But it's such a bad platform that there really isn't any reason for anybody to use WordPress for anything. No matter your use case, there will be a better alternative to WordPress.
I've tried Drupal in the past for such situations, but it was too complicated for them. That was years ago, so maybe it's better now.
25 years ago we used Microsoft Frontpage for that, with the web root mapped to a file share that the non-technical secretary could write to and edit it as if it were a word processor.
Somehow I feel we have regressed from that simplicity, with nothing but hand waving to make up for it. This method was declared "obsolete" and ... Wordpress kludges took its place as somehow "better". Someone prove me wrong.
The other part is clients freaking out after Frontpage had a series of dangerous CVEs all in a row.
And then finally every time a part of Frontpage got popular, MS would deprecate the API and replace it with a new one.
Wordpress was in the right place at the right time.
In one, multiple users can login, edit WYSIWYG, preview, add images, etc, all from one UI. You can access it from any browser including smart phones and tablets.
In the other, you get to instruct users on git, how to deal with merge conflicts, code review (two people can't easily work on a post like they can in wordpress), previews require a manual build, you need a local checkout and local build installation to do the build. There no WYSIWYG, adding images is a manual process of copying a file, figuring out the URL, etc... No smartphone/tablet support. etc....
I switched by blog from wordpress install to a static site geneator because I got tired of having to keep it up to date but my posting dropped because of friction of posting went way up. I could no longer post from a phone. I couldn't easily add images. I had to build to preview. And had to submit via git commits and pushes. All of that meant what was easy became tedious.
I build mine with GitHub Actions and host it free on Pages.
IIRC, Eleventy printed lots of out-of-date warnings when I installed it and/or the default style was broken in various ways which didn't give me much confidence.
My younger sister asked me to help her start a blog. I just pointed her to substack. Zero effort, easy for her.
For example (not affiliated with them) https://www.siteleaf.com/
Edit: I actually feel a bit sorry for the SurrealCMS developer. He has a fantastic product that should be an industry standard, but it's fairly unknown.
> new
Pretty sure Drupal has been around for like, 20 years or so. Or is this a different Drupal?
It appears Drupal CMS is a customized version of Drupal that is easier for less tech-savvy folks to get up and running. At least, that's the impression I got reading through the marketing hype that "explains" it with nothing but buzzwords.
And only hosted option for the copyrighted code starts at 300/y
these don't cover any use case people use WordPress for.
- very hard to hack because we pre render all assets to a Cloudflare kv store
- public website and CMS editor are on different domains
Basically very hard to hack. Also as a bonus is much more reliable as it will only go down when Cloudflare does.
Could be automated better (drop ZIP to a share somewhere where it gets processed and deployed) but best of both worlds.
And: compared to the other builders like Wix, Squarespace etc, you're not locked in. If you make a thing on wordpress.com or wordpress.org and want to escape, you just export your stuff in a common XML format. You get none of that with the commercial options.
So, yeh, however much HN likes to hate on it, it's still the best platform of choice for non-technicals to get stuff on the web.
If they are selling anything on their website, it's probably going to be through a cloud hosted third party service and then it's just an embedded iframe on their website.
If you're making an entire web shop for a very large enterprise or something of similar magnitude, then you have to ask somebody else than me.
Everything I've built in the past like 5 years has been almost entirely pure ES6 with some helpers like jsviews.
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-web-framew...
Then WordPress is just your private CMS/UI for making changes, and it generates static files that are uploaded to a webhost like CloudFlare Pages, GitHub Pages, etc.
Now that plugin became a service, at which point you might just use a WP host and let them do their thing.
I think a crawler that generates a static directory from your site probably the best approach since it generalizes over any site. Even better if you're able to declare all routes ahead of time.