WordPress Doesn't Matter for the Future of Web

https://molodtsov.me/2024/10/wordpress-doesnt-matter-for-the-future-of-web/

by twapi • 2 years ago

85 78 2 years ago

glutamate2• 2 years ago

IBM created PCs as we know them and is currently worth $214Bn, yet nobody cares much about them

"Nobody" except the people paying the revenue to support a $216B valuation. Hello HN bubble, you are all clever and innovative people and I love all of you but you are not everyone.

Also, I hate the future where the web is powered by managed solutions .

they are also dramatically easier to launch and operate

They are also are easier to get kicked off for no reason that can be appealed to a real human being

tsujamin• 2 years ago

I think the point is who thinks about IBM in the PC manufacturing space circa 2024, notwithstanding their other business lines.

dartos2• 2 years ago

Also, I hate the future where the web is powered by managed solutions .

Me too, but it makes launching startups easier and it seems that’s what tech is all about nowadays… maybe it always has been

forgetfreeman3• 2 years ago

Hah. Only if you're enthralled by what passes for reality in the Bay area. Outside that particular gravity well the rest of the world seems to be getting along just fine with pursuits rooted in providing actual value.

bdcravens• 2 years ago

IBM exited the PC space almost 20 years ago.

dtagames• 2 years ago

To Lenovo, who is very much still in it.

SeenNotHeard• 2 years ago

Back in the late 2000s, a viral blog post (which I can't find now) asserted that Microsoft was irrelevant—that Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. wiped out MS as a market leader, if not in income, but in reputation.

Look at MS today. Not so irrelevant.

I do think the original post is right, that WordPress is plateauing and they're scrambling to maintain their hold on a zero-sum market. But, if they can figure out a new direction, they're also in a unique position to lead.

Getting there is not going to happen through dot releases and a squeaky new blog template named for the current year. It looks to me like they need some fresh leadership.

arccy• 2 years ago

i mean microsoft do have a pretty terrible reputation except for with the typescript/vscode audience...

ValentineC5• 2 years ago

Automattic has been actively diversifying, with acquisitions like Tumblr, Day One, Gravatar, Beeper, Pocket Casts, and many more.

asdfman123• 2 years ago

The point is that if you're well informed developer building something new, you're not going to use WordPress.

Yes, there are people who are stuck on the CMS, and people will get roped into building WP sites due to the sheer momentum. It will be around for a long time. But it's not the future.

namdnay• 2 years ago

Eh… they’re just a consulting firm. Nobody does really care about them from the perspective of advancing the science. Does anyone bother what IBM or CapGemini or Accenture or Deloitte or whatever think?

ValentineC5• 2 years ago

Eh… they’re just a consulting firm. Nobody does really care about them from the perspective of advancing the science.

Are you referring to IBM here?

glutamate2• 2 years ago

Does anyone bother what IBM or CapGemini or Accenture or Deloitte or whatever think?

Exactly those companies are literally pumping out "thought leadership" that people and companies with $$$ are lapping up.

anoncow• 2 years ago

Fresh take. What could Automatic do to make things better for themselves? Launch a WordPress-related more easily managed solution with support for some legacy WP plugins? Sehr Interesting. I hate the ghettoisation of the internet, but the people will get what they want.

anon7000• 2 years ago

They have been trying to make a more easily managed solution since forever. All of the work they sponsor on Gutenberg and full site editing in WP has made complete GUI editing of your site completely possible using a portable data format. That wasn’t possible 5 years ago.

Problem is, the market for people who want an easy website doesn’t have a lot of money! Not everyone needs a site these days, and many just stick with a single page “link in bio” type thing. So the money is in businesses who need something more… which is by definition more complex. So Automattic has some massive, massive enterprise clients (including government agencies), but there are other more powerful enterprise tools too. Plus, at that point you’re selling a hosting platform and cloud resources, not managed WP.

Automattic has even tried to make a newsletter subscription like Substack and it didn’t really catch on (https://wordpress.com/support/paid-newsletters/)

x0x0• 2 years ago

I think ghettoization, whether you agree with the characterization or not, is driven by how much devops / security work / handholding a deployed app needs. And wordpress needs a LOT of that. When the popular solution requires a ton of work, people will naturally look for alternatives that don't involve them being a sysadmin, which they may well not even have the skills to do.

neya• 2 years ago

The scary part is he could probably be sued for using `Wordpress` in his title if he got into the someone's bad books.

immibis2• 2 years ago

I could sue you for writing the word "could" in your comment. Doesn't mean I'd win. I expect WPEngine to win its trademark case too.

bilekas• 2 years ago

I kind of agree with this. The numbers are big that there are ~40% websites in wordpress, yet from experience everytime I try to do something interesting with plugins etc, theres a php shell on my server within a week.

It will be a great loss for some who are hardcore plugin developers, but in reality they're in a far better position to pivot than WordPress/Automatic themselves.

I really hope Wordpress dies off to the history books of the internet experience, it can be a nice play experience to quickly make a website and see some results for people learning, but honestly without its plugin developers it's nothing. Another player could easily arrive and nobody would be upset. If anything this petty drama has hopefully expedited that scenario, I know I would be willing to support an alternative.

eastbound• 2 years ago

Yes. It should have been a static site generator. Dynamic things can be done with limited and scoped REST APIs actually running on PHP. But if the rest were SSG, customers would save on image optimization plugins, cache plugins, other cache plugins, SEO meta tag plugins and so on. Even Cloudflare would become unnecessary for a lot of usecases.

safety1st• 2 years ago

It's not a well informed article. Sure WordPress install growth has flattened. The revenue of both Automattic and WP Engine has not, in fact they've both been on an absolute tear. There's a fair bit of buzz around WebFlow but it's only around 1% of the market. WordPress has a long, long way to fall.

WP started out as blogging software and expanded the mission to include pretty much anyone whose main focus is publishing content on their own website. It's still pretty good at the things that matter, namely that doing the above is still very easy for a totally non-technical user, and the plugin ecosystem is absolutely massive and adds almost any kind of functionality you can think of (if your experience that there is never a plugin that will do what you need, you're definitely atypical).

Mullenweg's antics have been ridiculous - but outside of the WP community itself I don't think they've having a huge impact. Like the people whose businesses depend on a website that a developer set up on WordPress for them - 99% either heard of this issue in passing (maybe because their plugins wouldn't update for a few days) and have now forgotten about it, or they didn't even become aware of it in the first place.

Developers constantly underestimate or misunderstand what this space (publishing content) requires. I don't know why so many of them think you can replace a CMS with a bunch of static HTML files - Dunning-Kruger I guess. The plugin ecosystem is an absolutely massive moat. It's large enough that you would need to spend a billion dollars building an equivalent. Yeah WP has its problems but the most likely competitor to spring up is probably a fork of WP that can stay plugin-compatible at least for a while. The other big open source CMSes that shriveled away did so largely because they could never match the breadth of functionality that plugins made available to nontechnical users. NASA, the White House, Rolling Stone magazine the New York Post, and basically the entire News Corp empire all run WordPress just to name a few off the top of my head. Maybe its days are numbered but more likely it is big enough to be like say IBM and live on in some massive form or another forever. It never needed to be cool in Silicon Valley to exist.

ymolodtsov2• 2 years ago

OP here.

What was telling to me is that even new media websites are using other CMSs or building something of their own these days. WordPress was almost synonymous with the online news media for a time. This is exactly the area where you need multiple authors, taxonomy, and other things you mentioned.

WordPress itself pushed heavily into ecommerce, because it was a more promising area. But at the end of the day, the fact both Automattic and WP Engine earn enough money from enterprise orgs doesn't mean the tech situation here is too different from IBM. Yes, it's big. Yes, lots of people use it. Will it define anything in the future of the web? Not really.

softwaredoug• 2 years ago

Even Wordpress itself is typically treated as if it were a managed solution. Rarely does anyone think to untar Wordpress to a box somewhere. You’re instead going over to Dreamhost, WP Engine, etc.

Automattic lost out to these folks and now instead of looking at their own strategic mistakes wants to punish hosted solutions in their space.

Like many VC backed firms Automattic took waaay too much investment relative to actual ability to generate revenue.

henning• 2 years ago

Like all proper Uncle Bob Clean Code SOLID OOP React best practices 2024 websites, Webflow's website scrolls so badly on my developer workstation that it's hard to see what's going on with their animated parallax bullshit.

Just start banging out some HTML and check it into version control for a simple website. Add styling as needed. Optionally set up website deployment to happen on commit to `main`. Iterate from there. If you're going to have a lot of content for sure, use a static site generator. Solving problems you don't have creates ones you definitely do have.

peterhadlaw• 2 years ago

master

chris_wot2• 2 years ago

Oh god, absolutely. It appears that nobody writes straight HTML any more, and yet it’s so freaking easy. Skinning a semantically well formed html5 document with CSS is actually pretty darned easy.

I tried rewriting an absolutely dreadfully written, bastardized version of a bootstrap based static website from scratch. After writing the raw html5 pages, I included a bunch of small CSS files and emulated a CSS Zen Garden methodology. It was all done in a few hours and included some more advanced options like a background video with opacity as the hero image on the front page… and the site went from megabytes (!!!) to just under 200kb (including hero video).

It ran incredibly fast, and super responsive. It was easy to read and debug.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs2• 2 years ago

But then WordPress wasn’t replaced by an improved WordPress. Instead, fully managed proprietary solutions took over. You want to sell things online? Shopify. You need a landing page? Webflow or Squarespace. You want a blog? Substack or Beehiiv.

Unknowingly(I asssume) the author makes the best argument why Wordpress matter for the Web. None of those tools are free and open source.

immibis2• 2 years ago

Well neither is WordPress, in practice.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs2• 2 years ago

https://codex.wordpress.org/License

It looks pretty free and open source to me, in practice!

ValentineC5• 2 years ago

Also, data portability. I think it's fantastic that WordPress has a native import/export feature.

DonHopkins2• 2 years ago

Hopefully something not written in PHP will replace it.

timw4mail• 2 years ago

Wordpress is the BAD PHP. PHP itself isn't that bad.

fhdsgbbcaA3• 2 years ago

Precisely, it’s bad architecture not a bad language.

You can make bad architectures in any language you like!

The only truly bad language is JavaScript. ;-)

jameswlepage• 2 years ago

Interested in why this is your position. PHP 8.0 is pretty awesome at this point ... Is it just that JavaScript is a more predominant language?

DonHopkins2• 2 years ago

Is it a breeze to work with and seamlessly supports SSR, isomorphic code, and type safe library and data sharing, because it uses the same language on the client and server, and does it inspire joy and delight because it's fun and easy to work with like SvelteKit? Since not, then why bother with PHP? Because the alternatives are so much better.

In no way is PHP better than JavaScript, and the simple fact that JS runs natively in both the front and back end is astronomically more important than a point-by-point comparison of language features that PHP loses anyway.

https://x.com/Rich_Harris/status/1844744999272935596

Rich Harris @Rich_Harris:

A few takeaways from this remarkable data:

1. Yes, SSR matters. SvelteKit users sometimes get frustrated that it's too SSR-centric, and we have plans to address that in the next major version. But SSR is the default for a reason! Our ultimate responsibility is to end users

Ben McCann @BenjaminMcCann:

Some data from Google (big thank you to @rick_viscomi and @imkevdev !)

Client-side-only SPAs are extremely detrimental to latency as they add a network round-trip before rendering begins.

You can win at LCP by making it harder to build client-side apps

evbogue2• 2 years ago

I imagine there is a growing group of tech-oriented folks who just render a bunch of markdown files in a folder into a blog using their static generator of choice.

If Wordpress can't be easier than a static site generator then they are too complicated for their target market which is less technical people than the crowd who renders their blogs out of markdown files.

phailhaus3• 2 years ago

Are you saying that managing and hosting a static site generator is easier than WordPress for nontechnical folk?

galleywest200• 2 years ago

Hugo is very, very easy to manage. You generally do not "host" static site generators, you run them to generate the site.

chris_wot2• 2 years ago

It seems that way. And it’s probably true.

evbogue2• 2 years ago

My comments are on the article, which does not mention that many people render markdown blogs.

I agree with you that a CMS is easier to use for nontechnical folks, but Wordpress has so many managed hosting solutions it is clearly too hard to set up for nontechnical users.

ben4real• 2 years ago

Just my experience, but I had my wife and I on Wordpress on an AWS managed EC2 instance for probably a decade. Neither one of us really felt like we were in control of our content since they it locked up in mySQL. And yeah, if I cared to touch phpMyAdmin more than once every few years, then maybe I wouldn't feel like it was "locked up".

Anyway, I transferred us over to 11ty without a real plan how she was going to manage content. She's smart and computer savvy, but never opened a command prompt for example.

In the end, I had her install a Markdown exporter for MS Word, as well as Github desktop, and VSCode for mass editing files and editing front-matter.

Its a learning curve, and she'll still get front-matter syntax wrong occasionally breaking the build, so it's not perfect by any means.

But in terms of deploy, she just presses the push button on Github desktop, and then our free Netlify account handles the CI and deployment automatically. I share my AWS account with her which is where we store our images.

Anyway, like i said, it's not perfect, but I feel like it wouldn't be hard to package up these loose ends into a friendlier UX.

I'm also really liking that our 3 blogs have gone from a $15 a month EC2 instance to around 12 cents for AWS S3 hosting for the images

openrisk• 2 years ago

they are also dramatically easier to launch and operate

Umm, profound insight.

Here is a secret: its even easier to have a social media page and vast numbers of digitally dispossessed have no other option.

What matters for the future of the Web is foremost the degree to which small entities will have any agency.

There is no doubt that Wordpress stagnated, but its conceivable that the future of the Web will be propelled in a positive direction by a visionary project that aims to be equally impactful and empowering.

greenthrow2• 2 years ago

I wish the title was true.

I was at WordCamp 2014 or 2015 where Matt was asked about improving security in WordPress and he literally laughed at the question. So, yeah...

ValentineC5• 2 years ago

I was at WordCamp 2014 or 2015 where Matt was asked about improving security in WordPress and he literally laughed at the question. So, yeah...

The illusion that everyone's under assumes that WordPress Core is secure, and vulnerabilities are quickly patched and pushed out via the dot org update system.

Plugins are a whole different mess that people often exclude, but plugins are also what makes WordPress the success it is today.

greenthrow2• 2 years ago

Yeah that's a mistaken take to begin with. It also doesn't make a lot of sense to absolve WP Core of allowing plugins to cause chaos. If WP had a secure model for plugins then they could be far more limited in what they can do. But security was never a concern for Automattic.

burningChrome3• 2 years ago

This is what I tell people.

Wordpress core is pretty secure. The problem is people who are using WP just install the core and then add in whatever plugins they need to get what they want to site to do. Nobody ever sandboxes and tests their plugins, they just install them willy-nilly - which is like taking candy from a baby if you're a hacker.

And its already happened last year:

Thousands of sites running the WordPress content management system have been hacked by a prolific threat actor that exploited a recently patched vulnerability in a widely used plugin.

The vulnerable plugin, known as tagDiv Composer, is a mandatory requirement for using two WordPress themes: Newspaper and Newsmag. The themes are available through the Theme Forest and Envato marketplaces and have more than 155,000 downloads.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/10/thousands-of-wordpr...

4ndrewl• 2 years ago

"IBM created PCs as we know them and is currently worth $214Bn, yet nobody cares much about them."

Well except they sold their PC division years (decades?) ago to Lenovo, so yeah, no-one cares at all about IBM PCs.

ixtli• 2 years ago

Yeah the post uses dramatic turns of phrase like this to associate a mediocre point with something topical to get to the top of hackernews.

I'm honestly not sure whats being said here because frankly im not sure who, before seeing this, was thinking WordPress was anything other than a very widely used piece of legacy software. The reason this chaos matters is because of the number of actual people that jerk's hijack negatively impacts. Further, the post seems to unknowingly prove that actually WP still does have value because alternatives are all closed source.

JumpCrisscross2• 2 years ago

That was one of the weakest points of the article. If Mullenbeg is going to turn Auttomatic into IBM, I can come up with 214 billion reasons why that's perfectly fine for most people.

klabb3• 2 years ago

Not a fan of Wordpress and have no dog in the fight but managed platforms are not directly comparable, neither on the provider or user side of things. And if we’re talking about the future of web, managed commercial players are working hard to destroy the web in various ways. Also there’s nothing wrong with operating in a saturated market either. This tech-centric idea about growth is so toxic I don’t know where to begin. Like that existing users are worthless.

JumpCrisscross2• 2 years ago

managed platforms are not directly comparable

They may not be. But they are competition. It's the railroads arguing trucks aren't competition all over again.

macinjosh2• 2 years ago

This post says pretty much nothing. Irrelevant to what exactly? It is all subjective. Wordpress is highly relevant in many markets and use cases. So is Cobol, and IBM mainframes.

What the author actually means is that WordPress isn't trendy or popular.

The problem though with all these managed solutions is that every time you want to setup a new site you need to start paying a new monthly fee. Setup Wordpress (or any other open source CMS) on a web host and you can host as many websites from that one installation as you'd like for the same small hosting fee. If one thing takes off then dedicate resources to it.

Speaking from experience, many customers prefer not to manage their site content themselves. They want to hire a local person they can call and have things done for them on their website. These small web shops will always choose something like WordPress over say Webflow because of cost, control, and not having to worry if the investors give up on the trendy startup you tied your business to.

Open source still has many advantages over the paid services. But just like the Linux desktop, open source CMSs need to work on UX and on telling their story better.

fhdsgbbcaA3• 2 years ago

It’s entered the utility collapse curve. MySpace still exists but you can pinpoint the plateau and decline.

Wordpress will not grow from here on out, it will shrink.

Likewise, that “40%” number never says how many of those websites have been updated in the past year. My guess is less than half of currently hosted Wordpress sites are “active” in any real sense.

I see no reason any anybody starting today would pick Wordpress. The drama is only going to accelerate the inevitable decline.

macinjosh2• 2 years ago

I provided reasons some in my original post. But not everyone looking for a CMS is terminally online and plugged into X/HN tech circles nor care when creating a website for their client's muffler shop.

Those who do not like the SaaS business models for whatever reason (and there are many) still have incentive to use WordPress, a fork, or some other open source CMS.

I don't understand why the social death of WP/Matt M. equals the demise of open source content management in general.

If anything, with AI empowering more people to do technical things I see a bigger opening for open source CMSs going forward. Training data for open source stuff will be all over the web, while training data for WebFlow and squarespace etc. will be largely limited to their support site which might even be gated.

lolinder• 2 years ago

I agree that WordPress has saturated their market and the drama certainly appears to be a cynical move to try to pry customers away from the competition. I agree that future websites won't be built with WordPress. But I disagree that WordPress and its drama therefore don't matter for the future.

If WordPress dies a slow death as it's phased out over decades, that gives us plenty of time to develop the next generation open source replacement. Given time, those of us who still want to have control over our web presence (which is a significant number of businesses in addition to those here) will develop alternatives.

But if it dies a fiery death over the next year (as Matt seems determined it shall), then the author's prediction will come true—the proprietary locked-in stacks will welcome the WordPress refugees, many of whom will be businesses that will have soured on the idea of using "open source" if that means they're subject to the whims of some guy they've never heard of and have no relationship with.

That's why the drama matters. Currently 43% of the web runs on an open source platform. Matt is putting that short-lived victory for open source in jeopardy.

kstrauser• 2 years ago

I see what you’re getting at, but I don’t think that’s more of a risk than the people who soured on proprietary platforms after people like Larry Ellison made it clear you’re insane for trusting your business to a closed solution.

ASalazarMX• 2 years ago

I agree with this. You can always fork Wordpress, but you can't fork a closed source CMS that goes down an anti-consumer path the moment it gains enough momentum.

65• 2 years ago

There will always need to be CMSs that are easy to use for someone to make a website with. However CMSs work through network effects based on the number of plugins/themes available. And many developers don't want to write more PHP. The future of the CMS will probably be a Javascript based rehash of Wordpress.

joshtbradley• 2 years ago

I’m not convinced that managed solutions are the solution. I say this as a professional web developer with a range of clients. Webflow tends to fall apart with complexity. It creates the illusion of simplicity. For example, a designer will update a component, not understanding the underlying CSS classes, and end up breaking every other components relying on that class. Even worse, trying to do anything sufficiently complex, like embedding a third party form, becomes a mess of copy pasted JS embeds. And forget global components, the edge cases make them virtually unusable.

On the other end of the spectrum are headless solutions with your pick of framework, let’s say Contentful + Next.js. While far less flexible for a non-developer, the outcome is a rock solid, repeatable, maintainable template. You can democratize editing much more reliably. Although, yes, you need a dev for every customization.

Different solutions for different scales I suppose. I’d love to see the marriage of these two approaches. Something that gives the greatest experience to both editors and developers. I’m trying to tackle this problem in my free time, but it is a massive problem. The more I work on it, the more I recognize why it hasn’t been solved. And admittedly, WP has done a decent job of solving it with its massive ecosystem. There is a need for innovation, but it’s a shame to see the baby being tossed out with the bathwater.

dmje• 2 years ago

This is great HN fodder but IMO, it's b/s.

I think what's being missed here is that yes there are sites being built using Webflow / Shopify / whatever. And there are solutions for landing pages, or simple blog sites. And yes, flat file stuff with a GruntNodeDockerWhatever deploy pipeline is always going to make dev types happy.

But this is missing a big old chunk of people - those with relatively complex sites with a fair amount of content (say, I dunno, 100-1000+ pages), the requirement to link between pages, custom taxonomies, custom posts, have custom fields, multiple authors, different roles, requirements on things like member access, an API, feeds...

I think you'd be hard pushed to name a solution that isn't 1) Drupal (cos no-one wants to go there) or 2) Bespoke and stupidly expensive.

WordPress gets a bad rap on HN, some of which is warranted. But I also think there is a lot of hate which is unfounded, possibly from people who haven't touched it in years and years.

forgetfreeman3• 2 years ago

Sidebar: Drupal is mostly a testament to industry disinterest in talking clients out of shit they heard about at a business conference. If I had 10% of the website budget overspend I have personally witnessed due to some combination of headass design, oh-there's-a-module-for-that, and GRAB YOUR ANKLES IT"S TIME TO MIGRATE, I would have retired to a private island years ago.

LikelyABurner• 2 years ago

This article is missing the forest for the trees.

The reason why the Automattic/WP Engine fight has become the tech industry's daily soap opera isn't because we're all passionate about website hosting solutions. It's because the ramifications for open source are dire.

This fight is essentially the legal version of the xz-utils supply chain attack. It's a shock to the system that rocks the fundamental assumptions of open source to its core, here, "you can build your product on top of open source and as long as you follow the license you agreed to, you'll be legally fine."

WordPress.org could self-implode tomorrow, and that doesn't matter in the slightest, because the good will of the legal community (if there is such a thing) that the open source community spent decades trying to build up is being destroyed by one unhinged man. Matt may have ended up doing to open source what Bill Gates wasn't able to do in decades at Microsoft.

ymolodtsov2• 2 years ago

OP here. I'm not arguing with this. I was to this scandal very early and immediately started collecting key pieces in a thread and informed a few close reporters who might have been relevant.

There are very good overviews out there, one I linked to in the very beginning. This post is about something else entirely.

game_the0ry• 2 years ago

For anyone contemplating migrating from Wordpress or thinking about starting a blog, I highly recommend Ghost. Super easy interface and much lighter weight.

(I am not affiliated with Ghost, just a fan)

WordPress Doesn't Matter for the Future of Web

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