[karolist]

My gf has a WP ecommerce site that her business revolves around, it was built buy some local guys doing WP development who have an agency solving problems just with WP. She told me how fast they were able to iterate and solve all their problems. The site has a bunch of plugins integrating various social services, ad tracking, SEO and whatnot.

The site generates PDF shipment labels for parcels, one day her sales got high enough to buy a label printer, one that spits out 10x15cm stickers. The problem - PDFs from the site come out as A4 and text gets tiny if squeezed to fit into that sticker. She asked her developers to fix it, they said it's impossible and refused. Now that's interesting, nothing is impossible I shouted with my nerd hat on. I'm in the tech space for a good few decades now, I have FAANG experience, complex systems are my thing!

I spent 5 hours diving through tons of spaghetti code plugins masquerading as highly abstracted set of interfaces to arrive at the conclusion that these guys were right, the PDF blob comes from the shipment company's SOAP API, though it's obfuscated deep enough. In the end I solved it with a simple PyQT+fPDF UI utility to crop out the printable parts and project them onto the right sized canvas for printing, it took me 2h to complete with binary packaging and all, less time than it took to understand why the WordPress site can't do it natively, and much less than than it would have taken me to integrate this PDF modification into WordPress. These guys were basically right.

Her site now backs up to 4GB zip with photo assets. I dread the day when her site goes down due to some "hack" but I have no idea how to replicate this functionality for this cost without WP. No way in hell I would say I can do it from scratch for her, my previous Web dev experience doesn't matter at this point. Shopify? Sigh.

[skilled]

4GB? Those are rookie numbers. I have a site where /wp-content/ is 20GB. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of images that have been auto generated by WordPress because of how thumbnails and minifaction works, but also converting images to WebP. And if you delete old posts or any other content, the images stay.

And it’s my understanding that there is no safe way to remove unused images. I have tried to do it using the in-built media manager but eventually I gave up because it’s tedious and I don’t want to risk leaving pages without images by accident.

[debesyla]

But 20GB is not a big deal these days, even cheapest hosting solutions give "unlimited" storage (only limited by inodes mostly, but those go into absurd numbers too).

In my eyes it's more optimal to just don't worry and take the WordPress site as simply a tool - yes, it will break after 5 years, but by that time you would have needed new site anyway.

[pxtail]

Surely there is a plugin for that.

[jddj]

I have a handful of different personal web apps spinning away, and other critical-path ones for work.

Nothing though gives me the feeling of dread that I get when my partner's business WP site goes down and she asks if I can take a look.

[karolist]

It's amazing how much lock-in you get by developing ecommerce sites with WP for clients. Her site was recently down, just didn't load. She paid a few hundred for the agency to take a look, they said they updated plugins and "removed viruses" and all is good again. If you're someone not technical or without a huge sum of money to pay someone to replicate the functionality to migrate off WP you're on the hook for the life of business.

You can migrate hosts but that's about all the freedom you have, paying Shopify 20-30 USD / mo is nothing compared to what you'll have to eventually pay with WP if you build your business around it IMHO.

[jddj]

Same thing happened here recently, connection limit on the shared hosting's mysql.

If I hadn't named the exact issue for her in her communications I'm sure a consultant would have happily shaken her down for the same.

To be fair though, we get the same at work with Salesforce consultants