[vorpalhex]

Glad they realized the issues of Wordpress but a shame they went with proprietary nonsense with a faux license.

A php based platform has a lot of negatives for scalability. Using a cms to generate static content is much more simple, scalable and cheaper.

Keep it simple.

[ohashi]

PHP scales fine especially serving mostly static content. Not sure why that's even being used as an argument against choosing WordPress. There are valid concerns, this isn't one of them.

[vorpalhex]

Well, you're going to need apache or nginx, then you're going to need a php cgi or fpm. You still need somewhere to store your data so now you get a database layer that has to scale too. Don't forget your op cache. Oh and you probably need some kind of shared filesystem too, so there's that.

If any of those pieces break, get overloaded or have a security bug, your website is down. When your website isn't getting traffic, you still get to pay for those things, maintain them and perform regular updates.

With a static site you have files that get served by whatever. As long as you are serving files you are up. You should update your nginx or whatever on occasion. Scalability is stupidly horizontal.

[m_mueller]

WP is php, and it tends to take a ton of plugins of various quality, vendors and support to get it to where you want it. Last I looked at it, it didn’t even support multi-language out of the box.

[lixtra]

That’s a feature not a bug. >90% of the websites don’t care about multi-language. Why should their CMS be more complex just to carter the rest? Plugins nicely separate the concern and let the authors of the plugins get paid for their efforts.

[m_mueller]

Typical American viewpoint that is. In European markets it is probably the inverse, most sites need multi language support. For a content management system I find it pretty poor to be missing this.

[lixtra]

Indeed, I thought for a moment about Switzerland, that might have one of the highest rate of multilingual websites at least in Europe.

I wasn’t able to find what fraction of the Internet sites are multilingual but would be curious what’s your estimate. I still would be surprised if it is >10%. Maybe more if you weight by traffic but that is not the relevant metric here.

The plug-in approach has another advantage: there are several reasonable approaches to a multilingual site, i.e. you can have a default language if a translation is not available. Or rather show nothing. You may want to force a translation of each page. How do you track the translation of changes in one language, etc.

By picking/adjusting a plug-in you get the behavior you want instead of a one approach satisfies nobody default solution.

[m_mueller]

* first of all I think that not translating web content is leaving big chunks of potential markets by the wayside. the whole point of the web is that people are able to find you and your offerings worldwide - maybe they could be a fit in places you didn’t expect? [1]

* I’ve dealt with these WP multilingual plugins and they were all atrocious (see my first comment). Nowadays, if I have a core set of requirements, and a piece of software only offers that set through plugins, I will not consider it anymore. Plugins are fine for nice-to-haves, but not for must-haves. It’s a recipy for a maintainability disaster.

[1] https://weglot.com/wp-content/uploads/20191017121225/image16...

[lwhi]

Surely it's a lack of features.

[zelphirkalt]

"Various quality" is a very mild expression for it already.

Add to that the tendencies of many to use PHP directly as a way of cutting pages into non-modular non-composable pieces, that can only be concattenated instead of used everywhere, and add to that a mix of PHP, HTML, CSS and JS in the same file ... well you are set up for a catastrophe in terms of maintainability, which maps closely to how most plugins for WP are written.

[gexla]

> A php based platform has a lot of negatives for scalability

This is an outdated view of how websites are developed today.

> Using a cms to generate static content is much more simple, scalable and cheaper.

If the market agreed with you, then this would be the dominant method for creating websites today. You aren't smarter than the market.

Maybe you aren't looking at the right variables which go into your calculation for "more simple, scalable and cheaper."

[lwhi]

Static generation is common approach, and has gained a lot of popularity in recent years.

[gexla]

Sure, I said dominant, not common.

I don't know how representative these results are, but it's a clue.

https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/WordPress

I don't now if there are numbers for static sites on there, but my guess is that those numbers don't come close to Wordpress, especially for the top million sites.

[lwhi]

Many CMSs are used to produce static sites; WordPress included.

The investment in tech like Gatsby, goes a long way to showing how the market does support this.

Market dominance, won't describe the trends a market is moving towards.

[gexla]

> Many CMSs are used to produce static sites; WordPress included.

So, which is it? Don't use Wordpress because it's PHP based and doesn't scale? Or Wordpress headless is okay because the front-end is static?

Static sites are the future, not Wordpress? Or Wordpress is still going to be a part of the headless market because the CMS supports that functionality?

You're confusing me.

[lwhi]

You were speaking as an authority, saying something I don't consider to be true.

I just wanted to correct you.

[chiefalchemist]

Unless there's dynamic content, the pages are going to be cached anyway. I'm not sure static would buy anything much really. So few would be hitting the actual site.

[out_of_protocol]

Having 100% bulletproof site is huge (e.g. you can host static site on s3+cloudfront) vs worrying to be not-hacked, not-overloaded etc

[chiefalchemist]

Fair enough. Good point.

Btw, there is a hosted WP to static SaaS. I forget the name tho'.