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So Long WordPress
chriswiegman.comThis has been a hard post for me to write after participating in WordPress since before I even started a career in tech and, until 3 months ago, for my entire tech career. That said, it has been in the making for quite a while now and it is time that I make it official.
I’ve officially left the WordPress project after 14+ years of contributing including:
Meetup and WordCamp Speaker Meetup and WordCamp Organizer Core code contributor Plugin developer Photo contributor Over 11 years as mostly the sole moderator for the official WordPress jobs site Why leave now? It’s true that I had largely been moving away from the WordPress project since at least 2017. I think that is when I realized just how dishonest so much of the “community” around WordPress really is.
lol, a Wordpress developer. So… not a developer.
They are better off without Wordpress.
Whoever can see through WordPress’s spaghetti code must be a genius.
No, regular intelligence is all I needed. I made over a dozen plugins ( private not sold ) . I no longer have to maintain most.
One can pick up patterns, and the hooks get intuitive.
It’s not a bad framework, for the 1990s. It lacks many things, and God help anyone who wants to put a lot of data in it, or have multiple instances. It can be done , but omg.
And don’t get me started on the bad and lazy work seen in many of the popular plugins .
This is what a lot of the world depends on for day to day existence
Word press nowadays has the problem of maintaining backwards compatibility. If they would just breakdown and redo it, they could probably build a decent system while also keeping it easy to use. Sure, there are lots of alternatives at this point but they have the audience. The world would be a better place for it.
I think the value of Wordpress is its ecosystem of tens of thousand of plugins. They cannot rewrite it without breaking many of them
The other value of Wordpress is its low entry barrier for writing plugins. One does not need to code well to write a plugin, and often plugins are abandoned-ware, or close. Many of these badly written abandoned plugins are vital to thousands of sites, or more.
Broke plugins stay broken .
By definition wp must never change too much, ever
I’d say 99% of those plugins are garbage, and eliminating them would be a great opportunity to improve them. It can’t stay the same forever. The sooner it happens, the sooner it improves.
Think about all the work it will give people!
Mom’s spaghetti?
Tossing more spaghetti onto spaghetti!!
While there are quite a few agencies and solo devs that click their sites together using crap like Elementor and a bunch of no name plugins that could often be replaced by a single line of code, there are also people building building clean maintainable sites with it.
That said, I usually don’t pick it for my projects. Kirby CMS is a much more flexible alternative. For anything more complex there’s Laravel with Filament to build a nice admin panel.
Any examples? I want to know what counts as a clean WP site.
People really seemed to like this site I made a while ago and it performs well. But really any Wordpress site can be built well if with something like ACF and a custom coded theme.
I wish they had agency pricing. Buying a license for every install is a bit much.