Comment by carlosjobim

7 months ago

There's a lot of essential functionality missing from WordPress, meaning you have to install plugins. Depending on what you need to do.

But it's such a bad platform that there really isn't any reason for anybody to use WordPress for anything. No matter your use case, there will be a better alternative to WordPress.

54 comments

carlosjobim

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aaronbaugher  7 months ago

Can you recommend an alternative for a non-technical organization, where there's someone who needs to be able to edit pages and upload documents on a regular basis, so they need as user-friendly an interface as possible for that? Especially when they don't have a budget for it, and you're helping them out as a favor? It's so easy to spin up Wordpress for them, but I'm not a fan either.

I've tried Drupal in the past for such situations, but it was too complicated for them. That was years ago, so maybe it's better now.

  • ufmace  7 months ago

    I find it very telling that there's no 2 responses to this post recommending the same thing. Confirms my belief that there is no real alternative to Wordpress for a free and open-source CMS that is straightforward to install and usable to build and edit pages by non-tech-experts.

    • eru  7 months ago

      Perhaps people who wanted to recommend the same thing as was already written, just upvoted instead of writing their own comment?

  • carlosjobim  7 months ago

    Yes I can. There's an excellent and stable solution called SurrealCMS, made by an indie developer. You connect it by FTP to any traditional web design (HTML+CSS+JS), and the users get a WYSIWYG editor where the published output looks exactly as it looked when editing. It's dirt cheap at $9 per month.

    Edit: I actually feel a bit sorry for the SurrealCMS developer. He has a fantastic product that should be an industry standard, but it's fairly unknown.

  • donnachangstein  7 months ago

    > Can you recommend an alternative for a non-technical organization, where there's someone who needs to be able to edit pages and upload documents on a regular basis, so they need as user-friendly an interface as possible for that

    25 years ago we used Microsoft Frontpage for that, with the web root mapped to a file share that the non-technical secretary could write to and edit it as if it were a word processor.

    Somehow I feel we have regressed from that simplicity, with nothing but hand waving to make up for it. This method was declared "obsolete" and ... Wordpress kludges took its place as somehow "better". Someone prove me wrong.

  • djxfade  7 months ago

    Statamic https://statamic.com/

    • chilldsgn  7 months ago

      YES! I have switched to it for professional and personal CMS work and it's great. Incredibly flexible and simplistic in my opinion. I use it both as headful and headless.

    • 1oooqooq  7 months ago

      weird "license" on that project. pretty much blocks any self host usage besides a personal blog.

      And only hosted option for the copyrighted code starts at 300/y

      these don't cover any use case people use WordPress for.

      2 replies →

  • blipvert  7 months ago

    We have a (internally accessible only) WP instance where the content is exported using a plugin as a ZIP file and then deployed to NGINX servers with a bit of scripting/Ansible.

    Could be automated better (drop ZIP to a share somewhere where it gets processed and deployed) but best of both worlds.

  • bluocms  7 months ago

    We’re developing https://bluocms.com/

    - very hard to hack because we pre render all assets to a Cloudflare kv store

    - public website and CMS editor are on different domains

    Basically very hard to hack. Also as a bonus is much more reliable as it will only go down when Cloudflare does.

  • willyt  7 months ago

    Static site with Jekyll?

    • socalgal2  7 months ago

      Jekyll and other static site generators do not repo Wordpress any more than notepad repos MSWord

      In one, multiple users can login, edit WYSIWYG, preview, add images, etc, all from one UI. You can access it from any browser including smart phones and tablets.

      In the other, you get to instruct users on git, how to deal with merge conflicts, code review (two people can't easily work on a post like they can in wordpress), previews require a manual build, you need a local checkout and local build installation to do the build. There no WYSIWYG, adding images is a manual process of copying a file, figuring out the URL, etc... No smartphone/tablet support. etc....

      I switched by blog from wordpress install to a static site geneator because I got tired of having to keep it up to date but my posting dropped because of friction of posting went way up. I could no longer post from a phone. I couldn't easily add images. I had to build to preview. And had to submit via git commits and pushes. All of that meant what was easy became tedious.

      7 replies →

    • msh  7 months ago

      Its sad software like citydesk died and did not evolve into multiuser applications.

dmje  7 months ago

Just not true, although entirely aligned with HN users who often believe that the levels of nerdery on HN are common in the real world. WP isn’t bad, you’ve just done it wrong, and there really isn’t a better alternative for hundreds and hundreds of use cases..

  • carlosjobim  7 months ago

    My perspective is that WordPress is too complicated and too nerdy for most real world users. They are usually better off with a solution that is tailor made for their use case. And there's plenty of such solutions. Even for blogging, there are much better solutions than WordPress for non-technical users.

    • dmje  6 months ago

      Totally disagree! If you're non technical: wordpress.com - choose site name, create account, make website. Then if you want to grow you can pay for a domain, custom plugins, themes, shop. If you really want to grow then you can bring your data out and setup your own (or pay someone to setup) a wordpress.org instance. Thousands of options for hosting, themes, whatever.

      And: compared to the other builders like Wix, Squarespace etc, you're not locked in. If you make a thing on wordpress.com or wordpress.org and want to escape, you just export your stuff in a common XML format. You get none of that with the commercial options.

      So, yeh, however much HN likes to hate on it, it's still the best platform of choice for non-technicals to get stuff on the web.

wincy  7 months ago

I do custom web dev so am way out of the website hosting game. What are good frameworks now if I want to say, light touch help someone who is slightly technical set up a website? Not full react SPA with an API.

  • carlosjobim  7 months ago

    By the sound of your question I will guess you want to make a website for a small or medium sized organization? jQuery is probably the only "framework" you should need.

    If they are selling anything on their website, it's probably going to be through a cloud hosted third party service and then it's just an embedded iframe on their website.

    If you're making an entire web shop for a very large enterprise or something of similar magnitude, then you have to ask somebody else than me.

hombre_fatal  7 months ago

You can use WordPress as a static site generator: https://simplystatic.com/

Then WordPress is just your private CMS/UI for making changes, and it generates static files that are uploaded to a webhost like CloudFlare Pages, GitHub Pages, etc.

  • sureIy  7 months ago

    It has been a long time since I tried that, but it was never as simple as they claimed it to be.

    Now that plugin became a service, at which point you might just use a WP host and let them do their thing.