[iongoatb]

As someone that develops Wordpress and Jamstack sites for a living (among other things like apps / devops), this is silly. Debating Wordpress versus Jamstack is like comparing apples to oranges. I use Gatsby + Contentful (or other APIs, like a Headless Wordpress setup) for some situations, and I use Wordpress for many companies as well. Small businesses are not going to hire a designer for PDF designs and then hire a developer to build a Gatsby site, and relearn using a CMS like Contentful instead of Wordpress. Not going to happen. For more sophisticated clients, or for building static sites myself, I always use Gatsby. These type of clients have a higher budget, and can pay for a designer and developer to build the site properly and deal with a more sophisticated deployment architecture.

Wordpress is not going away. As long as you don't have to code to use Wordpress, it will be easier and far more accessible for people that don't have a lot of money for a website to hire a web designer (lower skill, lower pay than developer).

Gatsby or another Jamstack client could build themes that don't require coding, similar to Wordpress, but I don't see it happening. Webflow is sort of doing that now by allowing designers to build websites without coding.

Ultimately, the debate is silly because Wordpress and Jamstack have two different use cases. Wordpress will probably become less popular for big companies, but it will still be very popular for your average small to mid-sized business.

[dimmke]

I just built my first site in Gatsby (https://pubgood.dev/) and I honestly missed WordPress. Gatsby just doesn't take care of enough stuff without having to install a bunch of other solutions. I'm not sure of the extent I will use it in client sites.

I haven't regularly done client WP work in several years but I'm planning on doing some over the next year and I'm curious - how good is Gutenberg now? Before it would be adding fields to the admin with a plugin like Advanced Custom Fields - were they able to make it truly WYSIWYG for editing content?

[zapt02]

Look into ACF Blocks (it's part of ACF now), they allow you to very easily extend Gutenberg with minimal coding and simple templating.

WordPress core team is still working on the "full site editing" project (that is, being able to edit headers, footers and sidebars in Gutenberg). It's coming probably later this year or beginning of 2021. But you can still edit a lot of things with Gutenberg as-is.

https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/blocks/

[duhi88]

Gridsome is the one that I use (VueJS version of Gatsby). What are the sorts of things you found it couldn't do?

I want to get our team using it for simpler projects, and I haven't really hit any blockers with Gridsome, whereas I've hit plenty with Wordpress when we need a specific url structure.

[dimmke]

It's not that it can't do anything, it's that you have to actually implement things at a lower level. I mean, Gatsby doesn't have any backend CMS out of the box so that's the most obvious thing. If you want to use Gatsby for clients who want to be able to manage their content, you have to select and integrate one.

But even for me, who doesn't need a backend GUI stuff like a contact form was a pain. Luckily I host with Netlify and they have an easy form solution but imagine that across many other situations even for a somewhat simple site. Now you're having to set up accounts with all these other services when before it was all contained in one place. All for what? The benefit doesn't seem substantial enough to me to give all of that up.

Even if you use WordPress as the backend, you've still got to deal with integrating it's API which is more work than something generating all the markup you need etc...

[iamben]

Until recently had been a while since I've done anything wordpress either, but rather than ACF I've always been a fan of https://jeremyhixon.com/tool/wordpress-meta-box-generator/ -- such a neat way to do it for clients. Worked fine with Gutenberg as well.

[joe_momma]

Use something like Contentful with Gutenberg

[dimmke]

I'll look into that, thanks. I need to design the technical solution I am going to use for client work and I want it to be as cutting edge as possible without being a nightmare to maintain.

[pixelbash]

Putting in a word for Sanity CMS, it's like contentful but more programmatic. It also doesn't need so much of the constant 'publish draft' button clicking.

[robodale]

Yea, I can register a domain name, spin up a wordpress site on some shared hosting platform and point it to that domain, install some nice-ish template, connect an email service, and even get some basic pages, (very) basic content, and a handful of useful plugins on there in an afternoon.

Honestly...what other stack could get you that far in 3-4 HOURS?

[iongoatb]

Exactly.

[searchableguy]

You can use something like forestry: https://forestry.io or any of the few alternatives for managing content for your static generator site.

[FrontAid]

Or have a look at https://frontaid.io/ if you want to store your content in a JSON file in your own Git repository.

[zapt02]

Is there something like Forestry (CMS with Git as datastore) but self-hosted and/or open-source?

[searchableguy]

https://github.com/GetPublii/Publii

https://www.netlifycms.org/

https://github.com/sanity-io/sanity

[sionillinois]

Yes, NetlifyCMS.

[corobo]

Absolutely. I work with Wordpress for the day job it'd be horrible trying to do the same for my own site. Every issue would feel like work.

For clients though? If they want WordPress (or give a feature list that sounds up WordPress' alley without needing a bespoke Laravel build) they get it. We'd lose all our customers if I tried to get them editing Hugo markdown files!

Netlify could do with watching their PR at this point I feel. The honeymoon period is over. I've personally switched my site to a fiver DigitalOcean box and Cloudflare because I already had the DO box for another project. The deploy is infinitely faster and I don't need to worry about hitting limits bumping me up to a 50 quid a month account

[joe_momma]

Popular for small to midsize businesses to do what? Blog? They don't need wordpress to sell items or create their brochure pages. If they need a blog wordpress is good for that but even something like Medium may be a better option. The day of putting everything under one roof is gone.

[iongoatb]

Blogging is not the primary use of Wordpress in practice for small to medium sized businesses.

[joe_momma]

Please share their primary use that cannot be sufficed with a third party application or beyond a static page? Im curious as to what these are not being snarky

[mikepurvis]

I think the use-case is a CMS where a non-technical user can post files, create/update pages of static information with a wysiwyg editor, and have it all Just Work without having to ever see a command line or deal with errors from some mystery-meat generator process that has a bunch of its own ideas about correctness, style consistency, or whatever else.

As a former user who had one of those typical personal Wordpress blogs on a shared hosting setup, I experienced the nightmare of dealing with spam, hacking, having to constantly upgrade, etc. So for my own use I would never consider anything other than a static site generator; but I can see the appeal for many use cases, especially if the backend is managed (services like WP Engine) or semi-managed (the guy who set it up is getting a small monthly fee to keep an eye on things).

[pixelbash]

I looked into WP Engine recently to see if I could transfer some older client websites, it's eye wateringly expensive!

[mikepurvis]

I don't think it's meant to compete with DIYers or small-time bloggers— that market is covered by wordpress.com's paid plans, and value-add services on top of shared hosting, like what SiteGround offers.

My sense is that WP Engine targets busy professionals who have first-hand experience of how much hassle a WP installation can be to maintain, people for whom downtime or being hacked has potentially a severe cost in terms of lost business, reputational damage, etc. The other way to look at it is that $300/mo sounds like a lot for "just a WP installation", but it's peanuts compared to hiring another person for your IT department.

[dageshi]

Typically, it's because most of these businesses have some extra requirement. They need a brochure site + some complicated multi-step form, or some integration with a third party API. Wordpress is popular because if there is any platform for which there will be a turnkey plugin solution for these extra bits of functionality, it'll be wordpress.

The API will have an official plugin, or someone will have written one because their client needed it and the dev decided to support and sell it. Complicated forms can be turned out with plugins like Gravity forms.

This is why lots and lots of sites are still built on wordpress because the ecosystem around it lets people do a lot of stuff quickly without touching a line of code.

[joe_momma]

I could see the benefit of creating many forms or ones that frequently updated.

[cooljacob204]

One use case I had at a previous job was that they used word press for daily logs, inventory counts, hr portal, etc... Basically a form wrapper that would email the related departments with whatever the employees inputted.

Very simple and more then did the job. It costed basically nothing to use and pretty much anyone could maintain the site.

[joe_momma]

I could see a small company needing a quick and cheap way to make a portal. These are things wordpress should perhaps focus more on and move away from the blog being central, but still make it available.

[Mooty]

Maybe ecommerce or anything else, as it's also a bulletproof framework.