Data from Google Trends noted search requests around the website builder boomed in October 2024, especially on October 8, where it reached a peak score of 100.
The spike in interest signals a shift in user behavior, indicating an active search for options which align more closely with user expectations around performance, control, and transparency.
No one’s going to remember this in a year. Remember when Unity supposedly torched their business? They’re doing fine.
I’ve been giving static site generators a go, specifically Hugo. Webdevs have always treated static sites as unserious, but there’s plenty of sites out there where it’d be ideal. An awful lot of those sites are currently on WordPress.
Does your local mechanics shop need a dynamic site? No. Local restaurant that points you to an external site for online ordering? No. Little gift shop selling locally produced goods? If they don’t intend to sell online, then no. A manufacturer with product pages that have a “where to buy” button that sends you to their sales partner in your country? Nope.
How many CPU cycles are wasted on these sites that could be nothing more than reading a file and streaming it back to the client?
This is a very good point. The other issue is security. The little mechanic shop that has no dynamic content, technically should be static pages, so when it’s left alone and not updated for 3 years it doesn’t get hacked by some WordPress vulnerability.
it is not about wp engine. wordpress has just gotten really shit. gutenberg forced onto users eventhough it is the worst rated plugin in history. connect to wordpress,woocommerce,elementor,yoast so they also have a store to sell you shit with a subscripton. woocommerce pdf slip plugin…4$/month on the woostore…
enshittification has won this game.
wordpress has just gotten really shit. gutenberg forced onto users eventhough it is the worst rated plugin in history
meh I make entire sites with gutenberg, nothing was forced on me cuz I could have used (yuk) elementor… I prefer not to
eventhough
You can leave the space in. It’s okay.
Is there a better alternative though?
I was pretty disappointed at the options for a FOSS CMS when I last looked a year or so ago. Ghost looked good but is held back by the lack of a genuine plugin system.
I moved to a static site generator, Hugo in this case, because I felt that WordPress was too much for a simple website with some articles.
Drupal has been the main competitor for decades, but the biggest difference is that it’s not blog-style with a timeline of posts, it’s nodes and categories.
Just learn HTML?
/s
If I were building a larger site, I’d probably use Drupal.
It’s a bit of a departure from the “blogware” mindset though. You’re not managing “posts” and “static pages”. You’re managing stuff. …Which can manifest itself as pages or posts. Different kinds of content, different kinds of fields. Blogware gets hacky if you are posting anything but pages and posts, but in Drupal, every type of content is equally tweakable.
There’s a fork of Wordpress which still has the old editor, which looks fine to me. I don’t know anything about the people behind it though, and haven’t yet tried it myself.
https://www.classicpress.net/
It’s pretty solid.
WordPress itself isn’t a problem. Leach away my FOSS fans. Heck, customization up the wazoo. For a developer, it’s really really easy to make it your own. A competent developer can be taught WordPress CMS and understand what’s under the hood within a few weeks.
Contributing back to WordPress? Getting harder and harder with Matt being the biggest barrier.
It’s becoming one of those scenarios like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Fuck those companies. But I’ll build apps on your platform and play by your stupid ass rules to earn a living while also giving you the finger.
bring back greymatter cowards.
(but for real, moveable type is probably the closest alternative)
Anything community produced with a tool to transfer over WP sites would do pretty well at the moment.
One of the big selling points of Wordpress has been customization, so it’s unlikely you’ll be able to directly transfer anything more than the raw post. Any plugins you were relying on will not exist.
WordPress does provide a rest API, so you can do headless WordPress. It’s essentially your content/data in JSON. From that point, you can do whatever.
The issue is you still need a CMS, or use WordPress.
The point of free software is that it doesn’t have owners and you (individually or collectively) can just create an “alternative” yourself by forking it if you disagree with anything its maintainers do.
Yet, wordpress relies on a defacto central store for plugins, where properties (along with the userbases) of private companies can be taken over by Matt Mullenweg.
That definitely sounds like a problem. I am not familiar enough with WordPress, is that store not FOSS or are the plugins not or what is going on?
The plugin was an open source, but commercial product. It was forked and its store page was taken over by wordpress.org which unilaterally controls this store. Plugin updates were redirected to the fork, so essentially all users (bar the ones on wp engine, ironically) were stolen. Also, many sites were broken overnight by this move.
It’s a jarring situation, and frankly, I think it goes beyond the CEO being an asshat (he surely is). But I think this whole story shows signs of a mental illness.
The spike in interest signals a shift in user behavior, indicating an active search for options which align more closely with user expectations around performance, control, and transparency.
Good. Maybe people still can draw conclusions from the barrage of security holes in plugins (of which anything other than a blog had way too much and shouldn’t have used a blogging engine from start).
It’s open source. The alternative, if project governance actually starts making problems for end users is that someone will fork it. Cloning the plugin/theme repository makes that a bit more hassle, but it’s entirely doable.
That’s not to say there’s no room for more CMS projects. Wordpress is a little clunky, and variety is good.
Man baby and WordPress.com CEO apparently forced this on the open-source community.
Billionaire power is corrosive to maturity; you can make everyone do what you want, so why find common ground or compromise when you can just throw a shitfit and demand that people agree that pineapple is tasty?
Just think, they could’ve spent this energy making WordPress not suck for Kubernetes deployments instead, but that’s fine, we can settle for being told what to think and feel instead.
🤡
Is this real?
If only there was some way to find out. I guess we’ll never know.
Thanks 🙏
I looked at that, and thought “ha, that is a funny and obviously fake screenshot of a headline, created to ridicule photomatt for being petty in his fight with his company’s biggest competitor”.
Then, after closing this tab I did a double take and thought: maybe it’s actually real?
And, it turns out, yeah, he really actually did that (after a court injunction required them to remove the checkbox which required users to pledge that they were “not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise”):
😂
he's not wrong, though
😂🙏🏻 I love my Pizza Hawaii 🥰
Canada’s best invention since the telephone
Sorry, i’m already partial to banana-mascarpone pizza.
Tell me more, I’m a glutton for punishment.
Afraid you have to look elsewhere, this is a sweet-salty treat. Use some mild cheese, like Sprintz.
I’m genuinely curious, can’t find many banana pizza recipes that aren’t smeared with nutella as well. I assume this is a white pizza base since you mention mascarpone? Then banana topping with a sprinkle of grated hard cheese?
White pizza base woul maybe work too (up for testing) but i just use less tomato. Cutting banana lengthwise, blotches of mascarpone over it and the rest of the pizza. Olives around, olive oil and mild grated hard cheese and pepper & salt over all.
But Nutella, wth?
Ooh, that is salty! Will give it a try next time the family isn’t around to turn up their noses at my kitchen experiments.
Yeah, Nutella… I think it was the banana+pizza search query that sent me into crêpe-adjacent dessert territory.
Yes! Finally the world can maybe move on from PHP!
Huuuurrrr duuuuurrr PHP bad duuuurrrrr
Very mature opinion rit there
PHP 7 or 8 + Laravel is fine
PHP 8 is actually really good. Think last time I was angry at PHP was pre 7.4 PHP
I don’t see why I should care. In 2001, your choices for backend webdev were basically PHP, Perl, Python, or Java. Now we have a dozen languages competing for the top spot. Elixir is becoming a personal favorite, but I don’t see why I should bother with PHP if I don’t already have a legacy platform in it.
Have they stopped using every naming convention there is (including some from other planets) in their function names?
ConventionForReal_real_v2()
Yes it has gotten much better after 8.0
Of course PHP still has some baggage but 7.x was such a breath of fresh air that it gave me hope. 8.x made me love PHP
Edit: for context to people who don’t work with php on how this has been an issue (and continues to still be: Hasn’t been updated in a long time but still awesome php shortcomings website from the creator of advent of code
Huh? PHP wasn’t the issue
It is. They need to move to a long running application base and they are not doing it.
Some weeks ago I learned about ClassicPress: https://www.classicpress.net/
Interesting, I tried the migrator plugin on my basic 2 page site and none of my plugins or theme are compatible with ClassicPress. It wants me to drop all the way back to the 2017 base theme.
Great for a new site I suppose.
I actually don’t mind Gutenberg, but I fucking hate how I have to do everything with buttons and interfaces and all the paid half baked plugins I have to either spend a week developing myself or pay 40 dollars a month just to Access it for a year in a single domain or site and have to make botched multi language multi site networks that can’t even effectively share a theme and an awful theme that I was told was good but I can’t even set a fucking sidebar so I go into the fucking theme folder and MODİFY TBE FUCKİNG THEME MFSELF FUCK J SHOULD’VE JUST USED HUGO
