
Pain Points of Web Development with WordPress - prostoalex
https://medium.com/young-coder/the-pain-points-of-web-development-with-wordpress-9bbaf5393202
======
jawngee
This article is mostly nonsense.

I've found there are various gradations of WordPress developer and the "pro"
guys are a very competent and very pragmatic bunch.

\- Most "pro" guys limit the number of plugins they use.

\- They use ansible or similar for provisioning and deployment.

\- They use sane theme frameworks like sage, timber or stem.

\- They know how to do caching without using clunky caching plugins

\- They try to adhere to 12-factor where possible

\- They do their own devops

I mainly consider myself an iOS/Cocoa developer but I do my fair share of web
development including WordPress. I even sell a pretty technical WordPress
plugin ([https://mediacloud.press](https://mediacloud.press)). I don't
recommend or choose WordPress because it's a great platform, but because it
can be a solid pragmatic choice considering all things like time and budget
and client experience.

But for the average joe, it sure provides plenty of ways to shoot yourself in
the face. That said, what other options exist for them if Wix isn't enough?

~~~
ignoramous
The article might sound non-sense (to you, a power-user?), but most people do
require a simple to setup and use software, too. That's how usually things
are. Photoshop was great, but then came along Sketch and Figma. Lotus was
great, then came along Word and Docs; but there's market for plain-text
editors like notepad++ / cot-editor, too.

The other day I saw a ms-excel to webpage builder shared on news.yc voted to
the front-page, there's also a google-sheets to app builder that did YC last
year... I wonder if there's a market for notepad / word / docs to webpages,
too? This article makes it seem like there might be one.

~~~
WhiteOwlLion
If GitHub Wiki could get image pasting like issues, or GitLab Wiki could make
it your own domain name, something simple like the wiki could be really useful
for non-techy crowd that wants a simple web presence where they can
insert/update/delete content.

~~~
ignoramous
Posterous was genuis: Blog posts over emails. Its primary competition, tumblr,
grew big with super easy sharing mechanics. Notion.so now with its Swiss army
knife of products, esp with wiki-like semantics, has taken off as not only an
Evernote alternative but for documentation, as well. And there's of course,
Netlify that turns GitHub repos to websites; plus tilda.cc and the like are
growing, too. This area (low-code websites) is ripe with budding upstarts.

I personally use [https://1mb.site](https://1mb.site) for simple pages, but it
still isn't easy to use.

------
earthboundkid
Issue 3 (all changes are live) is the core proposition of WP. If you're non-
technical, it's great: you click some buttons in a GUI and your website
changes. If you're technical, it's hell. Trying to develop without git is like
write a novel without the backspace key.

~~~
4mpm3
They do have change tracking and scheduled posting (essentially staging) for
_content_ , though. But if you're actually building the site, they assume you
either don't care or are going to manage the process is some other way of your
own devising.

~~~
earthboundkid
"They assume" is probably too much credit IMO. It was the mid-2000s, no one
knew what they were doing, least of all the WP core team (the security holes
show that), so they made a product with a design that no longer make sense,
but it's hard to evolve away from.

------
badrequest
> For example, imagine you build the plainest possible website, with static
> content. Do you want WordPress to run PHP on the web server every time
> someone visits a page? Of course not. But unless you install a caching
> plugin, that’s the situation you’re in.

Or, and maybe I'm being crazy here: don't use Wordpress if all you need is a
static site?

~~~
tomcooks
Cue in Concerned Client #382716: "but then how do we update the website
independently"

~~~
earthboundkid
NetlifyCMS :-)

~~~
tomcooks
Needs server side is, most Concerned Clients have a cpanel shitsite with PHP
and mysql

------
amiga-workbench
The content migration situation between a development environment, staging and
production is just silly.

I've written database diffing and bulk replace tools just to make this simpler
and I still have ways to go before it becomes anywhere near sane.

I honestly think WordPress has cognitohazardous effects on developers, after
enough exposure you start normalising the most insane development practises.

------
onion2k
WordPress is ace if you stick to what WordPress does well. As soon as you
start trying to push it to be something else (ecommerce, surveys, complex
custom data stuff) things get hard to manage quickly.

~~~
josefresco
Ecommerce is very mature and stable thanks to WooCommerce, which is now owned
by Automattic. Granted, most implementations include customizations that make
maintenance and bug fixing a headache, but that isn't the fault of WP or WC,
it's the fault of the developers who hack away without documentation or regard
for maintainability.

~~~
badrequest
WooCommerce significantly slows down Wordpress such that I have a hard time
describing it as mature or stable. Take, for instance, the latest Kinsta
benchmarks which show a plain Wordpress installation running PHP 7.3 going
from ~250 RPS [1] to under 70 [2] after installing the latest WooCommerce.

[1]: [https://kinsta.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/12/wordpress-5.0-...](https://kinsta.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/12/wordpress-5.0-php-benchmarks-v2.png) [2]:
[https://kinsta.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/12/wordpress-5.0-...](https://kinsta.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/12/wordpress-5.0-woocommerce-php-benchmarks.png)

~~~
josefresco
The more nightmare WP/WC implementations I have to deal with the further it
pushes me to recommend something like Shopify. Only if the client needs
extensive customizations do I recommend WP/WC, and only if they agree to
regular maintenance.

Falling 2, or even 1 release behind makes maintenance a nightmare.

I also explain to people that even though WP and WC are free, and very easy to
install/setup, you're essentially running your own ecommerce software
platform, and are on the hook for maintenance and any problems
(security/scaling etc.) whereas hosted platforms like Shopify take a lot of
that off your plate.

~~~
badrequest
I worked for a Wordpress host I won't name, and I can tell you that 99% of our
installs that had WooCommerce installed also had zero products for sale. The
install base is huge, but the number of people meaningfully using the software
is a small minority of that huge value.

------
pavel_lishin
We had a Wordpress site at work, and ended up working around the staging issue
by paying Pantheon for hosting. You can actually use git to manage code
changes, and propagate changes to an intermediate staging environment before
pushing to production; they also offer pretty simple tools to copy the
database into staging from production as well.

All in all, it downgraded the Wordpress development experience from a hell to
a heck. It was _still_ unpleasant, and we _still_ had a lot of pain points,
but it did solve problem #3. (Although, I do have some other issues with
Pantheon as well, but they're largely orthogonal to Wordpress proper.)

------
cuu508
> 2\. The expanded attack surface

I'm a fan and a customer of
[https://www.hardypress.com/](https://www.hardypress.com/) –– they run
Wordpress in a sandboxed environment, and have a "publish" function that
exports a static site.

Of course that limits what you can build – for example, you would need to use
3rd party services for blog comments and for contact forms – but for many use
cases that's OK.

There is also the "Simply Static" Wordpress plugin that can export a static
site.

~~~
petra
Hardypress looks very interesting.

How fast is the exporting , for a big site(thousands of pages)?

~~~
cuu508
I don't know – I've only used it with small sites, a few dozen of pages or so.
For those the export (from pushing the button to seeing the changes live,
served by CDN) takes 30-60 seconds.

------
CM30
This article seems to be more WordPress install/customisation pain points
rather than development ones. For example, while plugin conflicts are
definitely a thing, they're usually not that big of a deal for longtime
WordPress developers, since they'll custom code as much as they can and stick
with tried and tested plugins for the rest. So they generally won't have to
worry about multiple plugins doing the same thing.

Nor will the attack surface issue to be as much of an issue for similar
reasons.

Similarly, most longtime devs will code their own WordPress themes for every
project (or use a framework they developed themselves), and have things like
local versions of sites as everyday procedure.

This isn't a large company and WordPress guru thing. It's an 'anyone who's
worked with WordPress on a more technical level for more than a year or so'
thing. Web development and marketing agencies do this, freelancers do this,
startups do this and individuals running their own sites often do this too.

Hell, it's what I do for all my own projects.

So yeah, it's not really about pain points developing with WordPress. It's
about pain points from people installing WordPress + themes and plugins who
aren't skilled at developing for the system yet, or who are mostly non
technical and relying on premade resources.

------
josefresco
Caching and "staging" problems are solved with proper "managed" hosting.
Genesis is a great framework but often times I fund under-qualified web people
use it only because they read a "best practices" article, and have no idea how
to properly use, or more importantly maintain it. For us (who inherit these
sites) it's just another dependency.

------
flywithdolp
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20998288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20998288)

Someone submitted article about Wordpress alternatives like an hour ago

For me the only issue with Wordpress is the security problems

Using wordfence atm

~~~
josefresco
Security and performance is why we moved our WordPress clients to WPEngine
about 5 years ago. If you can't move web hosts, Wordfence, WP Cerber and of
course Sucuri make sense.

~~~
petra
I work in a small business , and we have a lot of security issues with
wordpress.

So I'm looking for a solution.

Did WPEngine solved all of your security issues ?

What kind of expertise does it require , how does the process of using it
looks ?

~~~
winternett
Drupal has worked for me for many years, the modules are usually all free to
use and to modify... There are very specific ways of doing things to ensure
updates can happen without flaws, it has quite a learning curve, but the
security benefits outweigh all of that.

Drupal's abstraction layer is what keeps it secure. You also can restrict
permissions granularity, and it's core functionality does most of what you
need to create a simple site.

Administration menus don't change with themes chosen (unless you specify it
to). If you have a high traffic site, you can simply use cloud flare, or
system caching, or pay for higher tier services like Akamai.

I'm not an evangelist for Drupal though, it's not meant to fit every case, so
I'll just leave it at that.

------
brightball
I wonder if the author has tried TypeRocket? The WP devs I know who use it
tell me that it improves things so much it should just be the default.

[https://typerocket.com/](https://typerocket.com/)

~~~
kevindees
WordPress is in a weird place right now as the PHP community has matured into
MVC+ for some time now... WordPress core... not so much. Tools like TypeRocket
are a must-have to seasoned WP devs.

But, if something like TypeRocket was added into WP core, I believe, the
plugin ecosystem of WP would greatly improve moving forward.

These frameworks not only add MVC into WP but they also provide a common
interface to create plugins. These common interfaces can be a simple as input
fields with model binding but also extends to interactive HTML tables with
model binding and OOP and autoloading and dependency injection and IOC and so
much more.

I get that WP is trying to move toward JS and Guten-Blocks at the moment but
the neglect of MVC and adding a common interface causes me to wonder what WP
is really trying to do.

It seems like an easy win to add something like TypeRocket to WP core. And,
the benefits: a proper layer of security built into forms, unified design
athstetic in the WP admin, plugin interoperability, huge reduction in code
bloat and plugin hell, and the list continues.

