WordPress plugins are a little sad?

https://chriscoyier.net/2023/11/13/the-top-wordpress-plugins-are-a-little-sad/

by surprisetalk • 3 years ago

83 82 3 years ago

coldtea5• 3 years ago

It struck me recently how this list of plugins I saw in the 2023 Annual WordPress Survey wasn’t full of fun and interesting plugins that do interesting and unique things, they mostly just fix boring problems that users shouldn’t even be worried about having to fix at all.

The word the author is looking for is "useful". The plugins are useful instead of exciting. When it comes to plugins to a CMS I'd have the former, thanks...

hnbad3• 3 years ago

I think his point is more that most of them solve issues the CMS should address directly (in his opinion) or that should be better addressed outside the CMS (e.g. SSL and caching). The emphasis in that sentence is in the last part:

they mostly just fix boring problems that users shouldn’t even be worried about having to fix at all

And I agree, to an extent: import/export should probably be rolled into core, comment spam shouldn't be the default (although arguably this just means comments should be removed from core), technical SEO should be covered by the CMS and editor (be that Gutenberg or Elementor) and WordPress should have a built-in way to handle forms and configuring e-mail sending.

coldtea5• 3 years ago

they mostly just fix boring problems that users shouldn’t even be worried about having to fix at all

Because the problems they want to fix aren't the problems I want to fix. I don't want to send emails with Wordpress, or do polls, or whatever. If we add the superset of features to the core Wordpress it would be a 1GB install, with a team of 100000 needed to maintain it.

It's not as if it's not already one of the most full featured CMS as it is, or can be used for tons of things without anything else out of the box, from a personal or business blog, to a full featured publication with multiple authors.

import/export should probably be rolled into core

The core does have import/export.

comment spam shouldn't be the default (although arguably this just means comments should be removed from core)

Not having comments in the core would be controversial to say the least. Not to mention against the TFA complain ("not enough stuff in the core").

technical SEO should be covered by the CMS

It is, for the most part. The rest is SEO snakeoil the third-party plugins cover.

WordPress should have a built-in way to handle forms and configuring e-mail sending.

Are forms and email the role of a CMS?

creshal5• 3 years ago

Sending emails, setting proper meta tags, creating forms, not having security vulnerabilities, undoing broken upgrades, caching, … are all features that a fully-featured, bloated CMS like Wordpress really shouldn't need plugins for.

It'd make sense if WP had a "small core, versatile APIs" philosophy, but that flew out of the window over a decades ago; it's extremely bloated these days and has tons of features, yet the basics are still missing.

coldtea5• 3 years ago

Sending emails, setting proper meta tags, creating forms, not having security vulnerabilities, undoing broken upgrades, caching, … are all features that a fully-featured, bloated CMS like Wordpress really shouldn't need plugins for.

You could say the same thing about Emacs.

Wordpress provides the infrastructure. It doesn't have to provide everything and the kitchen sink.

skilled• 3 years ago

The problem is that WordPress lost the plot with its block editor, Gutenberg.

Automattic started to get more interested in money than they did in polishing their core product, WordPress. Instead of implementing a lot of these features into the core (which would then make room to actually make interesting plugins), they're acquiring companies left and right and delivering a new WordPress release every few months promising "100+ performance improvements", etc.

How come those "performance improvements" never actually do anything?

Not only that but WordPress ecosystem right now is extremely fractured because of this "block editor". It alienates more than 20,000+ themes because they're built on the "old" WordPress principles, and at the same time - nobody really wants to use block themes because it means starting from scratch.

I have played around with block themes as recently as a few months ago, and they've definitely gotten better than they were ~1 year ago, but they are only good if you know what you are doing. And, if you even have the patience and the will to make a custom site for yourself.

This is turning more into a rant of me than anything though, but maybe that's precisely the point, that's where WordPress is right now and the only thing I can see is that maybe Automattic is "afraid" to alienate plugin developers and cause a backlash.

bruh2• 3 years ago

I'm not a webdev by trade, so when I wanted to write a quick cute portfolio for my sibling I opted for ClassicPress. It's a fork of the last WP version that still featured the normal editor. Creating themes for it turned out to be straightforward thanks to the abundance of templates, tutorials, and examples available for these old-school WP themes. And PHP isn't so bad, too.

The only thing I found myself yearning for is more of an "as code" - i.e. having all of ClassicPress' config stored in a handful of version controlled files, rather than fragilely in a web UI. But for my humble needs, it sealed the deal perfectly. Boring is good!

creshal5• 3 years ago

I can see the reasoning behind Gutenberg, but the implementation is absolutely insane. Everything is needlessly complicated, there's no way to debug it, documentation is either missing or outdated, and so on and so forth. A large customer (who's been using Wordpress for close to 10 years now with a heavily optimized custom theme) wanted to use it, because it looked so shiny and cool, but in the end we had to put half a dozen people into what turned out to be a two year long migration process that's still not finished. At this rate, Wordpress will drop Gutenberg for a new editor before all that effort paid off.

poisonborz• 3 years ago

"lost the plot with its block editor, Gutenberg"

I don't get the flak, your comment also doesn't explain why Gutenberg is responsible for all this. WP is by far, faaar the most popular website platform, a huge driver of profits for a whole ecosystem of (mostly not so great) companies yet it's open source and Automattic is not anywhere as profitable as it should be compared to this. It must be a hell of a hard job steering this ship and still be not scummy/as good-willed as this company still manages to be.

tambourine_man4• 3 years ago

I understand why Automattic needed something like Gutenberg. The external competition from Wix and the likes and internal from Elementor, etc, was existential.

However, after all these years, it’s still a usability mess for the end user and a nightmare for the developer.

Was it really necessary to shove React and that dreadful ecosystem down everyone’s throat? I mean, the hello world of a block downloads 50k files through npm, I shit you not. And you now have to deal with JSX and need a build step for the web, which is heartbreaking for me. We have PHP, which is superior as a templating language in every possible way, and it’s right there already.

Anyway, whenever I start a Wordpress project I’m faced with using the block editor or falling back to ACF. And honestly, neither one feels like the right choice.

eyelidlessness4• 3 years ago

We have PHP, which is superior as a templating language in every possible way

It’s been a very long time since I’ve written any PHP, but even when I did write PHP pretty much full time this wouldn’t have been my impression. Tooling aside, JSX is exactly what I would have wished for PHP templating to be (if I had had the foresight to wish it). In fact, if I’m not mistaken, I believe better templating in PHP is the JSX origin story?

Don’t get me wrong, if you prefer PHP for templating, I have no quarrel with your preference. My gripe, insofar as I have one, is the preference stated in an objective framing.

Swalden123• 3 years ago

I personally really like the block editor. Much better then the shortcode hell we had before.

CM304• 3 years ago

The issue is that the block editor and classic editor have very different audiences.

In theory, the former is for the folks who'd use SquareSpace, Wix, etc. Non technical folks who want to customise everything in a 'user friendly' way and have absolute control over their site and its content.

Meanwhile the latter appeals more to agencies and large businesses, who have a bunch of users they want to only allow to post specific content/make specific changes, and a vision for what the site should be that they don't really want changed via random blocks and settings.

Gutenberg was meant to win over the former group and stop them going to SaaS based solutions, but ended up being a headache for the latter, which were arguably a bigger percentage of the folks using WordPress on a professional basis. Hence the ecosystem getting fractured like this.

sofixa• 3 years ago

Automattic started to get more interested in money than they did in polishing their core product, WordPress

Company cares about revenues more about "polish" (which is highly subjective - for some polish might be rewriting everything to Rust, for others it might be fancier looking UI components), more news at 11.

XCSme2• 3 years ago

For me, it's confusing because my theme provides like 3 different block editors to choose from, and all seem broken in a way or another, so I am not very afraid to even click on the "Edit with (insert name) block editor".

unixhero• 3 years ago

I attempted to work with WordPress and its plugins in a commercial scenario. Whenever we hit a tiny corner case with a theme, something we believed should have functioned well - The whole project failed.

So yeah I am not taking on any Wordpress projects ever again. I just tell people to use Wix and or Shopify and don't try to run an ecommerce site, it is too difficult for them.

DANmode2• 3 years ago

Take a lesson from the big boys, here: WordPress for landing/marketing pages only.

ibz• 3 years ago

Why not a SSG, like Jekyll, for that? Isn't WP overkill?

creshal5• 3 years ago

Between Squarespace and Shopify it's really hard to argue in favour of Wordpress these days, yeah. In theory WP can do everything, but it needs a full-time PHP dev (and these days, also a full-time react dev for Gutenberg) to baby sit it and keep up with vulnerabilities, incompatibilities and all the other stupidity of the Wordpress ecosystem.

pbowyer• 3 years ago

Whenever we hit a tiny corner case

These are the nightmare of WordPress sites. Someone builds a house of cards out of a pile of plugins, and then I'm asked "Why might it cost $$$ to upgrade my WordPress plugins?!?". Well sire, because plugins can throw in breaking changes, and an upgrade may take 2 minutes an work perfectly, or it might introduce a corner case that breaks something. And you don't have any automated tests to detect this breakage, so someone has to check by hand. Or forget a corner-case, it may completely break part of your site because a (commercial) plugin developer decided to rewrite and get rid of a feature you depended on [true story].

I try not to touch anything beyond a WordPress landing/marketing site, but every so often one comes bundled with another project or I give in to a sob story...

CM304• 3 years ago

This is arguably what's so dangerous about a plugin ecosystem in general. On the one hand, you can quickly implement a bunch of useful new functionality at the drop of a hat, and that's obviously incredibly useful for non technical folks.

But at the same time, you then often end up dependency hell, and realise that any changes going forward will break something or another that your site depends on, leading to many, many sleepless nights. God help you if you're one of those folks who installed hundreds of plugins, because an upgrade often meant 'revert everything to default, then hope at least some of your plugins had equivalents for the next version'.

It's why I'd recommend anyone who can do so to only use their own code for a WordPress (or other CMS based) site, and keep the third party stuff to popular plugins you know will get regular updates.

_cenw• 3 years ago

You just limit yourself. I have built database-style wordpress sites with custom taxonomies/types using just my own glue code, theme templates and Advanced Custom Fields (and ACF is just there for the backend experience mostly). It's also obviously not the best choice for everything, but some of these sites I built 10 years ago and they're still going without major issues.

frankzander• 3 years ago

That's exactly one huge point why I do not work with Wordpress on new projects. I use for example Contao (https://www.contao.org) because it already have everything to build a full website. Yes I also use plugins in this system but it really enhances the core system with some nice features. To me Wordpress seems to be CMS torture and I do not really understand why so many ppl got hooked on this system.

creshal5• 3 years ago

Probably because alternatives like Contao didn't really mature until 2010 or later, by which point Wordpress was already massive enough to have user groups and conferences everywhere, and could afford to just coast by on its momentum even as the product kept getting worse and worse.

spaceman_20202• 3 years ago

WordPress, blogging and internet content in general is pretty sad.

With new AI tools, folks I know who used to run content websites have also thrown in the towel from the content game.

Imo, this is the last decade when the “web” is still a thing.

tap-snap-or-nap• 3 years ago

It is truly sad.

I loved decentralised forums, when search engines actually searched millions of sites that were not walled and information could be accessed by anybody without social logins and paywalls.

Wish there was a better way to preserve internet culture and activity.

spaceman_20202• 3 years ago

I used to love visiting random blogs. Every blog used to be so different. People would spend hours tweaking themes and layouts to make their blogs unique.

Now its all centralized apps and they’re all tested and optimized to hellto maximize engagement. The Walmart-ification of the web.

meiraleal• 3 years ago

yes but because you'll be 10 years older. For some people, the web died a decade ago. For some, 10 years later.

easyThrowaway2• 3 years ago

For all the criticism the Gutenberg Block Editor gets, it was a necessary move for Automattic. They were one step away from being ousted from their own CMS by the likes of WPBakery, Visual Composer and Elementor. If your CMS becomes just a glorifed container for third-party solutions, it's just a small jump from there to having your users move to a completely different backend built by the aforementioned authors.

I still don't get why did they had to reach for such a needlessly complex solution. A few weeks ago I tried building a small project for a client by writing bespoke blocks for custom logic and storing.

I found it was waaay easier and even waaay quicker to learn laravel to scratch than try to wrap my brain around the weird custom superstructure they built around React, their suggested approach on how you should write a version of each block for previewing, another for editing, some glue code between those that is not extremely clear how you should be interfacing, etc. Their developer guide is the equivalent of the "Draw the fucking owl" tutorial.

Even looking for exisiting examples, every one of the default wordpress blocks does things their own way, the whole thing felt over-engineered and extremely brittle.

askonomm2• 3 years ago

Yup, fully agree. Thankfully for most of my client work I don't need WordPress theme-ing at all, so I have a custom plugin that disables that, and instead allows me to integrate into WP (so that I get all the WP core PHP functions as well) a PHP framework installation (for example Laravel) where I do all my data-and-front-end wrangling instead. It also supports replacing the front-end with a custom React app, if I wanted that, leaving WP as just the API and admin panel.

And as for letting customers edit custom data structures, I still roll with Advanced Custom Fields plugin for that, because it's 100x faster than making the equivalent functionality for the block editor. I do hope they simplify that API at one point though.

easyThrowaway2• 3 years ago

Honestly I wish they just offered an officially supported framework-agnostic headless solution on par with Block Themes. I was kinda hopeful when Automattic bought Frontify[1] some time ago, but for some reason apparently that went nowhere.

[1]https://frontity.org

pupppet• 3 years ago

A drag-and-drop page builder was the right move, except Gutenberg didn’t take any cues from what was already out there. They didn’t reuse any ideas from existing builders which were already in their second or third generation, and instead went out on their own and built UI trash.

karmakaze• 3 years ago

a glorifed container for third-party solutions, it's just a small jump...

This is the open question. I myself have wondered why WordPress still hasn't been replaced in any substantial way.

CM304• 3 years ago

Isn't this kinda expected? Most sites have fairly 'boring' needs, and hence the plugins they use solve 'boring' problems. Like a contact form, improved SEO or security, etc.

If you did a similar survey for the most popular plugins for almost any other CMS, I'm sure the results would be similar. Mostly normal business site logic, the shop system of the day (unless the CMS is for a shop itself), and some minor fixes to things people find lacking in the default settings.

For other examples, one of the most popular vBulletin plugins/mods back in the day was VB SEO, a paid SEO system that was basically the Yoast/AIOSEOP of its day, and one of the most popular XenForo plugins right now simply adds a bunch of BB code options for other video hosting sites and services.

Heck, even real life kinda does this. If you polled people about the 20 most popular home appliances bought in the last 10 years, the majority would be 'boring' things like a kettle, toaster, microwave, washing machine, fridge, etc. Nothing wrong with that, just that for most people, the most 'original' appliance equivalent would probably be a video game console, and the rest of their needs would be just the usual domestic house stuff.

zebracanevra• 3 years ago

The OP is saying most of these plugins should be built in.

Using your analogy, WordPress should be a furnished apartment, not one where you have to buy all the white goods yourself. (if renting)

CM304• 3 years ago

That's a fair criticism. WordPress definitely lacks a lot of seemingly basic features, like a contact form, a decent user management system, etc.

I guess if there's one thing that might be attracting people to hosted solutions, it's that many of them do provide these sorts of features built in.

sdflhasjd• 3 years ago

I think the question this raises is: Is Wordpress an application or a framework? Because what it's like at the moment is a half-furnished apartment where it doesn't come with a kitchen sink, but does have a bed for some reason.

If it's an application, a lot of what people need doesn't come in the box.

If it's a framework, a lot of what's built in isn't necessary and it doesn't let users pick what flavour of wordpress they want.

hobofan3• 3 years ago

Those aren't just the top plugins, they are also each accompanied by companies providing these plugins as paid products.

Yes, Automattic could provide a lot of those things out-of-the-box nowadays, and pay for the required development efforts, but that would probably kill the whole commercial plugin ecosystem around Wordpress pretty quickly. So this situation is kind of the extreme flip-side of what happens if you don't step into competition with your ecosystem suppliers, which a lot of other companies are being criticized for. I think Automattic is overall doing it in a quite fair way - Akismet, WooCommerce and Jetpack from the list are plugins/products maintained by Wordpress.

What I also wouldn't underestimate is the cargo culting that's happening in the WP plugin ecosystem. As the author noted, there are a few plugins (especially the one for "securing" the WP install) that are usually not needed, and don't actually do anything useful on modern WP installs anymore. But a lot of WP marketers love their list of curated plugins, and will drag them along to new employers/clients far beyond their expiration time.

cies• 3 years ago

WP as a whole is a little sad. A db schema from hell, hard to separate presentation out, PHP (don't get me started)...

But then it's open source, so I'm not complaining, just not using it.

esskay2• 3 years ago

Wordpress gives PHP a bad rep. PHP on its own - absolutely fine when used correctly. PHP in Wordpress however, well...it's crap. They've got the most convoluted and poorly structured PHP codebase I've had the misfortune of working with.

A well maintained, modern PHP codebase is a complete non issue, but Wordpress is unlikely to ever have that.

jokethrowaway2• 3 years ago

You should really check out Magento, I used to think like you but now WP is second place!

hackerbeat4• 3 years ago

100% on the blog post, but as for the comments here: Don't listen to the naysayers.

WordPress is crazy popular and rightfully so, already powering 40%+ of the whole web, like TechCrunch and the New York Times. And thanks to Gutenberg and especially the newly launched Full Site Editing, this number is gonna go up even more.

Anyone who's not using it is missing out big time.

MrVandemar2• 3 years ago

The comic you referenced seems to imply a creaky old 2004 Wordpress implementation is positively correlated with number of blog posts ... ?

hackerbeat4• 3 years ago

Yeah, the creaky old Wordpress setup from 2004 is still better than all the other options out there. The nerdier and more unpopular the system, the fewer the number of blog posts.

zelphirkalt• 3 years ago

Most plugins for WP should not be installed at all, period. Most have weird silly bugs or security issues, that are either due to handling user input improperly, or are just silly bugs, that one would think people would not build i to their code. But in WP land anything goes. And it has been that way for a long time. It feels like WP plugins are attracting lots of beginner developers, who would rather use a regex than a stored procedure to check for an SQL injection. That kind of level.

Even the usual guideline for how to write themes favors concattenation over composition, starting an element in one file and ending it in another, so that it really only can be used in one place, and cannot be reused. wtf. And most themes are blindly following this convention. It feels like almost intentionally encouraging shoddy work.

9dev• 3 years ago

The mere fact that anyone would have to check for SQL injections by anything other than using prepared statements at all is very descriptive of the WordPress ecosystem and the kind of engineering conventions it enables. It’s a sad state of affairs that this terrible insecure mess is the base of so many websites.

„Well it may be terrible but everyone uses WordPress, so I can’t be that bad, eh?“ - wrong. WP was in the right place at the right time, everything else is momentum. Anyone without any qualification sells themes and plugins, and it shows. In the construction industry, there’s a lot of codes and safety regulations to prevent that and ensure proper practices; it’s a shame the software industry doesn’t.

racked• 3 years ago

Wordpress actually provides a database wrapper (I wouldn't call it an ORM) called WPDB, which can use prepared statements.

In practice though, I have found myself on more than one occasion just using PDO in my plugins. WPDB is slower, and its API is weird, like a lot of APIs in Wordpress land are.

ljm• 3 years ago

I wonder how much of this is because of PHP's legacy.

For a long, long time, most articles and tutorials on PHP contained glaring examples of SQL injection, not to mention the whole thing with `mysql_string` and `mysql_real_escape_string`, among others, and embedding your DB credentials in the same file that is served to the client.

Wordpress still uses and encourages patterns that weren't even considered unusual back in the late 00s. Same deal with phpBB if you want to modify that. I can only imagine that a lot of developers see the coding part of a plugin as a means to an end. You certainly won't see much of that in, say, Laravel.

HissingMachine• 3 years ago

Gutenberg built in, wp import/export optional, this is the whole story of WP in my mind.

mojo74• 3 years ago

After working WP for quite a few years the problem as I see it it that it 'needs' to be all things to all people. Can't code? Not a problem. WordPress.

Before even considering working with a client with a WP site I have to look at what plugins they are using. If they don't have a developer on board (or at least a competent one that built it originally) you know that that it will be stacked with 'useful' plugins. And this is the bit where the issues arise as working out the provenance of each and every one of them and whether they are still supported and/or won't break the functionality of another plugin is pure guesswork. Case in point enabling a nondescript plugin on one client's site broke the main image slider.

stefanbayer2• 3 years ago

Someone interested in building the next generation mobile first Wordpress?

Preferably starting with a iOS App. Already checked out WebFlow and PhoneFlow, Notion, Drupal, Typo3, OnePage.io and many other Content Management Systems.

But neither incorporates the ideas that I have for a next gen CMS. If this sounds interesting to you feel free to reach out to me over at Apple FaceTime or Messages- available under hello@stefanbayer.com

Thanks :)

amadeoeoeo• 3 years ago

Have you heard of Kites? https://kites.io CEO here, I'll send you an email ;)

DANmode2• 3 years ago

Apps are dead.

stefanbayer2• 3 years ago

Why should they be dead? Aren't you using any banking apps, any note takings, video or messaging apps?

Could you exaggerate your point a bit more?

Thanks :)

jokethrowaway2• 3 years ago

Wordpress doesn't really have a place in a modern toolchain.

You want a blog? Pick a static website generator (eg. Cobalt, Zola, etc) You want a CMS? Pick a CMS (eg. Keystone, Payload) You want an ecommerce? Pick an ecommerce (eg. Sylius)

Wordpress used to be the only barely decent option, it became insanely popular and people are still using it out of inertia, ignoring a massive list of crappy defaults and security issues they need to patch up.

askonomm2• 3 years ago

Doesn't have a place for who, developers? Maybe. But your average company or person needing a blog has no idea what to do with, or what even is a static site generator. Most people do know of WordPress however, and how easy it is to use.

If you're only making websites for other developers then what you say makes total sense. But I'm afraid that's not the audience WordPress is meant for.

hackerbeat4• 3 years ago

Nah, it's powering 40%+ of the whole web already, and for a good reason.

timeon• 3 years ago

I agree with blog and website generator. But CMS like Keystone or Payload would probably not run on cheap shared hosting. There are for example small non-profit organizations that are not going to use VPS.

anonymous3442• 3 years ago

huh, was working with wp projects few years ago daily. what a mess the gutenberg was to transition.

For example: They added all kinds of adjustments on to the right sidebar, font color, bg color, and many many other but no way to disable them. No, the customer can't have these settings visible, the site will look like raimbow after one year. Customer's should only be able to see simple bold, underline, link, h1...h5 and that's it. It's the css that puts the right colours there automatically...

totally wrong way of doing sites with multiple people making content into them (not tech savy people)

anonymous3442• 3 years ago

And not to mention... the right side panel of a page editor does not contain different sizes for mobile... and to clarify, there was no way to hide those options about less than few years ago

augustl• 3 years ago

FWIW, I recently used Wordpress as a headless CMS, with a Next.js frontend that gets pinged by webhooks from wordpress to invalidate caches etc. I haven't really found any headless CMS that's easier than wordpress for non-technical users to post content. And I get to write the front-end in Next.js so I get to skip most of the plugin shenanigans in WP :)

josefresco• 3 years ago

The "top X" of any huge platform is going to be boring. While I agree with some of his criticism, the modular nature of WordPress is what makes it great AND messy. These are good things.

XCSme2• 3 years ago

MonsterInsights Google Analytics — I sort of get the idea of a plugin that helps you install Google Analytics. Really, it’s just a snippet of JS you put on the page, so I wouldn’t use one myself, but not everyone is comfortable editing theme files. Then this puts an analytics dashboard right on your site, which again I sorta get, but I’d rather just use the dashboards at the horse’s mouth rather than re-created ones

Plugging in my solution for this: https://wplytic.com

ShadowBanThis01• 3 years ago

It's "plug-ins" FYI.

WordPress plugins are a little sad?

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