Would it be wrong to hope they manage to commit some gross act of mutual destruction, and that the outcome would be that I never have to deal with Wordpress ever again?
That would be great but the reality is that client’s mindsets need to change. I tried to explain to a client that Wordpress is not a good fit for their complex web application and yet they didn’t wanna switch to anything else. People are way too worried about new tech and wanna stick with whatever they know, even if it causes massive problems.
Wordpress is not a good fit for their complex web application
Seriously. People want to shove everything into Wordpress then get cranky when you can't make Wordpress into a ecommerce store, marketing platform, personal blog, file sharing service, and NFT marketplace.
And then it gets hacked because they needed 14 SEO plugins, 2 different form plugins, and were not going to pay for managed updates because that's easy they can do it themselves.
If you're trying to turn WordPress into an application, for christs sake go use Django, Laravel, or Rails. Don't send a CMS to do an applications' job.
Shit you don't even need a CMS at this point. I moved off WordPress to Hugo and SFTP and i'm happier than a pig in shit. Shit loads fast and no external threats.
Wordpress is the Excel of CMSs. It can do just about anything, but at this point it barely manages content well.
That's a great analogy actually. You can do almost anything with it but what the vast majority of people choose to do with it is wrong.
Just like how people insist on using Excel as a database or Excel as a form.
I haven't done web work for well over a decade and recently was surprised to learn that Wordpress is still very relevant. I remember back then, seeking alternatives as we expected it to become more of a legacy thing a few years down the track, so we were on the lookout for future-proofing client sites with a better foundation. At that point it was a decade old and annoying af because it morphed into a messy way of doing websites because people misused it's original purpose. Brain had to think like a blog and then trick it into doing what you want, kind of like using tables to structure pages before CSS-P saved the day.
This year I stopped to let my clients pick the CMS. I tell them you wouldn’t ask a carpenter to make a chair, but restrict them to only use metal.
Genuine question: what is the real alternative to WP? Ghost sucks, Hugo, Jekyll has 0 client approval factor without some shitty third party thing. Wix, Squarespace is not open.
I've been pushing Squarespace for most people who come to me asking about setting up a small store or just simple business website.
Yeah, it's closed source and blah blah blah, but the end of the day, it's not about my opinions on software, it's about the most cost-effective, simple, usable option for the client who is asking me for my expertise, which is almost always not something they're going to have to keep paying me to maintain.
Like if you really really want Wordpress, I'll get you set up, and then quote you a couple thousand a year for maintenance.
Unshockprisingly, very few people think that's the right choice once they see what the keep-it-from-being-exploited cost is.
(And for anyone who thinks that's an unreasonable amount, okay cool. But maintaining a staging environment and testing updates and then pushing everything into production assuming there's no regressions you have to address takes a lot of time.)
Everytime checked someone else's WP, the only thing that came to mind each time was a Jenga block tower. Bunch of themes and plugins that do god knows what and interact together in mysterious way. Touch anything and there's a very good chance everything comes crashing down.
I personally send people to Wix, but I guess Squarespace is fine.
It's that Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns is only alive because all the things that would kill him are cancelling each other out, but in PHP form.
I tend to use Squarespace because uh, they have a marketing budget and everyone tends to already know (or at least one of the people in the meeting anyways) who they are, which makes things an easier sell.
I don't particularly think they're the best or whatever, but they at least do what they say at a price that's reasonable enough and I've yet to be burned by suggesting them, sooooo.....
Wix and Squarespace managed to be even worse options anyway.
Anyway who cares what the client thinks, they don't know anything that's why they're hiring a professional. The professional thing to do would be to convince them of the advantages of one of the listed options.
Anytime I've ever had to deal with WordPress I've always run up against the fact that it has limitations that the client doesn't understand, and then at some point you end up redesigning it custom anyway. May as well save time and start out custom.
I have off-and-on searched for alternative software for personal blogs that can be self-hosted and it doesn’t seem like there are many options anymore. The only ones I’ve seen are WriteFreely and FlatPress. Are there any other options you’re aware of?
Depends on if you need a CMS, or if you can use a static site generator.
For a CMS, I'm still a fan of Ghost and it has (mostly) not enshittified to the point it's unpleasant to use.
If you don't need the whole CMS thing, there's an awful lot of options. (And hosting them is super simplified since you can just stuff the output into a S3 bucket/Cloudflare Pages/Github Pages/a dozen other providers for basically free.)
Any suggestions for a free easy to use alternative to wp?
Wix was not free when I looked last, I cannot stand using websites that use Shopify.
I will look into some of those others.
Yeah, open source licenses don't entitle you to use trademarks.
This looks pretty bad to me.
WP Engine for WordPress.
That seems to be the commonly accepted solution if you look at other 3rd party trademark cases - situations like "RIF is fun for Reddit" coming to mind.
Like JohnEdwa said, using a trademark to refer to someone else's product is considered nominative fair use: "referencing a mark to identify the actual goods and services that the trademark holder identifies with the mark."
They're very obviously using the trademark in a manner that implies endorsement.
That is absolutely trademark infringement.
Wow Matt really looking bad on this one. This just reeks of trying to push out a major business competitor to wordpress.com and abusing control over wordpress.org to do it.
ThePrimeagen invited Matt to explain what's going on.
TL;DW Matt's claim is that he tried to get WP Engine to pay for a Trademark license (or whatever it's called - I'm recalling from watching yesterday), over several months, and they tried to legally block him in every way. Their self-claimed contributions to Wordpress were (as he tells it) that they held conferences where they promoted their own stuff only - code contributions have been minimal.
So the combination of not willing to pay for the trademark + not contributing back (not in code, not in helping the community) is Matt's reasoning for blocking them from using Wordpress' resources.
He also mentioned that he has good relations with other Wordpress hosts, so it's not like he's trying to block anyone else from hosting, but they were all willing to pay for the use of the Trademark (and/or contribute back).
This is accurate, but also, "minimal" here is 40 hours of code contributions per week compared to Automattic's near-4000. Additionally, WP Engine is the biggest Wordpress.com competitor.
The open-source side of WordPress is pretty pissed off at Matt right now. The Slack is heavily downvoting/disliking all of this.
What does WP stand for then?
I must be old - it's WordPerfect to me.
Exactly what I thought. I'd love to sit a young person today in front of that blank blue screen with the blinking cursor. Now, I have to go take my pills before bed.
WillPeoplenoticethecashgrab
Wordpress is a security hole anyway, use something else if you have to use plugins for your usecase.
Just not Drupal. Its still pretty bad.
Hopefully this spurs Automaticc to put more attention into the fediverse. With Tumblr moving to use Wordpress code that could bring all tumblr blogs to the fediverse and get more programmers and resources interested
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