Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

I know this is controversial, but I was in his EXACT spot and I did something else that many of us at some point in our lives ended up doing - I wrote my own CMS. But, I wrote mine for the last 10 years. I iterated it with various different languages, frameworks and eventually settled for a Phoenix/Elixir based backend that is locally / cloud hostable, with a more or less similar UI to Wordpress. I actually wrote a lengthy article about it if you are interested to follow on its updates: https://medium.com/@ideatocode/what-i-learned-as-an-artist-w...

The thing that keeps people hooked with Wordpress is actually the UI. For most people, it is stupidly simple to use after they play around with it for a couple of days.

In Singapore, I met this florist who was running her entire business based off of a shared hosting hosted Wordpress that wasn't updated in years. I asked her what kept her on the platform still as it was slow af and she said "it just works". She got hacked a couple of times, but no biggie, she was also back on track after just a support ticket to her hosting provider. That is the power of Wordpress from a user's POV.

Thanks to Wordpress, almost my entire career was built on top of it, just detesting it (unknowingly).

>She got hacked a couple of times, but no biggie, she was also back on track after just a support ticket to her hosting provider.

Nice provider :D

I have the same sentiment about Wordpress. I see a lot of criticisms for the Gutenberg editor after they deprecated TinyMCE and I can't understand it. You can easily write your own WYSIWYG widgets if you know React.

A lot of other CMS's just lack the ability to insert random blocks into the HTML or are purely markdown-based. If I can't Ctrl+K and search the name of a page to add a link, it's not even content-manage-y, it's more like a page rendering engine.

After writing a lot of things in Wordpress I went to write something in Reddit and it made me miss Gutenberg. I start a code block, how do I leave the code block? Pressing enter twice doesn't work??? If I click the code block button, the whole code block disappears! Can I type a paragraph before the code block and press an arrow button to push it forward? I can't. And even the toolbar doesn't stay on the screen on desktop if the post is too long, it stays on top of the textbox!

There's a lot of work put into Gutenberg to make it intuitive and versatile. Perhaps the most important lesson, UI-wise, one could take from it, that I have been noticing in good UIs lately, is that there should be multiple ways to perform the same task. There are at least 4 different ways to move a block in Gutenberg. In most editors, it's only cut and paste.

I suspect every bespoke web-accessible CMS evolves towards some WordPress conventions over time.

I have built, I don’t know, four (or maybe five depending on your perspective, and not-including small app-specific systems) fairly solid CMSes in the last couple of decades, and installed them in different places, and maintained a few more.

But the ones that have survived the longest are the ones derived from the first, simplest PHP system I produced, which had solid authentication, a very simple page handler model and admin screen model, form handling thanks to a custom version of the legendary fillInFormValues code, etc.

Because it had such simple objectives and structures at the beginning, it has never been difficult to maintain, and it remains incredibly fast.

It is getting on for twenty years old, has gone through two wholesale ORM changes, has a JSON API, is managed with Composer, has CSS inlining support for its transactional emails, etc.

It has also ended up with WP style hooks and actions for the front end, which has allowed me to port my own live SCSS and JS compiler plugins more or less directly from my WP projects.

There is a lot to like about the flat simplicity of the WP hooks and actions model, and the way it can be implemented in other very simple page rendering CMSes. It’s more or less completely independent of plugin initialisation so it’s easy to add it regardless of the scheme in use there.

Thanks Neya. I'm still grateful for WordPress, as I also owe a nice chunk of my career to it.

And, I also agree with you that the admin UI is pretty solid. This is impressively simple to put together any kind of content in minutes.

Yet, the performance and resource consumption are telling another story.

If I'm moving away for my personal (unvisited) blog, WordPress will still remain dear to my heart. And I know that, if I ever had to being a freelance full-stack designer and developer, I'll happily work back on WordPress for my customers.

Obligatory meme:

https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/

I'm personally in the top left corner and bottom right corner at the same time, which is sort of funny.

I have used WordPress since 2004-2005, and I've also written a Python static site generator before using Flask, Frozen-Flask[1], and webpack. I've also made stops through tools like Sphinx, Hugo, Gatsby, and VitePress[2]. But my personal site continues to run WordPress[3].

I think I'd prefer something like VitePress these days for a technical documentation site. It has a lot going for it for that use case.

Also, I recently learned that MediaWiki with a reasonable theme like Citizen[4] is a nice choice for an open source powered private wiki, although I do find the Mediawiki markup language a little cumbersome versus simpler markup languages like reST or Markdown/MyST in the Python community (or GitHub-Flavored Markdown or Asciidoc supported elsewhere). But Mediawiki has a lot of nice features (after all, Mediawiki powers Wikipedia). The theme makes it work properly on mobile and makes content editing a bit simpler. It still isn't nearly as polished as commercial wiki-like software (e.g. Notion) but it's better than open source wikis used to be.

I do find it kind of amusing how many tools and frameworks developers have created for making it easier to edit HTML pages. Truly a foundational 21st century problem, I guess!

[1]: https://frozen-flask.readthedocs.io/

[2]: https://vitepress.dev/

[3]: https://amontalenti.com

[4]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Citizen

It's the adage: your users don't care about your tech stack.

In the time it takes for you to learn jekyll or hugo, someone with a wordpress blog already wrote 30 articles. When you finally figure out static hosting, 50 posts. When you finally make something with it that you wouldn't be able to do with vanilla wordpress, they will have their first user. :P

Exactly. :)

Haha! That meme was spot on. I think we’re both the same, I simultaneously belong to the top left and bottom right too. In my case, i got lucky. I put my CMS to production into a newsroom that has over 50,000 articles, so in my case I was extremely lucky that it paid off. But, I totally get your point on getting lost in the chase. Thanks for sharing!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com