Modern WordPress – Yikes | Hacker News Reader

Modern WordPress – Yikes

dbushell.com

39 pointsbrnt17 comments

This article is pinpoint accurate. I was enamoured with Gutenberg at first and the idea of my clients being able to edit their site themselves but it turns out they almost never do and the problems outweigh the benefits.

I still think WordPress is a fantastic CMS for simple projects and I don't intend to replace it but I'm definitely going back to the classic editor + ACF flexible contents.

My first dev job was all WordPress stuff. The guy I worked for used the ability of clients to manage their own site as his main selling point. This was years before Gutenberg, and I don't think ACF was a thing yet. I spent a lot of time building forms to manage just about everything on the site. Almost no one used any of it except for publishing blog-style content.

We had one client who wanted this crazy design meant to look like a comic book splash page. Nothing was uniform or consistent. I spent weeks setting up all this bullshit so the client could customize every little thing. When I showed the client how to use it his only comment was something like "this clearly wasn't made to be easy to use."

I believe "whole site editing" just isn't a good idea for most clients who hire a web developer. Anyone who wants that much control will either build it themselves or use something like Square Space.

I spend way too much time in the insanity that is Gutenberg and I absolutely hate it.

They are basically build a weird word processor where everything is constantly broken and in flux.

If you want to do something as basic as update the DOM structure of a block you have to manually update every page that uses it since they serialize it rendered. It’s technically possible to render your blocks in PHP but then you still have to implement it in React as well for it to work fully in the editor.

Can you still write/use old style themes? It's been more than a decade for me, and although there where some WP-isms you had to know about ('the loop'), it was otherwise pretty straightforward using php as the templating language and (obviously) rendering html and styling through css. Standard stuff, that would let you dive in quickly. I'm sad to see that has changed.

Yes you can. I've been working with WP inhouse for a long time and I had no idea it had gotten as bad as in the OP article. I stay away from the gutenberg stuff and continue on with the "oldschool" stuff.

Checkout https://textpattern.com/ - its development started around the same time as WordPress, and still continues. Even though it didn't reach Wordpress' success, I've always felt that TextPattern is better coded than WordPress.

Throwing my recommendation for ProcessWire CMS. I switched to it 10 years ago and made a YouTube series around that time that compares it to WordPress. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOrdUWNK38ibz8U_5Vq4z...

Thanks for the reminder! I loved Textpattern. Should check it out again.

I maintain an industry news website built in Wordpress and we use the Classic Editor plugin (as well as the classic widget). Gutenberg just isn't it. Hopefully the classic plugins won't become abandoned or incompatible anytime soon, feels like it might even though they refuse to modernize the WP project because of backwards compatibility.

Dreaming about migrating to some other CMS.

Gutenberg never worked for me, it could not save the post. This being said, this was likely caused by cloudflare.

Be careful with cloudflare. Wordpress multisite? Does not work with CF.

Another nasty suprise: Very possible CF prevents the indexing of your pics:

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/images-are-not-indexed-by...

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/request-for-assistance-i...

I turned CF off today and will replace it in the near future with a paid CFN that can run on my own subdomain.

https://expatcircle.com/cms/why-you-should-never-use-cloudfl...

Is this where all software ends if you don't have a very strict enforced vision and policy that safeguard's you from this deterioration?

WP is a giant skip-fire. These bloody plugins and updates dance ended in tears for me. These days we leave it the WP professionals to handle the pain at my former employers. This is why I quit web dev. I prefer application development these days.

I guess ClassicPress [1] needs some love by those who prefer the classic editor and how WordPress used to be before the introduction of Gutenberg.

[1] https://www.classicpress.net/

From the domain I would have thought this guy spends all his time struggling with D-Bus

The font hinting(?) causing merged arrow characters on this article made me think Wordpress themes had started using entirely new characters to represent template steps.

Not what I'd expect in a formatted code block.

It's font ligatures for code, and yeah, it can be very confusing if you're not expecting it.

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