A case for something, anything more simple than WordPress
colin.getbarley.com
colin.getbarley.com
All the time I hear from fellow devs "oh don't advertise you use WordPress, it's irrelevant to clients." Tell that to my bank account and all the jobs I've stolen from agencies who wanted to use their BS proprietary CMS.
I sell WordPress like this: when you want a rebuild in 10 years and I'm in Thailand smoking drugs with your money pile you just gave me, you'll be able to find someone to work on it no problem.
There's plenty to dislike about the WP codebase, but we all have to remember that WP was made in an era when coding reasonable software in PHP was nearly impossible. Nothing backwards-compatible can happen there that isn't going to destroy all the millions of existing sites. It's still pretty freaking easy to build a site with, especially when you compare it to other CMSes of that era.
Moreover, their development roadmap is actually really solid. I like where WP is going. I unfortunately would no longer recommend it for basic blogging due to its complexity but as a CMS, there's really not a lot of free software options that can function on that level without extensive database programming and security knowledge.
So the "next Wordpress" won't be able to be the next Wordpress until it's popular. It'll have to be good for other reasons until then.
I'm working on an open-source Wordpress replacement right now. (No link yet. I want to get a little farther before I put it out there.) The basic concept is:
1) Use Rails, to ease development of plugins and per-site functionality.
2) Don't save content or site config in the database. Save it to disk.
3) Git keeps track of your content and config, just like a regular Rails project. The user-friendly admin interface is actually just a wrapper around Git plus a text editor and some menus. Developers can work in a text editor and a terminal while the client works in the GUI.
4) Because content and config are Git-controlled text files and not database records, you have a sane workflow for developing locally then deploying.
Wordpress works on all manners of shared and dedicated web hosting because they all (or at least the majority) support PHP
The biggest missing ingredient is a one-liner installer for all the dependencies. Installing Rails, the MySQL gem, and Passenger on a fresh server is not terribly hard for an experienced Unix user, but it is quite intimidating for casual users. So one of my goals for the project is to create a "worse is better" Rails installer. I.e. a really quick-and-dirty script, bundled with the CMS, which gives you a minimal Rails/Passenger/MySQL environment. It would be optimized for issue-free installation on a variety of hosts, rather than for bleeding edge features or maximum performance.
The choice of language in particular is a place where I don't want to compromise, because it's such a fundamental component, and it sets the tone for everything else. It's not just the language itself, but the community you're importing when you choose a language. There are plenty of good programmers using PHP, but the language also attracts a high percentage of the clueless. (If you're reading this and you code PHP, chances are you're in the first camp, so this isn't a stab against you.)
I understand why you're following 37signals' simplicity model, but those markets didn't have flexible CMS' to start with like we do. The beauty of WordPress is that it's easy to hide and remove extraneous features. It has everything you need and you can just remove the stuff you don't, just like the way a sculptor chisels away the unneeded parts. It's building from a different direction.
WordPress is a tool, not an end product, and it's been around for over 10 years.
Face it, websites are a commodity these days. What new features, processes, or anything else exist that WordPress can't do with a few tweaks? Front-end editing, one-click setup, drag and drop, it's all easier to add than building from scratch.
If your goal is to create value, then think hard about what problem your customer is trying to solve. If it requires something new, then by all means build it! But I don't see this as one of those cases.
Once you drop the ecosystem there are plenty of alternative to creating static or near-static sites.
edit: I should point out that more alternatives for creating Web content is, on average, a Good Thing. Presenting a tool, however good, as an alternative to Wordpress however brings a lot of assumptions that may cause people to focus on the wrong things.
There's probably a market for a form of Wordpress that could use existing themes but not plugins, and only allowed basic posts and pages, with perhaps a more robust security model. E.g. prevent commenting (in order to avoid having to accept external content) except via Disqus or something.
Even if you're not the one actually extending it, the fact that it's easy to extend means there is a wealth of plugin offerings.
True. I hadn't done any PHP coding in many years, and knew essentially nothing about how WP worked, but Google + tenacity = useful results. Shortcodes, for example; super cool.
There are plenty of WTF moments in PHP and Wordpress but nothing that prevents pragmatic results.
Consider: http://wpmu.org/why-you-should-never-search-for-free-wordpre...
It has good documentation:
http://www.textpattern.net/wiki/index.php?title=Index
And an ecosystem of plugins:
The separation of editing and design roles in the admin is worthwhile as well.
// 1. Having built and hosted multiple WP sites scaling to millions of uniques a day, and even having built and managed a WP install for the most notorious domain name in the world, I have to say I don't advise it for most cases.
As for me, I use Jekyll and disqus because I'm just one guy.
That being said, all software and services as they age begin to suffer from scope creep and feature bloat. Then it will be time again for something new.
Comments were replaced with Disqus. No more opening my site to any possible security holes, no more having to keep on top of plugin updates, no more crying tears of shame when I snuck a peek at said plugins' source code, I can check in my whole site into github and be done with it.
I think WordPress is often the go-to platform because it's just what people hear about -- plus, it's free. My preferred CMS for websites is ExpressionEngine because it's flexible enough to make it what you want. There's no "loop" that you have to deal with over and over and there aren't a gajillion default things that you have to strip out at the outset of a project.
The trouble is that clients are afraid to try something that isn't what their neighbor is using. I often get, "Yah, but this is what I used in a past project." or "A buddy of mine used WordPress and he gets 10 million hits a day!" Getting them to pay $299 for a commercial license for EE seems like a really steep cost when they could just get WordPress for free and it's "good enough."
I use it myself and it's fantastic. Simple and elegant and I feel in control of my blog now- there's no magic.
Their big overhaul of the wp-admin section, in 2.5 I think, de-emphasized the post writing page (something which was previously instantly accessible). That's what started pushing me away from WordPress.
Recently I've started looking for another server-side platform. I've been getting annoyed with the extra work involved with static site generators, especially for a rather trivial "look what I saw" blog. I installed Anchor [1] last night, and plan on playing with it. I'm also interested in Ghost, but it hasn't been publicly released so far as I know.
[1]: Anchor CMS: http://anchorcms.com
That said if you want a CMS that only does the five things you need, you don't want WP.
I find that above text a bit odd. Maybe I'm misinterpretting it, but why exactly shouldn't there be one tool to build all of those websites? It might very well be that Wordpress is not suited to build all those things, but it doesn't follow logically that there should not be a "mastertool", no matter what.
I understand the general sentiment of "horses for courses", but I also think that it's important to make sure that your tools are performing well, rather than trying to make a blanket statement about what web dev tools should and shouldn't do in general.
It has a gui site builder (wysiwyg) and what not, and is considerably simpler than wordpress.
What does barley have over weebly?
Can I download barley and install on my servers like I can with wordpress? If not, this is apples and oranges.
I think you're traveling down a meat grinder of a road by choosing to spend time on this.
use CGI;