site to equivalent functionality.

With me it's the exact opposite. Jekyll, a GH actions, deploy to a static site hosting takes under an hour. I know Jekyll, so it's a bit cheating, but yesterday I did the same with hugo, that I never used before and within 1:30 I had a site running on Digital Ocean.

And It's also not because I don't know WP. I've build and scaled a dedicated WP hosting company so I know quite a bit about setting it up :)

In my case it's always because I know the primitives of the web very well: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (and the JS/HTML Web APIs).

WP has layers upon layers upon layers between me and these primitives. Hugo or Jekyll don't: they are as close to these primitives as possible. I know the primitives, I never know these layers upon layers upon layers. They are shifting targets, poorly documented and often horribly executed. So instead of "just using flexbox for this thingy", In WP I need to learn yet another "site builder", or "theme framework", or, worse but rather common: all combinations of all options; infinite amount of permutations that interact, or conflict, or both.

(And yes, I know I can build a WP theme from scratch, staying close to the primitives. But that's far, far more work than 1:30h)

This is just the startup cost. Which is, in my experience, rather high with WP. The real cost comes at maintaining and future development and scaling.

The problem is that right now the pathways to quickly bootstrap a WordPress site with a good enough, customized theme are hidden under SaaS providers, like hosting companies. Use InstaWP or ZipWP, for example, and you can start in just minutes.

> and you can start in just minutes.

Like I said: I built and scaled such a hosting.

But while you can start in just minutes, you don't have that publishable site that you have in your mind, in minutes. It takes hours to learn where to find what. To select a good theme. To find the right plugins. To remove the wrong plugins. To then fix some error that comes from removing the plugin. Or to fix an error from installing the wrong one. Experienced WP devs even ask hours for this: people who do this all day, for a living, will charge you hours to build this for you.

Sure, you may be lucky and have some goal in mind that happens to be ridiculous easy with WP. Or you may not have something in mind and just go-with-the-flow to end somewhere that happens to be easy with WP (a good strategy really).

But, in general, I have something in mind. A landing page for a startup. Or the outlines of a webshop, or a simple blog even, and it will take me hours or days banging against WP to get there, whereas with hugo or jekyll that's less than a few hours of banging.

I’m building pretty complex stuff with just Flask and Jinja, and as somebody who also has deep fundamentals it’s so much easier than wading through layers of useless crap these frameworks de jour push in your face.

> I'll still use it because it's entrenched, and because it takes less time than coding a Jekyll site with equivalent functionality.

I wouldn't count on that. It required a 90-minute video for you to get going with Wordpress. I would say, if you know some basic stuff (e.g., know how to install gem, how to write markdown/html), you can set up Jekyll in under 90 minutes:

gem install jekyll bundler; jekyll new myblog; cd myblog; bundle exec jekyll serve

Now, you have a server up and running. You can start creating a post by creating a markdown file in the _posts folder.

For me personally, it would be faster to learn any easy-to-use static site generator than Wordpress.

Only if you already know how to, well, do programming and writing commands to terminal.

For a lot of people clicking pretty buttons is easier to understand.

it's 30 seconds to do that in wordpress. I think what GP meant by setup is advanced setup

> But I hate it. Thoroughly.

I had this mindset for years. "It's not real programming. It's for people with no brain", I would tell myself. A lot of other developers share this idea, I think.

However, I currently am in the plan of launching a series of blogs, somewhat related to each other. I figured I'd try out wordpress, just to see what it's like, and also because I plan on having other people working on these blogs.

Whoah! Completely blown away by wordpress and how quickly I can set things up. PHP is quite simple, and the built-in functions are very helpful.

If you plan on just launching some products, learn wordpress. If you want to learn a programming language, go ahead and write the entirety of the code base yourself - that's the only reason I can think of to not use wordpress (for myself).

I recently was forced to use WP for a site due to third party constraints. It simply wreaks of being a swiss cheese of security vulnerabilities once you start adding plugins - so that would be my main reason for staying away from it for a simpler site. For a more complex site you will wind up with so many plugins you are better off custom since something will definitely break from an update down the road.

My favorite thing was how easy it was to create a simple plugin from where I could inject my own php / html / js/ css at just about any stage of the pipeline, and crazily enough, I tried too many cms that would not allow me to override and direct edit the html on a page. It does win in the "easy to deploy but fully customizable" category, just because of that.

But my thought when using it was sometimes "they made this more complicated and difficult than doing it directly, because they managed to convince people the direct programming was out of reach". But that is how I feel about most frameworks, so I might not be objective on that one. Overall it was faster, but the tradeoff was massive opacity. I recently noticed a tracking pixel on my site and have to figure out which a**hole plugin dev is injecting it, then find a different plugin or write my own. I have always been vanilla for my other sites, so learning to combat other vendors and having an adversarial relationship with my own site really breaks the mental model for me.

WordPress is best viewed as a framework for people who don’t want to touch code. The reason it feels more difficult to ‘do it directly’ is because most WP users really aren’t expected to do so; they’d be using plugins rather than writing their own code.

I completely understand that, but in the real world, you will need to get your hands dirty with a bit of code because no matter how complete, there will be an edge case where you need to jump outside the box.

WP is still popular as it is for two reasons:

1. You can install it in a toaster. The cheapest hosting service will offer PHP and MySQL. It will run slow, but it will run. It will be easy to install and start working right away.

2. You can train anyone to use it and put content on it in an hour.

> It simply wreaks of being a swiss cheese of security vulnerabilities once you start adding plugins

The security industry in WP space is bigger than most open source spaces, comparable with Linux. If you go use plugins with a few hundred installs, yeah, you may end up with security risks. But if you use plugins with a few thousand installs and more or use plugins that are from maintainers who have other plugins with such large amount of installs, you should be safe.

I’ve built my own websites running on NextJS, Django, Rails, Jekyll, and Hugo and it was great as a developer getting exactly what you want. Recently we brought on some marketing people and trying to get things out on a custom Django app was blocking them because of a lack of engineering resources. Their campaigns were delayed and they were getting frustrated. We moved to Wordpress and have setup a vetting process for plugins which they just need 2-3. Marketing can update the website as needed and don’t need engineering time. Most of what they create are forms, blog posts, and pages. So nothing super complex anyways.

As an entrepreneur I see why WordPress has such a large command. Plenty of people who can work on it. If you are nontechnical and use a hosted solution you can create a good enough MVP with all of these plugins. As an engineer everything about it is annoying but it commands 42% of the web so it must be doing something right.

> I had this mindset for years. "It's not real programming. It's for people with no brain", I would tell myself. A lot of other developers share this idea, I think

Yeah. I also had the same mentality until I started interfacing with actual users, site owners and customers and they started telling me that they don't give two sh*ts about the things that we programmers think to be 'important'. They care whether something is easy, cheap, it works and that's it. And they are right - they have actual businesses to run, and their livelihoods depend on it. Then I tried setting up and using a few WP sites - holy crap, that was easy. Even if the coding paradigms in some parts of its code were not 'up to date', it worked like a clock, and it took away all stuff that I had to do manually before. Then with time I understood that the project was not changing those 'not up to date' code inside the codebase to keep backward compatibility - which is critically important for the users (who now included me), and I came to appreciate it. I also did some coding on it and got some users and learned that users really, really, REALLY hate their websites and businesses getting disrupted because some programmer/maintainer thought to update something in a backward compatible way because it was 'better programming'. So now I don't do it either.

Mind sharing that video? I have a friend that set himself up on a WordPress site because he wants to be able to have control over his very small private training business. I'm a full-stack dev, but don't know anything about how WordPress does things to be able to help him out.

" followed a 90 minute video on YouTube where I was instructed step-by-step on what to do. The result is that I'm happy with the finished product"

Now try doing that as a non technical person with anything else and report to us if you succeeded. You won't. This is why WordPress is popular. Liking or hating doesn't matter. No one has been able to build something that can replace WordPress.

Same. I tried many times in the last 10 years to see if it improved, but every time it got worse. Especially the plugins. Automattic should have killed many of them by integrating the functionality, but they have seem to have stagnated years ago.

Automattic are one of the worst offenders when it comes to plugins, a bunch of features that should be in core are in their jetpack plugin that integrates with their proprietary SaaS.

Background: I got my start dabbling in WP around 10 years ago, and still maintain a few WP sites.

If you needed a 90-minute video — I daresay you either did it wrong, bit off too much to chew, or were better off using a high-code framework instead.

One of the reasons WordPress got popular is its at-the-time famed ‘five-minute install’. [1] You just throw the files on a server with PHP, give it a MySQL database and that’s it. (Nowadays, even this five-minute process is usually abstracted away behind a mouse click.)

With that, you get the core WP functionality, i.e. a modern theme, the ability to create blog posts, pages, and have visitors leave comments. For many people who just want to get a relatively simple website, this is quite enough, and IMO there is still no comparable no-code site engine.

Want a different look? Just search on the official theme directory (quality varies, but there are decent ones — just try not to get forced into the old ‘classic’ editor), use one of the first-party themes, or write your own.

Want to extend the core functionality? Just search on the official plugin directory (again, quality varies, so exercise judgment) or write your own.

Now, is it possible to blindly throw a cocktail of plugins at the wall, resulting in an unmaintainable abomination? Yes, it is — but as you’ve already discovered, you won’t necessarily like the result.

[1] https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/befo...

Something similar I said in 2021, glad to see it still applies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540187

The problem with Wordpress is it doesn’t follow MVC and mixes application logic with presentation which is a mess.

I'd love to share the link to that video with someone who will benefit as much as you have, so that I can continue to never think about WordPress myself.

Folks here are commenting about this FSE feature that allows you to build a full site starting from a block theme. I did a quick search on YT for 'FSE full course' and found some. I think it's worth the time checking out.

Are you mad at wordpress or the fact you had to build the site in the first place?

Cause it seems like building any site with a tool you don't understand and don't particularly want to understand is going to be a bad experience?

What's the video?

> WordPress is too complex, too bloated, too filled with messages from plugins, too reliant on magic, too reliant on plugins to do anything advanced beyond setup a post or page.

Huh?

The out of the box Wordpress is everything one needs to publish things on the internet. Its easy as hell and that's why its 43% of the websites on the planet.

If you BUILT a site, then it means that you did use it for a specific purpose other than just blogging or having a presence on the internet. If that is the case, how did you expect it to happen? Without zero effort on your side? Have you tried doing the same in React or any modern frontend for comparison?

I get it, i had used a half dozen blogging platforms before switching to wordpress in the early 2000s and beyond the ease of creating a new site, the ui felt very crowded with tons of menus I didn’t need or care about initially. Yes it relatively simple and everything one needs but I get it can be intimidating and feel bloated if you just want a simple blog. The menu structure takes some getting used to. It’s easy to forget after using it for a time. I’m back to thinking it is bloated after a decade of using it, but for different (philosophical) reasons now.

Can you share the link with this tutorial?

Not OP - but I have found a few like this that are good - and I posted a few under 'wordpress stuff' https://steveiscritical.com/learn-websites-and-coding/ - to teach my teams more modern wordpress ways recently.

I warn people that even though a good and easy to use tutorial like XYorZ may help teach, be wary that if they are teaching using elementor, bricks or similar page builder (added plugins), that it may be good knowledge, but that's not really wordpress per se.

Anyhow, with the new FSE editing options, I will say that I finally feel we can put the separate page builders to pasture for the most part, and all the bloat that comes with them for most use cases.

Super Appreciate the vids that Jamie Marsland has been releasing - many showing how to do nice designs with base WP, watching the process is helpful getting up to speed with current options - and shows how modern stuff can be crafted without tons of fancy addons these days.

Navigating the new FSE stuff is very different than previous WP ways like the customizer or 'additional css' blocks, it's finally getting noob friendly again.

Thank you, Sir

Once upon a time, you have to have a second installation of WordPress just to get an "About" page along with the main Blog.

I reached a point where I had to install Bludit in ./blog in order to add a decent blog to a Wordpress website. I'm serious.

I first used WordPress in ~2008 and that wasn't the case then, you must have been a real early adopter for that to have been true, or have done something seriously wrong during the install.

Tried and used WordPress since its beta or early release 2003-ish. If I remember correctly, it has no option to have multiple pages, hence the need to install another instance for Pages.

(I see, my original comment was downvoted -- I've no idea. We started WordPress with no option to have multiple pages and now see where we are and what we can do with it. Isn't that an interesting titbit.) :-)

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