[thimabi]

This whole affair has been a disaster for everyone involved. Just a ton of dirty laundry being aired in public…

Time is ripe for a new publishing ecosystem — more secure, with less cruft, and preferably better governance. But I imagine WordPress is far from being displaced, even after everything that has been going on.

[rjmunro]

There's already Drupal, Joomla, Ghost and many more.

What I'd like to see is a CMS that uses git as a data store and renders to a static site. Something that can render to S3, Google pages, Cloudflare pages or a random FTP server. Ideally I could run it locally in Electron or similar, but also be able to have it hosted somewhere online that isn't the same place as the website being managed. I haven't seen a good offering in that space.

[lordgroff]

The problem is that what WP can do is so, so much more than that. And this is the secret to its success since it can grow from a blog to "here's a bunch of static pages" to a full ecommerce site with CRM/ERP integrations, etc. Boutique mini CMS is a fine thing but won't be displacing WP.

[cosiiine]

That’s the jamstack in a nutshell. I use DecapCMS to manage some client sites using that exact strategy. It’s always nice to rollback their content issues using git, it’s saved me many hours of headaches.

The only challenge is markdown is not a great store of complex component data IMO.

[c0brac0bra]

I really like Decap, but I wish that the UX was better. With a bit more polish it would be very compelling.

[closewith]

Wordpress was quite a leader in this area, as there's a great plugin to render WP sites to static files, Simply Static.

[thimabi]

> There's already Drupal, Joomla, Ghost and many more.

None of these have gained as much traction as WordPress, so much that I don’t consider them as drop-in replacements for the general public.

[fiala__]

Astro pretty much does exactly this.

[sgdfhijfgsdfgds]

> But I imagine WordPress is far from being displaced, even after everything that has been going on.

Right. But this is because of a very simple, undeniable fact that is unpopular around these here parts:

There is nothing close to as good as WordPress at everything WordPress can be made to do.

No GUI-based CMS not built on PHP can be as flexibly hosted as one that is. PHP is easy and can be secured. There are no real PHP-based competitors for WordPress that are as easy to install, configure or use.

There are no CMSes that can get close to being as good for a bespoke mix of small ecommerce, member systems, digital downloads sales, form handling etc. Hosted or not hosted.

Say what you like about the block editor (personally I think it is an impressive but ultimately ten-year-plus project). But TinyMCE and shortcodes has proved painfully non-robust and there is no other block editor on an open source CMS that gets close to being open-ended enough for an extensible CMS. Gutenberg has some strengths over hosted solutions like e.g. the Squarespace editor.

There is no open-source CMS that rolls out security patches automatically the way Wordpress does, or can do so at the scale WordPress does.

HN people may dislike this, but it has not been out-competed because it is actually basically competent and extensible, and has no real jack-of-all-trades competitors at all. There's nothing with this level of contribution, extensibility, attention to detail, longevity or backwards compatibility.

Personally I think WP Engine needed a bit of a straightener; there are things they should not have done and there are things they could do. But this was not the way to go about it.

The damage Matt is doing, in particular with the "Secure Custom Fields" gaslighting bullshit is among the most depressing examples of willingly setting one's own hair on fire that I've ever seen.

(Edited for clarity, but sorry everyone, I'm waiting for a new coffee grinder to be delivered this morning)

[rob]

I can't think of another CMS that lets you easily make over $1000 for a day or two worth of work, often times without actually writing any PHP or doing some minimal overrides with filters and actions. Everything is pretty streamlined for the most part. There's stable plugins that have been active for over 10 years that pretty much do anything you can think of. Page builders that output modern HTML and CSS. Optimized hosting ready to go. Secure backup solutions that let you restore everything easily without needing to SSH into a remote server. You're not locked into an obscure language or niche CMS that leaves the client stranded down the road, or with big bills because they needed to hire an Elixir developer for their Phoenix blog they deployed via wasm to fly.io 3 years ago.

[pell]

>No GUI-based CMS not built on PHP can be as flexibly hosted as one that is. PHP is easy and can be secured. And there are no PHP-based competitors for WordPress that are as easy to use.

There have been many attempts in the past. Some offered better performance, security, were easier to use, more lightweight, etc. However they all lacked the ecosystem that WordPress provides. They just didn't have the plugins and themes, the webhosters which optimize for WordPress, the developers and companies which are dedicated to developing for, maintaining and optimizing WordPress sites.

[sgdfhijfgsdfgds]

Right. WordPress is Windows for the Web, basically.

More enjoyable to develop for, IMO, but otherwise the comparison holds.

I would add that other PHP-based projects have had severe maintainability crises, poorer clarity of design, even worse code quality crises (Joomla, for example), major fallings-out and multiple forks (Joomla again).

WordPress got this far in part because it managed inevitable community fallings-out and egos much better. It's totally depressing to see what is happening.

[aldavigdis]

I would go as far as saying that PHP has developed into a very good OOP programming language in the past years (from C with dollar signs to something more Java like). Frameworks like Laravel and their ecosystems are actively using modern PHP and utilising the newest PSR standards.

The issue is how WordPress seems to be stuck in the ways of the mid-2000's. You can be a "senior full stack" developer in the WordPress ecosystem but you'll hit a wall once you start applying for more general PHP roles as everything from the standard coding style to how classes and namespaces are used are worlds apart.

[sgdfhijfgsdfgds]

> You can be a "senior full stack" developer in the WordPress ecosystem but you'll hit a wall once you start applying for more general PHP roles as everything from the standard coding style to how classes and namespaces are used are worlds apart.

I once taught someone to make this jump, who was convinced he would never be able to. It is definitely a mindset change but I think a good developer can do it. Especially since these days, class and namespace stuff and Composer dependencies are increasingly common in plugin development.

I love Laravel (especially with Lighthouse) but I think the hooks/actions model in WordPress is underrated in its simplicity and appropriateness for the task.

(I am not a fan of the standard WP coding style, TBH)

[aldavigdis]

100%! I made the journey myself after finally getting an honest feedback of a coding challenge I did for a job application, but I do think that my own background in other languages and frameworks helped.

I do worry about the thousands of people out there that have no other marketable skill than WordPress and are not going to climb out.