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Comment by Topgamer7 | Hacker News Reader

I think these days, the average WordPress site runner is trying to find a cheap/free. Non-technical solution.

I help out with a sports league who run a couple wordpress sites.

- One, its totally the wrong CMS for how they use it.

- Two, they have almost no ability to diagnose and debug issues themselves. Honestly 80% of the issues that get raised to me are even just solved by clicking "keep plugin automatically updated"

They really just want a CMS that allows them to share announcements, post schedules and where to show up to play.

But it gets the job done, for cheap, and there is a decent community on plugins and themes.

Wordpress was originally popular because of its openness and community right? I wonder if that's still the platform it is.

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No I don’t see it as an open platform with a strong community. Matt has demonstrated he will shut off features for large swaths of sites where is the openness there? The community plugins are loyal to a few popular plugins that all have pay walls if you want to do more than the basics. Any time Wordpress implements a new feature they have to do so it doesn’t completely crush the plugin community. Like site maps for example are trapped behind using a wordpress hook or using a plugin like Yoast to customize them.

I'll second the sibling poster here by saying anything useful you want to do with WordPress will probably have a non-negligible cost, and usually a subscription. WooCommerce for instance requires a subscription to add a minimum quantity to a product! I volunteer for a non-profit that uses it, and it's absolutely insane how many plugins will give you a little for free but charge $5/month or $50/year for just slightly more features.

If you were to guide them today, what would you set them up that's not WP that gives functionality similar to wp+woo?

(asking for someone who has a site using wp+woo. I don't plan to switch us - the switching cost is too high to be worth it - but I do want to have something in my pocket for the future.)

I would point you at headless cms software like ContentStack or Payload which are easy as pie to use and integrate with a react frontend.

Thank you!

Or React Bricks

Shopify actually might be appropriate for many of their use cases.

About a decade ago, there was a huge kerfluffle about making the plugin directory include pricing and payments (like an app store). Matt was hugely against it. I think they did themselves a huge disservice. Pricing is opaque until you install the plugin, often requiring you to go "off site" to install the paid version (or it silently uses a different plugin repository). Lastly, there is no quality control or even ensuring that best/ethical practices are being followed.

So, you end up with this scummy feeling every time you install a plugin and discover its pricing.

How is it set up though?

I feel I could battle harden a WP setup with those needs.

Disable most of the admin interface. Just let them access what they need.

Announcements, schedules, and where to play - stored as ACF records on a page/post and displayed with a custom template/loop.

Slim down the admin interface to just CRUD for those items.

> its totally the wrong CMS for how they use it.

As the same for most sites hosted with WP.

Whats the alternative? Most people have just switched to Instagram or Twitter for stuff like that. Easy daily update/schedules ect.

I went with wordpress for a website for a small charity I help with, I'm not usually a web guy but I used it years ago and, hey, it's open source right?

I was incredibly disappointed in how the plugin ecosystem is dominated by "freemium" plugins that don't really seem in the spirit of open source. Even Automattic's own jetpack seems nothing more than a connector to a proprietary SaaS.

I still don't understand how the new template system is supposed to work either.

Maybe I'd feel different if I was doing this for a company, but I was doing this for free for a charity with near zero budget.

The only real competition seems to be ghost though, and it doesn't even have a real plugin system. If you want something simple like a event calendar you need to host it entirely separately.

> I still don't understand how the new template system is supposed to work either.

Oh gosh I had to use a blog post to even find documentation on it. It’s basically a pile of hidden legos, for a simple table with columns you have to essentially implement it yourself with a few helper methods to help out. Then there’s the new system based on react because they could that has an entirely separate implementation stack. Also for a simple table you end up implementing all the functions and JSX yourself.

> I was incredibly disappointed in how the plugin ecosystem is dominated by "freemium" plugins that don't really seem in the spirit of open source.

I haven't been doing WordPress for a few years now, but plugin maintenance does take up either money or time.

"Freemium" is how everyone gets the end customer to contribute something if they want something readily off-the-shelf, considering how low the barrier of entry for plugin installation is.

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