Ask HN: Where After WordPress? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where After WordPress?

49 pointspsikomanjak66 comments

What's the best alternative to WordPress right now after all the drama?

Considering I am a javascript person.

None of the solutions right now seem to be close.

Not even ghost.

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I think it'd best to just stay. I see one of two likely things happening:

1. Matt comes to his senses and formally secedes his control of the WordPress Foundation and WordPress OSS to a qualified group of people.

2. He doesn't and the project gets forked to something that gets traction and will be immediately compatible.

I think there's a realistic future where Matt steps away and things go back to being okay. As we've learned, the Foundation is intrinsically integrated with himself and Automattic. And the backdoors they have into authentication and plugins and etc are deeper than we expected.

Matt would basically have to sell the company and the only buyer would be... cough cough ... private equity!

> the Foundation is intrinsically integrated with himself and Automattic

Don't you think Matt could de-integrate himself[1] with and achieve proper governance[2] of the Foundation, while retaining control of Automattic? I don't see the issue, there.

1. I think having Matt as a part of a properly-governed Foundation would be best.

2. "Proper governance" meaning one person can't go apeshit and single-handedly do crazy stuff like what has been happening.

Again, I can only go from what I have read elsewhere in this mess (and Matt making the governance of the Foundation clear as mud doesn't help), but my understanding is that the Foundation is essentially staffed and directed by Automattic employees.

If they could hand it over to an independent board and reassign leadership duties, maybe?

Forking the code is easy, forking the infrastructure and community not so much. It would be a lot of work and with an apparently capricious founder any splinter project has a high likelihood of getting bogged down in drama. My guess is no code fork gets traction, business continues mostly as usual but the supporting service providers and dev ecosystem start moving to alternatives that have more stable governance. Eventually this means the de facto death of WP as a brand and technology.

This is all avoidable if Matt can restore confidence in WP's governance and give the community a sense of a positive vision for the future. That would probably have the side effect of being financially beneficial to Automattic and bring WPEngine into the major contributor fold.

I'm not sure how likely the good version of this is but for everyone's sake I hope WP ends up with some kind of positive resolution.

Look what happened to freenode: everyone just migrated to exactly the same thing but without the crazy guy or the trademark. WPEngine could fork WordPress, call it WPEngine, they're probably already halfway done scraping the plugin repository.

Freenodenis/was a small thing used by quite technical people. WordPress is very different.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#/media/File%3AIRC_t... - this shows 100k Users before the fall and libera taking over about half of them.

freenode wasn't a software project, infrastructure - yes, community - yes, but there's no wordpress community without the software

I think just cede is fine here vs. secede

If he’d go after WPEngine, Matt’s likely to sue any fork or something

This space grew into a bunch of different sub-cutures:

- static website generators (Hugo, etc)

- WYSIWYG editors (Wix, Squarespace)

- Frontends (NextJs, etc) backed by Headless CMS (Strapi, firebase, etc)

There really isn't a good spiritual successor currently. Someone should clone the UX of WP Admin panel, plugins, etc and drop the worst tech debt. Base it on React and make it really easy to deploy.

(edit: formatting)

There's is Ghost as well. Which I think was started by some ex Wordpress people from what I remember back in the day.

There are also the so called "universal CMS", which are headless but with a frontend SDK to achieve the same WYSIWYG, but with a modern frontend framework and deciding exactly what content editors can do. See for example React Bricks.

Just stay with Wordpress, if you like WordPress. It's a vast community. Nothing is even close in terms of marketshare and popularity.

Most people do not care about this drama. And they dont want to care about it because it is their golden goose and customers are used to it.

Yes, some people do care, and yes they are very vocal. And yes there are a lot for those voices here.

Just look at X.

Is still around and still has an extreme amount of users. and it looks like some of folks that switched to Mastodon are not loving it.

Now personally I want WordPress to die because its a nightmare of code.

I find the data schema pretty good. Now with Pods it takes care of extending the schema. The back-end code is decent.

The front end story is different. But after I quit using plugins and started doing a lot of my own coding it is somewhat better but the layers upon layers upon layers of CSS is still a nightmare.

I dont believe the world will accommodate my wish on WordPress.

I also want social media to die. I dont belevive the world will accommodate me on that either.

I have been using kirby (https://getkirby.com/) for all my websites with great success the last few years. It's super stable, flexible, under active development and has a great ecosystem.

Can't recommend it enough.

Seconded. Use it as the full CMS for one blog, as a headless CMS for a company site for another. Great either way.

I recall this being mentioned before and I thought I’d take a look. One thing missing on this site is a clear pricing page and pricing link in the menu and/or footer. Only the license page mentions that it is not free and that a paid license is required.

There is a clear "Buy" link in the header which hints it's a paid product, but maybe you're right and thats not clear enough.

> What's the best alternative to WordPress right now after all the drama?

Probably WordPress. The user-base is so huge that you'll be in good company. There will be an easy migration to whatever the future version is that Matt doesn't have the ability to supply chain attack.

I moderately frequently wonder what is next for me after WordPress. The drama has nothing to do with it though. I don't use WP Engine (have long thought they seemed off), and I don't see the drama causing wordpress.org or wordpress.com to fall.

Likewise. The vast majority of what I've seen so far on this debacle amounts to mob mentality. A lot of people are adding their commentary about Mullenweg, but it strikes me as very surface level and unthoughtful: just saying something to say something because they know what WordPress is.

I don't think the drama will kill Automattic or any of the other involved orgs either. The post-WordPress thing for me, I think, is going to be something that successfully ejects the Gutenberg editor and builds around it. Probably something that borrows from what Drupal has done with Gutenberg and what Corcel has done with WordPress models.

Is Drupal still a thing?

I have always considered Drupal to be a pretty industrial-strength system, but quite complex.

One of the nice things about Drupal, is that you could customize the backend. I have always hated WP's backend.

Drupal is very popular with major enterprises, but it doesn't have the same ability to stand up sites quickly with plug-and-play features and update them automatically.

> you could customize the backend. I have always hated WP's backend.

Ironically, this is something the Wordpress Foundation has made worse over the years.

Drupal is still a thing. It's actually really great, but it suffers from two things:

1. You need a deep knowledge of Drupal to put together something good. It's not beginner-friendly, you will build a couple clunkers before things click.

2. The mind-share is not there like it was for Drupal 7 - the devs still contributing are great, progress is being made, but if you're used to Wordpress plugins or an NPM package being available for whatever you need, Drupal can be frustrating.

> but if you're used to Wordpress plugins or an NPM package being available for whatever you need, Drupal can be frustrating.

On the other hand, Drupal does not have the WordPress ecosystem habits where many modules/plugins have paid upgrades and/or scatter ads all over your site. The WP plugin ecosystem feels so scummy in comparison.

I agree the switch to Drupal 8 really killed its momentum though. (Drupal was reimplemented on top of Symfony and all existing modules/plugins had to be almost entirely rewritten to work with it - which was quite a difficult hurdle for people used to the previous conventions. Also being able to implement a site's configuration entirely in code, a beautiful feature of D7 albeit one that required third-party modules to implement, was still not quite working properly last time I checked.)

I agree with your first point.

Configuration as code is actually one of the best parts of Drupal now. I think it's probably symfony as well under the hood, but you can just import / export your config with a CLI and commit as yml, makes moving configuration to higher / lower environments so pleasant.

But yes, I think with Drupal 7 there were a lot more "site builders" using Drupal, where D8 I imagine it's mostly just developers left standing.

No. Drupal is only suitable if an organization requires open source. To develop a fully customized site still saves more time than using Drupal. And your maintenance path will be much simpler.

Same boat.

As we all realize, WordPress itself is not an immaculate piece of code, but it's the plugin library that makes it. But we now know that even the plugins themselves are liable to hijacking from within.

While it would be nice to start from scratch with a modern, better CMS - the reality is going to be something like ClassicPress but using only premium, manually installed plugins.

http://payloadcms.com -- I'm all in after 12 years on WP.

Payload is tight as hell, but it's tough to recommend a headless CMS as a Wordpress replacement without, you know, a "head."

now that we're built on Next.js (3.0 beta), we now use Next.js as an optional head

you can still use Payload headless of course with any frontend but out of the box you have everything you need. it's pretty nifty

I'm a Technical Director of a design/web agency (small scale, I still build one out of every 3 or so sites). We use Sanity + Next JS (or Sanity + Remix more recently) in a repeatable way. I used to use WP a long time ago, and even then I had my own setup to use twig templating, my own image resizing solution, etc.

I have been considering pouring energy into this problem or at least offering advice, our approach is definitely bespoke and not scalable in the way WP is, but I've long thought the middle ground is in need of ~something~.

Statamic: https://www.statamic.com

I've been using Statamic for a few months now. I've often worked with Laravel, so I tend to really like Statamic. The static content by default feature means you can skip a database altogether if you'd like. Theming and content management is a little bit more of a learning curve, but so much more powerful than something like Wordpress.

I do have one complaint. It can be remarkably difficult to learn how to use Statamic properly. The documentation is a bit lacking. I often struggle to find a solution to a blocker only to find out there's a simple solution that wasn't documented very well. I think this is one of those things that will likely improve as the community continues to grow and mature.

There is a very active discord community that is on hand to help: https://discord.gg/WG9Rucjf

Unrelated but that landing page is probably one of the best I've read and seen.

Source available (?) and licenses get expensive quick it looks like (?)

When I last did my survey of what I could use as a CMS I ran into this, looked at the licensing and walked away quickly.

But I may be wrong since I didn't do any more research, .

Source available yes. There is platform licensing starting at $7 per month per site. Prices are comparable to Wordpress + Jetstream + ACF which is functionality you get out of the box with Statamic.

The price of $7 license is only available at a 25 site minimum that makes the minimum cost $175 per month around $2100 yer year.

For a pro license it's $275 upfront with 1 year of updates per site.

That is damn exception from my point of view.

You can use Pods for free on WordPress which is now a better choice than ACF in my opinion. But ACF has a huge marketshare and is better supported.

I mean not sure about JetStream, it seems to be Laravel scaffolding and open source.

Do you mean JetPack? If so I have not used that in a very long time. It had become very bloated.

There are a lot of other choices ut there som that cost less.

As a JavaScript person, you will probably want to start using JavaScript frontend frameworks like React/Next.js, Vue/Nuxt.js, Astro, etc. These frameworks allow you to build very fast websites, without page reload.

You can connect these frontend frameworks with a Headless CMS which is, ideally, open-source and written in JavaScript/TypeScript too. This way, you can customize both the frontend and the CMS using the same programming language.

We created Strapi, the most popular open-source Headless CMS, to replace legacy stacks with full JS stacks: from the frontend framework to the CMS.

Astro. It's not the same, it's a static site generator, but with a few edge functions for server-side stuff if you need it. Deploys to Cloudflare or another CI/CD environment for free.

The biggest difference for daily use is you don't get an editor. You can pick your markup language (markdown being the most popular) then it's just files. If you're a developer this should be natural.

I have a few blogs running Ghost and really like it. Plugin and theme ecosystem is nowhere near Wordpress size. However, Ghost is much easier to modify and use IMO, maybe because I'm more comfortable in javascript ecosystem than PHP.

https://ghost.org/

let me vouch for 11ty.dev, i love it. it is simple, easy to use, and slim. you don't have to worry about fighting the million dogs around and if that seems like to much. just go and use raw html, i think that ever since i've been using raw html i've actually been publishing more blogposts

11ty is okay, but it is by no means an alternative for WordPress unless you are a developer, using it only for yourself, and are fine writing a custom backend for literally any basic functionality beyond serving static content.

I say we bring back phpNuke

I think it’s probably best just to stay with wordpress.

I just made my own "blogging" platform, where I simply render markdown files using PHP: https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog

I am also using Ghost on a different site, I like their clean editor.

WordPress isn't going anywhere, even if it's via a fork. It's too large and has so many contributors. It may lose some market share over this, but there's a massive, vested interest in at least keeping the spirit and general code base of it alive. Matt bit off more than he can chew, but I wouldn't worry too much about it at the moment. I think it's very possible that during the discovery phase of the lawsuit that Matt is forced out entirely. Not many companies want a massive legal liability at the helm.

Thanks for asking this question! I asked this a couple of weeks ago (Ask HN: What's a Good Alternative to WordPress https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41731867) and I hope people keep the discussion up.

I was also hoping that Ghost would become much larger than it has.

In terms of features or users? For the latter, I hope no company can capture as large of a market as WordPress has. For the former, I wish them all the luck in the world

If I was going to bother now I'd start at static content and work back from that to a solution. Be that a static site generator or another tool which is scraped into static, but nothing you have to host anywhere other than a cheap CDN. The maintenance overhead of CMS platforms over the years have been a killer and the attack surface awful.

Squarespace. I know that sounds insane, but Squarespace.

Used WP for 7 years and now Squarespace in its place for 5.

The builder has gotten so much better in the last 3 years, and I am very impressed. The plugin library is expanding at a faster clip now, too.

> What's the best alternative to WordPress

To do what?

For blogs, static-site generators (Eleventy, Astro, or Hugo). For CMS, a combination of a headless CMS with something on the front (e.g. Eleventy + CloudCannon). For ecommerce, dunno, Shopify?

0. Install Airplane Mode on your WordPress and keep it enabled

1. Try ClassicPress

2. Move to Drupal

3. See if you like something else. E.g. BoltCMS, OctoberCMS, or one of the october forks.

4. Go back to Joomla

5. Quit your job and do something you'd like to be doing

There is the Erlang based Zotonic.com which has a Wordpress like feel.

If you want something simple, try this one: https://www.microfeed.org/

Eleventy if you're a JavaScript person maybe?

I've moved my personal site/blog over to Grav. I've done some small work with Statamic before and loved it.

For a small site with relatively technical administration, Grav is unsurpassed. I've been using it for years for my portfolio and various side projects, and it is a joy to build with.

For a larger site with multiple contributors, I'd probably still stick to Wordpress, though. Its admin experience and ecosystem are just too mature to not take advantage of.

This is why I recommend people look into Statamic. It's absolutely smaller than WordPress, but it's set up for the professional community so there is an environment of plugins, themes, etc. It's also built on top of a Laravel foundation, so you're not stranded having to do things "the WordPress way".

For those of us out of the loop, can someone please share a summary of the drama?

I’ve tried to document the most relevant happenings and writings: https://duerrenberger.dev/blog/2024/10/08/timeline-of-the-wo...

> tl;dr After Matt Mullenweg, BDFL of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, has dragged WP Engine publicly through the mud for not paying a ludicrous amount of money or contributing (enough) to the open source project, WP Engine is suing Automattic and Matt Mullenweg, while Automattic claims misuse of WordPress trademarks.

Thanks for doing this, I had lost track of the drama.

I have always liked Expression Engine, but it looks like they have done yet another licensing / price change.

It is confusing.

I would like to think that Core is open source and free but fromt the site it appears that the "control panel" is limited to 1 user in the core / free version?

I have not used it in a long while but last time I did it was insanely fast.

WordPress is open source and free to use no matter how many users yo have.

https://expressionengine.com/

If you don't want a simple commenting system, go for Hugo.

Perhaps Joomla? As WP, it's PHP based.

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