Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld(lasselaursen.com) |
Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld(lasselaursen.com) |
Something like sticky menus should be trivial for any web dev: find the menu you want to make sticky in the web inspector. Modify the styles inline until you make it work. Grep the theme for the selector that you modified. Copy your modifications.
I think that really illustrates Wordpress' versatility.
By that same extension, a custom hacked up theme is the "return 4; /*" of site maintenance.
By using a plugin, the person that follows you doesn't have to be a webdev who could float a css div blindfolded.
As part 2 will detail, the whole purpose of switching to Wordpress was to reduce the work load of building/maintaining the site. I fully agree, Wordpress is swimming in tutorials, docs, and sometimes guides disguised as advertisements for a paid theme.
Re. changing fonts - My actual first thought was 'Surely I just need to find the settings in WP that let's me change the theme's font', and my experience was that Wordpress did not 'natively' support this.
I still use it for my personal blog and for marketing my various projects.
The article doesn't have a lot of meat, but I think the title alone was interesting.
My primary issue with the WP ecosystem is how folks end up paying for GPL software.
Leaving aside my opinions about the actual legal weight of commercial plugins in that ecosystem, having a bunch of systems with un-patchable software (until you pay for the latest release) has caused a whole lot of problems for the world.
There are other problems with WP of course. I'm completely burned out on trying to fix things with it, so hopefully I can find some other work when I get done trying to be a musician.
However, I find the community is quite unique in its lack of tolerance for the idea that GPL means GPL.
> June 9, 2023
> This post is the first in a three-part series about migrating from a self-built PHP-based Laravel backend to a managed WordPress backend.
Cool...
> But it’s still worth it. Find out next week part two in this series, same bat-time, same bat-website…
Excellent. Let's go find parts two and three!
Oh. There is no part two. Or three.
Happy to ping you with them if you're still keen.
Sticky – WordPress 6.2 (released in March this year) adds native sticky support.
Non-standard font – Twentig plug-in.
Latest 3 blog posts – Team Tangible‘s Loops & Logic plug-in.
Gallery Lightbox – dFactory‘s responsive lightbox and gallery plug-in.
And unless I'm missing something, doesn't injecting PHP either require a plug-in or actively building on to a wordpress component?
Most implementations are massively bloated as a legacy from the jQuery days when that was neccessary. CSS is incredibly powerful now, and the browsers are all evergreen, so it's pretty trivial to implement a pure CSS/HTML gallery:
https://css-tricks.com/css-only-carousel/
This is fully featured, with indexing, scrolling, animation, etc., but you could slim that down even further to just a few lines for a simple automated slider. Obviously doesn't work if you need managed control, but 99% of gallery use-cases are just flipping through a homepage hero like the OP.
This seems like a setup for a lot of apples to oranges comparisons.
Recently I moved my static blog (what it's been since the WordPress days) to Django and Wagtail and my experience has been night and day. I think a big part of that is that Python is one of the languages I code in with some regular amount of frequency and that Django is one or two layers of abstraction below a thing like WordPress, which is much more appealing and intuitive for me as a programmer.
That's to say, pick a platform in a language you like and an abstraction layer that ensures you'll continue to have fun.
All the writer has done here is screamed their ignorance (which, to be fair, is not at all simple) of the complexities of using free/open source and also maintaining something huge and complex WITHOUT being huge jerks about it.
I do wish there was a simpler way to essentially do two tiers of "service" -- but for now, "you either 'pay' in terms of digging in and learning or you 'pay' with real money" seems pretty reasonable.
My issue is with the omission of what I perceive to be some basic and universally useful features. What's basic is - of course - subjective, and you're welcome to disagree.
As noted in my article, I share your preference with a basic paid tier just to get in the door.
Wordpress gets a lot of undue hate, imo. It just works, at least for me and my workloads. I worry I’ll encounter some legendary source of friction that turns many devs off to Wordpress but so far I haven’t. YMMV.
Granted, changing the CSS is straight-forward, but not necessarily for everyone switching to Wordpress.
Another fundamental thing requiring upgrade is access to the canonical address if you're using a custom domain. Control over canonical address configuration should be integral part of any paid plan, in any platform.
A huge amount of features that should be in core are locked behind the proprietary "jetpack" SAAS.
The plugins repository is a hive of scum and freemium, with no way to search for only GPL compliant plugins.
What you might mean is that there are GPL plugins that you can use with a third party service that you have to pay for. And yes, that is a grey middleground that is allowed at wordpress.org.
>Plug-in time, or change the CSS, or somehow add it to the theme itself, which I never figured out how to do
Ok, buddy… I think your definition of “web developer” and mine are quite different if you can’t figure out how to add a font via CSS or a theme.
This makes the rest of this argument garbage.
If I were introducing young folks into building stuff for the web (and I am considering doing that locally), WP would be my platform of choice for the reasons that you state. It really isn't bad if you are doing mostly what it is designed to do. It's got a lot of horrible parts to the code base, but if you never have to touch them (and there is a lot of equally shitty code written to aid in that effort) then it doesn't really matter.
However, if you're integrating an ERP and a SSO system that has many thousands of users, it gets to be a bit hairy. You're correct that at a certain point a wholly custom solution makes sense. But if the shop where you're working is married to WP because that is where all the success stories they know how to tell live, then WP it will be.
A lot of people try to impose the same kind of "name brand" identity on open source software, and it just doesn't work. Underneath, it's based on the same code and libraries, and a lot of the time it's vulnerable to human agenda and human flaws.
Why is that a an issue? Sounds like WP has solved a problem that an entire industry has wanted to achieve since the invention of the GPL.
Red Hat also sells GPL software. The problem for them is that customers are simply rebranding Red Hat at a cheaper price point, becoming competitors.
I'm kind of surprised this is not happening in WordPress land.
You might as well just have whatever normal for-pay license. The reason it is an issue is that not just that it's not legitimate GPL (which is ethically wrong to me- it's literally stealing from a community).
The issue is that it splits up the repos which messes with the upgrade structure. That's fine until you get a security issue and the community can't collectively update to mitigate the issue until the people using the software have paid for their liceneses.
To your point about rebranding stuff, people do that but it's not discussed often in the community. Personally, I feel like white-labeling people software sounds like a community service.
But there really isn't any money in that and it's shunned by the community, so you get a lot of malware created (which is, once again, a problem created by the culture around selling GPL software as if it were closed-source).
Anyhow, other than a few large plugins, the people making real money in the space are doing custom work and leveraging the open source, which is the "real" solution and what folks are doing in other ecosystems as far as I can tell. There are plenty of folks making money off "commercial" WP plugins, but IME that's not the main source of income into the economy around WP.
Do your homework in the ecosystem and you can get that experience, or just pay to get around it seems reasonable, if definitely not ideal?
I've seen enough cases where folks have paid to "get around" some problem and it's ended very poorly, often require extensive work that could have been don correctly the first time with some bespoke code instead of many layers of kludges.
Could just be a problem with low-rent software dev in general, but the plugin ecosystem doesn more harm than good in that area, at least IME.
FTFY.
Quick, now tell us how secure Adobe products are.
It is amazing how much time and effort in the world that has been lost because somehow it became the standard.
Quality WYSIWYG editors and hosting tools will come back with a vengeance soon. As soon as austerity and efficiency returns to the economy.
I mostly think it's due to updating quickly, generally I update the next day and manage it all with a central service, and just not using unknown plugins that don't get updates.
* Using a plugin written by a someone who has no idea how SQL injection attacks works.
* Failure to update WP/plugins after a known security vulnerability.
* Poor general security practices. Tip: don't use your domain name with the "o"s replaced by "0"s. Also, don't create a secret backdoor into your site because the owner has trouble remembering his password.
* Your web host itself has been hacked (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/godaddy-hacke...)
Regardless, my motivation was to implement as little as possible, as the whole motivation to switch to Wordpress was to not minimize what I'd have to build. I will make a note to detail that better in the future. Appreciate the candor.
I don't have WP experience and don't understand what "splits up the repos which messes with the upgrade structure" means. I can sort of understand the argument that not buying a new license can prevent upgrades, but, I still think it's within the spirit of the GPL. As a user of said plugin, you can choose to make the necessary changes yourself (or hire someone for it). Or look for a gratis alternative.
To me it sounds like the GPL is doing exactly what it was designed for.
I've always done my own hosting too, just a minimal setup of nginx, php-fpm, and mariadb on a 1GB RAM VPS. That way I can keep the server side up to date with security patches, instead of relying on a webhost that may not do it.
Backups run nightly offsite, and I monitor the sites with Change Detection so if a plugin update does break something or in the worst case a site gets hacked, I know fairly soon and can either fix it or roll back to a backup.
That makes the post even more meaningless since they don't even say what managed service they are using. It seems they are complaining about what some unnamed managed service is charging them and framing it as criticism of WordPress.
Where exactly in the article am I complaining about being charged for having someone manage my backend?
That critique would be fair if I was talking about my one WordPress site but I'm talking about hundreds, maybe even a thousand if you count sites I've built that came and went. It's a pretty decent sample size (IMHO) both for the number of instances but also the time period (10+ years). And it's also not 300 clone sites, each one was built unique, and each has their own mix of plugins & themes.
YOU, are a technical person and understand the value of updates, vetting plugins, etc, yet a majority of these sites aren't run by people like you/me. They are run by end users, with all of the baggage.
You have a point, to an extent. I wholly disagree with your stance on WP though. It's got issues, numerous issues, and a majority of the sites aren't professionally managed.
I've made sure to more explicitly motivate the intent of switching to Wordpress being to reduce custom code and on-going maintenance, in the article.
You're worried about your fleet and that's great. I'm more concerned with the internet as a whole and Wordpress is just vuln after vuln.
I'm happy your systems are secure. That's great.
Unfortunately, that doesn't apply to the 1000s of installations done by amateurs, lax IT, etc. etc. that make the WP vulns a much bigger issue than the 300 you manage.
Manage on, friend.