WP21

Quick judgments and strong opinions have unfortunately become part of the community.

Having spent the last 2-3 months working excessively on WordPress development, I would like to say a word about the excellent isolation of code with blocks ("Gutenberg"). As standalone plugins or in combination with Advanced Custom Fields, these allow for perfect, modular websites and development flows (design system), where even the HTML is 100% in your own hands. I can recommend everyone to understand and learn WordPress properly.

– no relation or connection to WordPress.

I just wish WordPress actually adhered to development standards, not actively tried to break them.

Using globals everywhere and encouraging spaghetti code with its classic themes, and with its new themes it evidently learned nothing and is encouraging JSON inside HTML comments which obviously has no editor support, is very prone to errors, besides being just plain stupid (like seriously, some senior engineers I assume decided to have templating inside HTML comments as JSON?). If I had my tinfoil hat on, it's almost as if they actively try to kill the freelancer or digital agency market and push everything to its WYSIWYG site builder on WP.com.

I have come across a situation, where an automatic Wordpress update (need to keep up to date, against vulnerabilities) made a site I maintain violate the law:

I used a unicode symbol for something in text. Wordpress out of nowhere and by itself decided, that it would be better to replace that symbol with a bloody svg, that is loaded from some third party. At first I could not believe my eyes, then it dawned on me, how incredible reckless they acted with that update. They must really have no clue what they are doing.

Then I scrambled to reverse this bs and tried various things, including editing the theme minimally, which originally I never wanted to do, because I do not want to maintain a theme in addition to the site. Well nothing worked, except for installing a plugin, whose sole purpose it is to reverse this stupidity.

If I had not had functionality connected to the DOM structure around my unicode symbol, I might not have noticed it, because that functionality also broke.

So there we go, WP automatically making the site violating the law by loading from third party without consent and also breaking my functionality and basically forcing me to install a plugin to correct WP core mistakes. Of course it is very clear now, that it is completely unfit for any business website, when the core developers make such bad decisions. It requires constant maintenance, even if you update nothing but WP itself. Alternatively you let it get outdated and get hacked due to vulnerabilities. Great.

WordPress is proof that clean code doesn't matter. Security doesn't matter. Out of the box performance doesn't matter. At least none of these matter if you are the 800 lb gorilla in the market and everyone else is trying to take a piece out of you.

WordPress is my favorite example of "It doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to work"

So many cool projects die because people over-complicate the first steps. You can always make it better later if people start using your thing, but first you gotta ship.

To be honest, I never found WordPress easy to use. It's all flowers and rainbows as long as I can find good themes and plugins. However, it starts going south as soon as I need to make a very small custom change.

WP is 21 years old, and people on HN still bishing and crying about it. How come no one has offered something that can beat WP in 21 years?

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.

WordPress is not the blogging solution humanity deserves, but the one that was needed. Customising a base and installing plugins as opposed to devving a blogging platform allows a huge portion of people to create internet businesses who otherwise wouldn't. I get that there are supposed better solutions now, but this was not the case a few years ago. And there is a lot of WordPress content out there for novices to learn web dev.

My sister co-owns a very basic architecting firm, and they have figured out WordPress based on online materials to design a website that suits them pretty well. Maybe that is not the long term solution for them, but it is a very productive place to start for a small business.

One of the things that strikes me about WordPress is the way that web nerds expect to find it easy and are angered when it is not.

Like everything, it takes learning. It has opinions.

It has some crazy history (I really wish media items were not handled the way they are), but it also has methodology to it.

If I said I know Go and JS and Perl and Java and Ruby and C, and I was enraged that Rust is so hard to learn, I'd be shot down for it, rightly.

WordPress looks like it does a simple job, but actually it's a whole, quite broad platform. You might have to read some documentation for a bit.

And if you've inherited a site using Elementor, ask the people who made it how to change the simple stuff, because they will be able to help.

If you've inherited a site using Visual Composer or Divi... shoot the people who made it.

If you think Gutenberg is bad (it is very much not, now!)... oh man, Divi was a time.

I wish wordpress did fewer things but did them better. There should be something that is a notch better Jekyll but doesn't get gross when you install a dozen plug-ins. Out of the box wordpress produces a very slow and bandwidth heavy site.

I will always fondly remember that time i was in college (~2011), and created a fully working social network for my classmates using WordPress and ungodly amount of Plugins, and ducktape code I barely understood.

A user profile display was ~30 SQL queries (who needs cache), and my poor 5$ VPS was sweating ...

learned a lot on what not to do! fun times !

WordPress is simultaneously amazing and terrible. At its best, it's a highly extensible free and open source CMS that's incredibly easy to set up and customize. For that matter, its core has reasonably good security and performance before third-party themes and plugins are added into the mix.

The problem comes in with how many basic GUI-based features it's still missing out of the box 21 years later. Take, for example, the curious case of the lack of post cloning; Why is there still no "Duplicate Post" button in the core after 21 years? Why are over 4 million websites being forced to keep a third-party "Yoast Duplicate Post" plugin active in order to access a very basic CMS feature? The same goes for other GUI-based tasks like logging outgoing emails (WP Mail Logging), or viewing the scheduled cron jobs (WP Crontrol), or letting an admin temporarily switch to another user's account (User Switching), or downloading a one-click backup of the site regardless of host (All In One WP Migration), or managing the SMTP settings (FluentSMTP), or managing URL redirects (Redirection), or enabling SVG uploads (SVG Support).

The fact that many of those tasks can be accomplished through small code snippets in the child theme is great and all, but that doesn't help the average WordPress site owner who is barely tech literate and would be more likely to break the site than successfully copy a hook over to the correct file. It's not uncommon to find WordPress sites with 50+ plugins installed, a good chunk of which are abandoned and have multiple code vulnerabilities, yet still find the time to clog up the dashboard with useless "notices", AKA advertisements for their other products.

I could understand a lot of the missing functionality if WordPress was still a small FOSS project with no real funding and a few irregular volunteers, but the fact that's it's grown into what it is without any real plan to address those issues is just so frustrating. I've made a few small contributions to the core and read through a bunch of tickets for longstanding issues, and it's clear that time or funding aren't the problem; it's that the maintainers have an attitude of "We don't personally need that feature ourselves, therefore it can just be a third-party plugin", which might sound fine on paper, but...

Ever clicked on a Google link, only to catch a quick glimpse of the real site before being redirected to an "UPDATE CHROME NOW" or "CRITICAL MICROSOFT ALERT" or "CHEAP PHARMA PILLS" website? There's a 99% chance that site is running WordPress and has dozens of plugins and got hacked at some point, and if you try to message the site's owner to tell them what's happening and how they can fix it, they'll think you're crazy or a scammer and leave the malware there because it intentionally hides itself to logged in users. I'm not exaggerating about that percentage, either; WordPress runs a massive chunk of the modern web (excluding major social media websites), and the failure to quash the need for so many common plugins has made them a goldmine for bad actors to inject redirects and SEO spam.

I wish more companies would adopt the sabbatical policy that automattic has: https://automattic.com/benefits/sabbatical/

I love Wordpress. People install it on their own, install dozens of useless, unsecure and buggy plugins ("it's easy, just clic clic clic... I love my admin panel !") and after a while their websites break and then we can charge them for a more secure and resilient solution.

I avoided wordpress like a plague. Used stuff like django, flask, grav and who knows what. But recently I had to make a website with lots of unknowns which needed to be authored by dummy users and I just said ** it and went with wordpress.

What I struggled with are: 1) Interesting site design, 2) custom functionality through plugins, 3) making it easy to add pages and blog posts with a nice editor.

I'm glad open source solutions exist, but I swear, they always have drawbacks. Either they are code heavy, plugins are out of date, maintenance takes a lot of time or there is no way to easily design a page.

So for Wordpress I bought Oxygen, for which you can still buy a lifetime license for, and oh my god, even I can make a nice, responsive website without touching code. It's such a game changer.

I think lots of people avoid wordpress because of security. But that is not primarily a wordpress fault. Linux & PHP complicates it a lot. And I'm sure those other open source projects have severe bugs, too, but nobody knows or talks about them.

What could bring down wordpress, imho, are expensive license fees for plugins. Who wants to spend 50 to 100 bucks per year and per page for a builder plugin? Everyone wants one, but no one wants to pay yearly. And it seems that all plugin makers are starting to go that way.

Would be interested to hear other people’s favorite paid WordPress plugins.

A couple essential ones for me are Advanced Custom Fields Pro and Admin Columns Pro.

Do you know what makes you feel old? When you read "WP" and think not of WordPress (which would now apparently be accepted as an adult in even the most conservative countries), but of WordPerfect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect - which is now at "midlife crisis" age).

Wordpress is the SMS of the Internet. There are hundreds of alternatives that came and went.

1. Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible.

Yeah. Like, for example, forcing users to install the "Classic Editor" plugin to use, well, a normal editor that is more than sufficient for a blog.

What I find remarkable is that multiple people can say 'I am a Wordpress Developer' and it will translate into very different experiences and skillsets.

For some it means clicking around installing theme, plugins then writing the content of pages through the Wordpress admin.

For others it means old school php code to customize Wordpress behaviour with PHP template to write the HTML. This is called classic theme.

For yet other people it means writing JS+React with docker, CI/CD,... This is the new block theme.

<< Static websites are fine, but dynamic ones are better.>>

Nah

WordPress is special - though I don't work with it anymore, I have enjoyed seeing newer developers solve problems with it

No matter how long it has been, on the one hand, WordPress can be seen as a victim of its success, as widespread adoption has led to various challenges such as security vulnerabilities and performance issues after maintining clients' website for the past 3 years. There are remaining security that is essentials and yet not many website does it correctly.

I like Wordpress and it’s the CMS of choice for almost every situation, but Gutenberg has been out for a long time and it’s still far from good enough. Both as an enduser and as a developer.

I'm getting old. I really thought for a moment that the title was about Word Perfect 2.1.

Dann I miss the underwater screen.

Kudos, WordPress.

I remember a time when WordPress was "easy". Nowadays starting from a clean install and customizing the appearance and modules has actually become quite difficult. Even the usage workflow feels bloated.

These days I prefer Dotclear as a blog engine. It also has grown in complexity over the years, but not quite as much and still feels like nothing is getting on your way.

This is from the point of view of someone knowing how to program and the languages involved (PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS, etc.) but who's not a professional web developer and even less a professional WordPress-based developer (since this is now actually a thing).

WordPress is the biggest bowl of spaghetti code in production! 21 years of carbicide!

In a vertical where the barrier to entry is not high, being first to market with something simple that people can extend can create a decent-sized moat.

The downside is that much of the code in WP core is effectively un-modernizable, given how much depends on things working a certain way. Key classes and functions haven’t been meaningfully updated in over a decade.

21! At this point WP is “boring technology” which makes it a great choice for many sites. It still does much that's hard to get anywhere else:

- The core update process. It's long been one-click. Almost no other CMS or self-hosted framework offers as smooth an update process. (With Laravel, for example, I end up paying for Laravel Shift and even then it requires manual intervention that would be hard for a non-dev to handle.) For WP, services now exist to do automated updates with health checks and rollbacks to counter potential plugin incompatibility[1].

- The plugin ecosystem. WP went from "democratizing publishing" to "democratizing user-owned sites and businesses". From learning management systems to stores to paid newsletters, it's pretty cool what people with no programming experience can spin up.

Things I'd love to see for WP in the next 21 years (that we'll probably get sooner if enough people contribute):

- Built-in multilingual support. The web is global but WP isn't really, yet, except via third-party plugins. It's on the roadmap[2] but it's been a long time coming.

- Improved education around Full Site Editing (FSE) and the new editor. The tools are getting good now, but there's still an education gap. Lots of people are helping to close this, though. Jamie Marsland's YouTube videos do a great job of showing what's possible with FSE, for example. [3]

- Background batch processing/queues. These are only available via third-party solutions (and bundled with things like WooCommerce), but should probably be built into core.

- SQLite support. Already pretty good but not officially supported in core yet.

- Built-in site migrations. Also on the roadmap.[4]

- Enhanced Playground tech. Distributing WP as a single binary for dependency-free local development (i.e. without Node.js) feels achievable and worthwhile.

- Version control. It's too hard to store a WP site's state in a git repo and keep that synced with production and staging environments, especially when those with admin access can install and upgrade plugins independently of the repo.

[1] Like Automattic's own scheduled updater on WP.com (https://wordpress.com/blog/2024/05/20/scheduled-plugin-updat...) and WP Engine's Smart Plugin Manager (https://wpengine.com/smart-plugin-manager/).

[2] Current state of multilingual sites in WP: https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/word...

[3] I like Jamie's videos showing how to recreate famous layouts with FSE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrdXCSIP578

[4] Site Transfer Protocol: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/60375

I checked it out around the same time Mark Pilgrim moved to it. Movable Type came and went but to their credit they tried a GPL version but sadly OpenMelody never caught on.

My first computer software related job was creating Wordpress powered web sites from photoshop documents. Thank you to the creators for making that possible!

WP is the perfect tool for 95% of the job with the last 5% of tweaking being incredibly frustrating. I've used it extensively and it's longevity is a testament to its usefulness may it be around for another 21yrs.

Congrats Matt! WordPress enabled lots of people to push their own boundaries in the internet. Looking forward to celebrate the next 21!

I prefer something like Django to build more complex websites against for clients, or just pure PHP for blog style stuff for myself. WP level sites wouldn’t hire me as two days of my work is as expensive as years of WP hosting.

But I admire the way the web was democratized with these CMS’es.

I was on the team that built news.com.au, which, along with the other news sites we set up in a multi tenant WordPress setup, was at the time the largest commerical WordPress site in the world, getting something like 500 million monthly page views. We made extensive use of caching to say the least.

> "Almost every site would be improved by having a great blog."

Unfortunately, WordPress seems to move further and further from this every year. I've used WordPress from near the start, and the editor is so top-heavy now that I get anxiety opening it. Switching to Ghost (with a nice little $4/month managed host[0,1]) was a breath of fresh air.

It doesn't do all the things WordPress does, but it does the things it does do better. Especially newsletters and pay gating.

[0] Referral link: https://magicpages.co?aff=9fLJierQBpnV

[1] Non-referral link: https://magicpages.co

Haven't used it a lot in the last decade, but WordPress was great for quickly setting up a basic website that needs a nice beginner friendly CMS.

Just make sure you stick to the base theme with a custom child theme and only use a select few plugins (like custom fields and contact form), that don't stab you in the back or begin to fight with each other later on.

I just still don't understand how Gutenberg is an improvement. It's so clunky and confusing to get even the most basic things done with it.