
WordPress is at a Crossroads - gmays
https://medium.com/@plagiarismtoday/wordpress-is-at-a-crossroads-133638714a52?mc_cid=d41bb5b19f
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sleavey
On the topic of the prevalence of freemium plugins in WordPress ecosystem: I
really detest this. Given the huge effort that has gone in to WordPress itself
- freely provided to the community - it's ridiculous for small plugins - that
in many cases just filter some function already provided as a hook in
WordPress by the core developers - would ask for money. A few years ago I set
up an online labbook for my research group using a bunch of plugins to make
WordPress behave the way I wanted. I had to search really hard for plugins
that didn't spam end users to "upgrade" to unlock arbitrarily disallowed
features, and furthermore plugins which were well written and didn't contain
silly hacks or security vulnerabilities (in the process I ended up submitting
patches to a few of them to fix obvious flaws). It was even difficult to find
plugins that use the proper settings page infrastructure, instead of adding
their own top level menu item in the admin panel and not conforming to the
WordPress core look and feel. What a mess.

Somehow discouraging freemium junk from the plugin library wouldn't be a bad
thing from my perspective. It would surely decrease the sheer volume of
plugins available, but would undoubtedly increase the quality. Perhaps this
could be achieved with some sort of rating system for the code quality,
judging based on how much the code relies on WordPress APIs, properly handling
unexpected input and errors, properly sanitizing user input, etc.

Incidentally, I am now developing a plugin to combine the behaviour of all the
plugins I previously used for the academic labbook [1] (if anyone is
interested in using it, I would like to know!). In the process I've learned a
lot about the WordPress code base, and have come to appreciate that it is on
the whole well written - it's mainly just plugin authors that produce junk,
and hope to make a quick buck off the back of the hard work of volunteers in
the process.

[1] [https://github.com/SeanDS/alp](https://github.com/SeanDS/alp)

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pxtail
When your plugin will reach - let's say 1 million users - I hope that you'll
stick to your ideas and don't spam end users to upgrade, just work for free.
Good luck :)

~~~
sleavey
I don't have a problem with large plugin projects charging money, but I have a
problem with (1) very basic plugins asking for money and (2) spammy, clickbait
tactics to upgrade; for example, asking the user to upgrade to premium after
every update, or adding extra pages to the admin sidebar with "Upgrade to
Premium", etc. etc.

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rocky1138
Good article. This problem is, of course, much larger than just WordPress; the
open libre Internet where you can just run your own instance of whatever you
need is increasingly being threatened by walled gardens of every kind because
it's more fiddly work to do it yourself.

Is it possible for a libre tool to be easier to use than one from a walled
garden? Can we make running your own Medium easier than signing up for Medium
and starting a new post?

This is the challenge.

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signal11
With tools like Github Pages, netlify, etc, and static site generators like
Jekyll, Hugo and nanoc, I’d argue - yes it’s possible.

Wordpress itself attracts criticism but for a large class of users it does
work.

Ironically imo Medium, with its “dickbar” and pop ups, is a fairly crappy
reading experience.

~~~
robjan
I don't think setting up and configuring Jamstack is within the realm of
understanding of the majority of Medium users. Most indie publishers are "non-
technical".

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sleavey
What a long winded article. It gets to the point in the last few paragraphs:
WordPress needs to add more options for free customisation, and is doing so
with Gutenberg, but some people don't like it.

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csbartus
I’m working with WordPress since 2005 both as a theme designer and plugin
developer. The experience is the same today as it was at the beginning.

And that experience is famously broken. Code mess, theme mess, customisation
mess, etc.

If WordPress powers one third of the internet, and, Automattic is such a
success story how they couldn’t create a framework in which designing and
developing can give you a little satisfaction?

Many times I left WordPress for others like Ruby on Rails, Yii, static site
generators, Contentful, etc. but I’m always returning to it. My clients need
it. They think it is a standard in CMS and the hosting is stable and
affordable.

But non-businesses, individuals are abandoning it. The promise is huge: pay a
few dollars for hosting, get a pre-installed WordPress, choose a theme from
that 5,000 free themes and you are done.

The reality is that WordPress theming is broken. None of those 5,000 free
themes can satisfy a single need in 100% percent. People realise they need an
expert to customize and make it work, and from that moment their project
either is migrated somewhere else or just bitterly abandoned.

I wonder how many of that ‘30% of total websites are powered by WordPress’ is
an abandoned site?

TLDR: WordPress lost it’s individual user base; still good for small
businesses who can afford customization; awful as experience for designers and
developers;

WordPress is not at crossroads but in chaos. Gutenberg, the only big change
since it’s inception is not well received by designers and developers. If they
flock they’ll take away with them the small businesses.

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pxtail
Your message is full of sentences which are contradiction to each other. You
are saying that WP not changed for a long time and yet at the same time you
are afraid of upcoming change, and you are power user! - this is the reason
why changes are so slow.

> The reality is that WordPress theming is broken. None of those 5,000 free
> themes can satisfy a single need in 100% percent.

It's not broken, it's just how everything works in life - unless you are
skilled or determined enough yourself you need expert for customizations, it
isn't possible to make creator which will satisfy everyone (and yet there are
abominations like Visual Composer which try to do it). Can you customize parts
of your car engine yourself?

>TLDR: WordPress lost it’s individual user base

What is used as replacement nowadays? I hope not walled gardens or solutions
like medium where your content is held in grip and they just wait to squeeze.

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m0dest
You could say a lot of the same things about SharePoint. (I was never a fan,
personally.) This seems like the natural progression of any CMS that tries to
be infinitely extensible and flexible. It becomes very difficult to evolve or
simplify your product without breaking its add-on ecosystem and your most
entrenched customers.

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gorm
Interesting article! Gutenberg itself is also on a different road than before
as you can't run it self hosted. To use it on a self hosted blog you would
need to install jetpack and use WordPress.com as the main UI, which isn't self
hosted. His point regarding commercial plugins are also to the point. There
are great plugins out there, but setting up a site with these can easily cost
over $1000 in yearly subscription fees and the free versions are often too
basic or require tweaking to add required features. Still think WordPress make
sense for organizations that can easily pay for premium plugins and support,
or hackers that know how to code and find the great free plugins.

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stephen82
What do you mean you can't run it self-hosted? I have it already locally and
work as expected.

I don't use jetpack nor I have a WordPress.com account.

