
A case for something, anything more simple than WordPress - cdevroe
http://colin.getbarley.com/5466/a-case-for-something-anything-more-simple
======
homosaur
I'm so weary of people pitching the solution to WordPress and then tossing a
proprietary cloud hosted thing at me. That's a complete non-starter.

All the time I hear from fellow devs "oh don't advertise you use WordPress,
it's irrelevant to clients." Tell that to my bank account and all the jobs
I've stolen from agencies who wanted to use their BS proprietary CMS.

I sell WordPress like this: when you want a rebuild in 10 years and I'm in
Thailand smoking drugs with your money pile you just gave me, you'll be able
to find someone to work on it no problem.

There's plenty to dislike about the WP codebase, but we all have to remember
that WP was made in an era when coding reasonable software in PHP was nearly
impossible. Nothing backwards-compatible can happen there that isn't going to
destroy all the millions of existing sites. It's still pretty freaking easy to
build a site with, especially when you compare it to other CMSes of that era.

Moreover, their development roadmap is actually really solid. I like where WP
is going. I unfortunately would no longer recommend it for basic blogging due
to its complexity but as a CMS, there's really not a lot of free software
options that can function on that level without extensive database programming
and security knowledge.

~~~
ZoFreX
So the advantage of Wordpress isn't anything you could find by looking at
Wordpress itself... it's the popularity and huge amount of support that
brings? Makes sense.

So the "next Wordpress" won't be able to be the next Wordpress until it's
popular. It'll have to be good for other reasons until then.

~~~
jamesbritt
Yes. People who say they are creating a Wordpress replacement need to make
clear what they understand Wordpress to be and what exactly they are
replacing.

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gmays
Here's a crazy idea: You're a developer. If it's too complex for your
customer, then simplify it. Fight the urge to build something new just because
you can. You're really the only person that cares that you built it, everyone
else just wants something that works.

I understand why you're following 37signals' simplicity model, but those
markets didn't have flexible CMS' to start with like we do. The beauty of
WordPress is that it's easy to hide and remove extraneous features. It has
everything you need and you can just remove the stuff you don't, just like the
way a sculptor chisels away the unneeded parts. It's building from a different
direction.

WordPress is a tool, not an end product, and it's been around for over 10
years.

Face it, websites are a commodity these days. What new features, processes, or
anything else exist that WordPress can't do with a few tweaks? Front-end
editing, one-click setup, drag and drop, it's all easier to add than building
from scratch.

If your goal is to create value, then think hard about what problem your
customer is trying to solve. If it requires something new, then by all means
build it! But I don't see this as one of those cases.

~~~
rocky1138
In my experience developing websites for clients, I've found the ones that ask
for simplicity up-front (or ones I assume will need simplicity) end up
requiring other more complex features down the line, making WordPress a great
choice to start with and then expand into without much rework.

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jamesbritt
I'm using Wordpress for a project because of the wealth of existing templates
and plugins. Without these Wordpress is not terribly interesting; it's not
Wordpress.

Once you drop the ecosystem there are plenty of alternative to creating static
or near-static sites.

edit: I should point out that more alternatives for creating Web content is,
on average, a Good Thing. Presenting a tool, however good, as an alternative
to Wordpress however brings a lot of assumptions that may cause people to
focus on the wrong things.

There's probably a market for a form of Wordpress that could use existing
themes but not plugins, and only allowed basic posts and pages, with perhaps a
more robust security model. E.g. prevent commenting (in order to avoid having
to accept external content) except via Disqus or something.

~~~
jsdalton
It's also very easy to extend. It may not be the prettiest code base, but I
very rarely hit a blocker where I _can 't_ do what I have set out to do.

Even if you're not the one actually extending it, the fact that it's easy to
extend means there is a wealth of plugin offerings.

~~~
jamesbritt
_It 's also very easy to extend._

True. I hadn't done any PHP coding in many years, and knew essentially nothing
about how WP worked, but Google + tenacity = useful results. Shortcodes, for
example; super cool.

There are plenty of WTF moments in PHP and Wordpress but nothing that prevents
pragmatic results.

~~~
Karunamon
Worth mentioning though, that level of easy extensibility, combined with
Wordpress' absurd popularity, makes it very easy to get into trouble. It's the
Internet Explorer of the blogging world.

Consider: [http://wpmu.org/why-you-should-never-search-for-free-
wordpre...](http://wpmu.org/why-you-should-never-search-for-free-wordpress-
themes-in-google-or-anywhere-else/)

~~~
zapt02
Your link has nothing to do with building themes or plugins though..

~~~
Karunamon
Building, no. Using, everything. A non trivial amount of plugins/themes an
average user is likely to install are major security risks.

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jinushaun
The problem with this post, and other "WordPressis too complex" posts like it,
is that WordPress did not intially start off this way. Wordprrss was
originially a simple blog. Once Barley gets enough users, people will want it
to do more and more things until it becomes yet another blog turned CMS
platform.

As for me, I use Jekyll and disqus because I'm just one guy.

~~~
cdevroe
jinushaun: We agree. Sort of our company mantra is "we have a passion for
saying no" which means, to us at least, that we think we have the ability to
say no to new features that do not fit who we think our target is. Time will
tell if we're able to do it.

That being said, all software and services as they age begin to suffer from
scope creep and feature bloat. Then it will be time again for something new.

------
jtreminio
About a year ago I moved my blog completely off of Wordpress and onto
Piecrust[0]. I realized I didn't need all the dynamic tools available in
Wordpress, because blog, and Piecrust has so far worked beautifully.

Comments were replaced with Disqus. No more opening my site to any possible
security holes, no more having to keep on top of plugin updates, no more
crying tears of shame when I snuck a peek at said plugins' source code, I can
check in my whole site into github and be done with it.

[0] [http://bolt80.com/piecrust/](http://bolt80.com/piecrust/)

~~~
Kronopath
I'm in the process of doing the same for my personal site with Jekyll.[0] It's
so much more convenient to be able to structure and style my website the way I
want without having to mess with Wordpress's PHP-based themes. And I find
writing in Markdown with optional custom HTML snippets to be much more
powerful than trying to wrestle the Wordpress browser-based editor into doing
what I want.

[0] [http://jekyllrb.com/](http://jekyllrb.com/)

------
mikeschinkel
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-
just-a-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-
blogging-platform)

~~~
frankydp
this should be released by the 15th of oct

------
ryansan
I agree that WordPress is a little convoluted for simple projects. However,
you can get great starter themes that eliminate that complexity for you from
the get-go. Like the _s starter theme or something like Bones.

I think WordPress is often the go-to platform because it's just what people
hear about -- plus, it's free. My preferred CMS for websites is
ExpressionEngine because it's flexible enough to make it what you want.
There's no "loop" that you have to deal with over and over and there aren't a
gajillion default things that you have to strip out at the outset of a
project.

The trouble is that clients are afraid to try something that isn't what their
neighbor is using. I often get, "Yah, but this is what I used in a past
project." or "A buddy of mine used WordPress and he gets 10 million hits a
day!" Getting them to pay $299 for a commercial license for EE seems like a
really steep cost when they could just get WordPress for free and it's "good
enough."

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Riley
I couldn't agree more. In fact, this is why I started building a project for
my girlfriend so she could create her own site. And now it's grown into
something powerful that I really enjoy using too.

[http://simplpost.com/blog/what-is-this-
thing/](http://simplpost.com/blog/what-is-this-thing/)

------
darkFunction
The first comment on the article is by Jason Schuller, who created a great
little open source blogging platform called Dropplets
([http://dropplets.com/](http://dropplets.com/)).

I use it myself and it's fantastic. Simple and elegant and I feel in control
of my blog now- there's no magic.

------
dkuntz2
I used WordPress for a while, but switched to a host of static site generators
about two years ago. One of the big reasons I switched was because WordPress
was so huge, and unnecessarily so.

Their big overhaul of the wp-admin section, in 2.5 I think, de-emphasized the
post writing page (something which was previously instantly accessible).
That's what started pushing me away from WordPress.

Recently I've started looking for another server-side platform. I've been
getting annoyed with the extra work involved with static site generators,
especially for a rather trivial "look what I saw" blog. I installed Anchor [1]
last night, and plan on playing with it. I'm also interested in Ghost, but it
hasn't been publicly released so far as I know.

[1]: Anchor CMS: [http://anchorcms.com](http://anchorcms.com)

~~~
egypturnash
These days there's a "\+ New" button at the top of every single page of a
Wordpress site - both the admin section, and the public section if you're
logged in - that lets you add a new post, piece of media, page, or user. Or
more; I use the Comic Easel plugin to manage my webcomic, and it lets me add a
new page that way.

That said if you want a CMS that only does the five things you need, you don't
want WP.

~~~
dkuntz2
That's exactly the conclusion I came to. Which is a shame, because there was a
point where WordPress basically did just what I wanted to, and put the
emphasis on those things. Now it's a full blown CMS, which I don't want or
need.

------
kartikkumar
> Some sites are blogs, others are small business web sites, others are photo
> galleries, others are one pagers of information, and some are pages that let
> you buy things. There shouldn't just be one tool to build all of these.

I find that above text a bit odd. Maybe I'm misinterpretting it, but why
exactly shouldn't there be one tool to build all of those websites? It might
very well be that Wordpress is not suited to build all those things, but it
doesn't follow logically that there should not be a "mastertool", no matter
what.

I understand the general sentiment of "horses for courses", but I also think
that it's important to make sure that your tools are performing well, rather
than trying to make a blanket statement about what web dev tools should and
shouldn't do in general.

------
joetech
I'm liking Ghost so far, but it's still a very early release and yet to
include some base features

------
marban
If you're into simple, hosted services, you might give
[http://www.postagon.com](http://www.postagon.com) a try.

------
lrem
Incidentally I just released my me-too static generator. It's targeted for
academics, with all the features an academic expects (hyphenation, LaTeX math
support and so on). If anyone's interested:
[https://github.com/lrem/phdoc](https://github.com/lrem/phdoc)

------
buckbova
I point complete novices to [http://www.weebly.com/](http://www.weebly.com/).

It has a gui site builder (wysiwyg) and what not, and is considerably simpler
than wordpress.

What does barley have over weebly?

Can I download barley and install on my servers like I can with wordpress? If
not, this is apples and oranges.

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dsowers
You should try out Silvrback ([https://dsowers.silvrback.com/introducing-
silvrback](https://dsowers.silvrback.com/introducing-silvrback)). It's a
hosted, markdown powered blog as clean as medium.

~~~
silverbax88
Well, I like the name.

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tlongren
I think Anchor CMS has done a nice job of filling this space. It's FAR from
complex.

------
matthewbaker
The only differentiator that I see you offering is inline editing, which can
be activated very quickly with a Wordpress plug-in.

I think you're traveling down a meat grinder of a road by choosing to spend
time on this.

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jere
Just wanted to say: you've got yourself a pretty amazing promo video for
Barley. Love the quote, song, style, everything really.

------
rocky1138
Consider Perch.

[http://grabaperch.com/](http://grabaperch.com/)

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jackmcdade
Another one: statamic.com. Flat file, live routing and caching, with a
responsive cp.

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knieveltech
It's like Wordpress has turned into Drupal and Drupal flipped the hell out and
is trying to become Sharepoint. Crazy pills.

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AsymetricCom
Perl/CGI is pretty simple..

~~~
jlgaddis
Well that brings back memories!

    
    
        use CGI;

