WordPress is at a Crossroads

https://medium.com/@plagiarismtoday/wordpress-is-at-a-crossroads-133638714a52?mc_cid=d41bb5b19f

by gmays • 8 years ago

37 14 8 years ago

sleavey3• 8 years ago

What a long winded article. It gets to the point in the last few paragraphs: WordPress needs to add more options for free customisation, and is doing so with Gutenberg, but some people don't like it.

rocky1138• 8 years ago

Good article. This problem is, of course, much larger than just WordPress; the open libre Internet where you can just run your own instance of whatever you need is increasingly being threatened by walled gardens of every kind because it's more fiddly work to do it yourself.

Is it possible for a libre tool to be easier to use than one from a walled garden? Can we make running your own Medium easier than signing up for Medium and starting a new post?

This is the challenge.

signal11• 8 years ago

With tools like Github Pages, netlify, etc, and static site generators like Jekyll, Hugo and nanoc, I’d argue - yes it’s possible.

Wordpress itself attracts criticism but for a large class of users it does work.

Ironically imo Medium, with its “dickbar” and pop ups, is a fairly crappy reading experience.

robjan• 8 years ago

I don't think setting up and configuring Jamstack is within the realm of understanding of the majority of Medium users. Most indie publishers are "non-technical".

swaggyBoatswain• 8 years ago

That, and medium paywalls content as well.

I still would rather use wordpress over Jekyll (which I have used) and Hugo. Wordpress just has so many themes to pick from, there's something for everyone.

There's a learning curve over medium, but you get used to it you can customize it if you know basic HTML/CSS/JS.

Netlify may be free for personal use, but I'd still rather pay $6/month for 10 custom sites in sitegrounds. Wordpress just has way more matured tools, I'm not a big fan of change for something that's solved already

Also, I am not a fan of Jekyll's writing tools either. Wordpress out of the box, lets me just write things natively with less friction. I don't need things like cloudcannon or foresty.io.

m0dest• 8 years ago

You could say a lot of the same things about SharePoint. (I was never a fan, personally.) This seems like the natural progression of any CMS that tries to be infinitely extensible and flexible. It becomes very difficult to evolve or simplify your product without breaking its add-on ecosystem and your most entrenched customers.

csbartus• 8 years ago

I’m working with WordPress since 2005 both as a theme designer and plugin developer. The experience is the same today as it was at the beginning.

And that experience is famously broken. Code mess, theme mess, customisation mess, etc.

If WordPress powers one third of the internet, and, Automattic is such a success story how they couldn’t create a framework in which designing and developing can give you a little satisfaction?

Many times I left WordPress for others like Ruby on Rails, Yii, static site generators, Contentful, etc. but I’m always returning to it. My clients need it. They think it is a standard in CMS and the hosting is stable and affordable.

But non-businesses, individuals are abandoning it. The promise is huge: pay a few dollars for hosting, get a pre-installed WordPress, choose a theme from that 5,000 free themes and you are done.

The reality is that WordPress theming is broken. None of those 5,000 free themes can satisfy a single need in 100% percent. People realise they need an expert to customize and make it work, and from that moment their project either is migrated somewhere else or just bitterly abandoned.

I wonder how many of that ‘30% of total websites are powered by WordPress’ is an abandoned site?

TLDR: WordPress lost it’s individual user base; still good for small businesses who can afford customization; awful as experience for designers and developers;

WordPress is not at crossroads but in chaos. Gutenberg, the only big change since it’s inception is not well received by designers and developers. If they flock they’ll take away with them the small businesses.

pxtail2• 8 years ago

Your message is full of sentences which are contradiction to each other. You are saying that WP not changed for a long time and yet at the same time you are afraid of upcoming change, and you are power user! - this is the reason why changes are so slow.

The reality is that WordPress theming is broken. None of those 5,000 free themes can satisfy a single need in 100% percent.

It's not broken, it's just how everything works in life - unless you are skilled or determined enough yourself you need expert for customizations, it isn't possible to make creator which will satisfy everyone (and yet there are abominations like Visual Composer which try to do it). Can you customize parts of your car engine yourself?

TLDR: WordPress lost it’s individual user base

What is used as replacement nowadays? I hope not walled gardens or solutions like medium where your content is held in grip and they just wait to squeeze.

gorm• 8 years ago

Interesting article! Gutenberg itself is also on a different road than before as you can't run it self hosted. To use it on a self hosted blog you would need to install jetpack and use WordPress.com as the main UI, which isn't self hosted. His point regarding commercial plugins are also to the point. There are great plugins out there, but setting up a site with these can easily cost over $1000 in yearly subscription fees and the free versions are often too basic or require tweaking to add required features. Still think WordPress make sense for organizations that can easily pay for premium plugins and support, or hackers that know how to code and find the great free plugins.

stephen82• 8 years ago

What do you mean you can't run it self-hosted? I have it already locally and work as expected.

I don't use jetpack nor I have a WordPress.com account.

sleavey3• 8 years ago

On the topic of the prevalence of freemium plugins in WordPress ecosystem: I really detest this. Given the huge effort that has gone in to WordPress itself - freely provided to the community - it's ridiculous for small plugins - that in many cases just filter some function already provided as a hook in WordPress by the core developers - would ask for money. A few years ago I set up an online labbook for my research group using a bunch of plugins to make WordPress behave the way I wanted. I had to search really hard for plugins that didn't spam end users to "upgrade" to unlock arbitrarily disallowed features, and furthermore plugins which were well written and didn't contain silly hacks or security vulnerabilities (in the process I ended up submitting patches to a few of them to fix obvious flaws). It was even difficult to find plugins that use the proper settings page infrastructure, instead of adding their own top level menu item in the admin panel and not conforming to the WordPress core look and feel. What a mess.

Somehow discouraging freemium junk from the plugin library wouldn't be a bad thing from my perspective. It would surely decrease the sheer volume of plugins available, but would undoubtedly increase the quality. Perhaps this could be achieved with some sort of rating system for the code quality, judging based on how much the code relies on WordPress APIs, properly handling unexpected input and errors, properly sanitizing user input, etc.

Incidentally, I am now developing a plugin to combine the behaviour of all the plugins I previously used for the academic labbook [1] (if anyone is interested in using it, I would like to know!). In the process I've learned a lot about the WordPress code base, and have come to appreciate that it is on the whole well written - it's mainly just plugin authors that produce junk, and hope to make a quick buck off the back of the hard work of volunteers in the process.

[1] https://github.com/SeanDS/alp

pxtail2• 8 years ago

When your plugin will reach - let's say 1 million users - I hope that you'll stick to your ideas and don't spam end users to upgrade, just work for free. Good luck :)

sleavey3• 8 years ago

I don't have a problem with large plugin projects charging money, but I have a problem with (1) very basic plugins asking for money and (2) spammy, clickbait tactics to upgrade; for example, asking the user to upgrade to premium after every update, or adding extra pages to the admin sidebar with "Upgrade to Premium", etc. etc.

CM30• 8 years ago

Makes you wonder what WordPress itself would look like if it went this 'freemium' route. Probably something like:

Free core $10 for comments $10 for user accounts $10 for post types $10 for the theme customiser... well maybe that's one less of an issue

Etc

Plus god knows how many banners and ads stuck all around the dashboard. Yeah, it's not a great situation, and it definitely feels like a lot of major plugin creators are either spamming the hell out of their uses or nickle and diming them for every little 'feature' they can think of.

Still, I guess it could be worse. Some open source scripts (looks at OpenCart) and many paid ones (looks at IPB and XenForo) seem to have communities where every little thing in the plugin directory has a price attached to it. Definitely feels like the community spirit has mostly died out and been replaced by a bunch of agencies pumping out plugins like they're in some of gold rush.

WordPress is at a Crossroads

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