Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattbrewsbytes | Hacker News Reader

Are people genuinely building new things with Wordpress these days?

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.

View on HN

Wordpress is still pretty freaking phenomenal with its various page-builder plugins, huge ecosystem of templates and plugins and consultants and hosts, headless-capable systems (like advanced custom fields), and ability to be deployed just about anywhere for dollars a month. If you're not a dev and don't want to pay for one, it's still one of the most flexible systems out there and one of the best bangs for the buck.

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.)

>Are people genuinely building new things with Wordpress these days?

Yes, because it's still the best tool for certain tasks. A blog with well integrated commenting, for example.

To be honest I think comments as a pro is the worst possible example in modern times. I am (unfortunately?) fairly industry.

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.

Thanks this is helpful, and your response tells me a lot of why some people don't want to use it anymore. It's still massive though https://joost.blog/cms-market-share/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com