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by thomasfromcdnjs 749 days ago
I've always considered myself an above average web developer, my friends would always have Wordpress websites, and ask me if I can just tweak a few things.

Without hesitation, I'd proclaim I could easily make those changes!

Then I'd load their site, load their plugin/theme code and css files, struggle for hours to get the desired effect, and even if I got it to work, I would break every other part of their site.

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Denigrating anecdote aside, good job Matt, loved the story at the end.
1 comments
pests 749 days ago
I had the exact same thing happen years ago and I've never felt so helpless. Simple banner / color change. Ended up rebuilding the entire site from scratch it was easier.

Once you spend some time in the codebase and understand a bit of its legacy history it gets easier over time. A lot of plugins and solutions are aimed towards non-technical users and a lot of overlap. Where we might just write up some custom HTML others might install 3 plugins to make it work.

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kijin 749 days ago
The overlap between plugins is crazy. It looks like every plugin comes with an entire SEO toolkit, a performance optimizer, a firewall and the kitchen sink. Unless you're very careful, you quickly end up with an unusable house with 5 kitchen sinks, no fridge, and 1 3/4 ovens that are perpetually trying to burn one another.
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pests 749 days ago
I think half the problem there is everyone offering half a house for free, but every company is offering a different half. No one wants to pay for the paid offerings that have all the features, they install one SEO plugin to get page metadata, another to get structured data / microdata, another to optimize keywords; when all they had to do was buy the premium version of Yoost, for example.

Thankfully there was a recent consolidation in a plugin called Admin & Site Enhancements (ASE). Probably got rid of 10 others with this thing. Includes duplicate post/page, admin menu cleanups & reorganization, hiding dashboard widgets, cleaning up the top bar, changing the login URL, an easy way to setup SMTP delivery, media replacement, hides the annoying admin notices, and a bunch more.

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