Ask HN: What's Wrong with WordPress?
Not a question about the organization or founder.
I'm curious as a product what would you change about WordPress / what would you do differently if you could rebuild it from scratch today?
I use it regularly - 3 or more posts a week - and it's as fast as I could hope for. So easy to create and edit posts. So many plugins for just about everything I want to do. And professional templates - with support - are so cheap I'm almost embarrassed to be paying for it.
I think a lot of people see Wordpress as it was back in the early 2000s, when amateur bloggers were liking each others posts and getting comments was the goal. And fighting spam was a daily chore.
I see it as a simple publishing platform where I can focus on writing and not on infrastructure. I really don't care what's under the covers. If your better solution is any more complicated than me signing up, I'm not interested.
Years ago there was a surge of people putting out blogs and websites like that which brought demand for plug-ins, etc. Long form text content isn't the trend now, its podcasts and vlogs, etc. In some ways, amateur content creators just need a smartphone.
I think if someone was going to build a platform for nearly anyone to publish content it would need to have easy plugins to do things with video and audio and not be focused just on text. Allowing people to build plug-ins and themes and install them is a key feature.
I think the technology choice that would make this easiest these days is JavaScript (even tho I'm not a user). The numbers of people out there today with deep JS skills are similar to when there were a lot of PHP developers building WordPress plugins. It allows for front and back end development which could be an advantage to a plugin based tool like WordPress is.
Yes, because it's still the best tool for certain tasks. A blog with well integrated commenting, for example.
Pretty marketing sites that look fancy is what WordPress primarily is used for and expected.
“Hey devs and designers make me something better than Squarespace but give me edit access.”
Comments and everything possible disabled. The point of value for organizations really is that it is self-host and self-updating. Essentially simple portable auth with easy template system.
If you need more customizability than Wix but don't want to learn all the bullshit that is modern web dev with its decades of baggage, Wordpress can get you very far, and help is widely available and cheap or free.
IMHO its ecosystem is in much healthier shape than, say, the JS framework graveyard or even its close competitors like Drupal or its past competitors like Joomla, Moveable Type, Blogger, etc. Wordpress is alive and well, and these days, with services like Pantheon (or yes, WPEngine), hosting it and developing on it isn't so bad either. It's way more structured/documented/maintained/tested/stable than your average JS Jamstack project, for example.
(And I say that as a frontend dev who purposely chose to move away from Wordpress & PHP into the React world, like you said. I love JS because frankly it's a lot more fun than Wordpress, the DX is better, and there's lot less backend stuff to worry about. But Wordpress is really amazing for what it's been able to offer the web community, and really, for most users (as opposed to devs), it's probably still the better choice. Way less fragile and bleeding-edge chasing than JS.)
I also wish it weren't PHP or require such a heavy backend stack. Having something like the above but serverless and portable would be pretty cool. Open source internals, paid templates, pick any cloud to host on, 1-click deploy, 10% of the hosting fee goes back to open source foundation, then any editor can drag and drop and rearrange modules as needed. Oh, and no for-profit branch run by the same people competing against the other vendors...
If I were building it today, I would write it in golang and I would offer the ability to export static sites. I would make comments an optional or external module since spam has largely ruined comments sections for anyone who doesn't get many legitimate comments. Why golang? Because it typically has the easiest deploy story, IMO.
If I were writing it then, I would have written it in Python and chosen PostgreSQL as the database. Of course, back then that is what I would have chosen as well.
To me, this feels like an anti-feature of WordPress. In a sane CMS, getting a basic theme up and running – from scratch – should be easy.
I also don't get all the focus on full-site editing and blocks and customisation and Gutenberg either, since it feels like these features are only really going to be usable if either you're running your site as a solo venture or you're working in some sort of media environment where fancy one-off article styles can be the norm (like some New York Times longform pieces).
Anything other than that feels like a place where the modern style of editor is just a recipe for disaster. A large corporation doesn't want its editors to go wild with blocks and widgets in their posts and pages. An agency doesn't want the client to play designer and go crazy with the theme customisation. They're features meant for the Squarespace/Wix market, and not ones that necessarily fit something like WordPress.
But eh, it feels like there's too much focus on trying to compete with page builders and hosted site building tools, and not enough focus on fleshing out the features already included there, or providing a solid, easily extendable editing experience for existing WordPress site owners.