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by luckylion 1210 days ago
I always wonder, at what point is it easier to just ditch Wordpress completely and instead spend the time to add an admin theme that looks & behaves like it for familiarity of users, and maybe add whatever magic functions your favorite framework might be missing.

This isn't a critique, I use WP intensively, and we heavily modify and extend it as well, but the familiarity of the team (in dev, seo and content) is pretty much the only selling point, because we shut down most extra features (feeds, rpc, json-rpc, emojis, gutenberg, comments etc etc etc), use a complex varnish-setup, do image optimization etc outside of it and most plugins aren't really good, so we roll out something custom instead. Getting rid of it it isn't an option for us because we're so committed and have built so much custom stuff around it, but with a green field, I'm not sure.
1 comments
noeltock 1210 days ago
I think you answered your own question, the familiarity for users (seo & content) which is "end-to-end no-code" is massive (especially once extended with user-facing plugins). And you're not even speaking about making the move to Gutenberg yet. Just too much value there.
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luckylion 1210 days ago
Yeah, certainly, but that's what I meant to address by making your framework's backend look & feel like WP and adding e.g. shortcodes to it and having a media library that works the same way (but doesn't suffer from WP's clunky bolted-on attachment).

Gutenberg isn't a thing for the folks I work with, nobody there likes freedom (freedom only leads to errors!), everything is form-based (ACF is slow but it works, and here, too, it's not users setting up the fields, it's developers) with a few shortcodes to pull in special elements.

I'm not complaining, I like building tools and solving problems and using WP allows for plenty of both, but in hindsight WP is slowing us down, I believe. Of course, it's hard to predict the scale of things when you start, so having something you can quickly iterate with is useful.

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minusf 1210 days ago
what familiarity? every single plugin's dashboard/admin page looks completely different.
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tehbeard 1210 days ago
Somewhat of a facetious argument, like saying the posts and site settings pages look completely different.

It's not to say there aren't some that say sod it and have their own UI library. But quite a few leverage wordpress admin styles and conventions (such as the wp_list_table).

But the quality is all over the place, much like with composer packages.

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