The issue is that if you’re developing like this on WP you don’t gain much from it except the ability to use a select few plugins and an admin UI. At this point why not use a solid PHP framework like Laravel?

> The issue is that if you’re developing like this on WP you don’t gain much from it except the ability to use a select few plugins and an admin UI. At this point why not use a solid PHP framework like Laravel?

Agreed, if you have a dedicated engineering team, but most non-tech companies that need basic websites don't...so in that context, Wordpress's admin UI is a big gain. It's familiar to users and provides media management functionality out of the box. The vast majority of CMSs have terrible/non-intuitive admin UIs and limited functionality. Leaving aside Gutenberg and the rest of the garbage pile that is Wordpress, the admin is the primary selling point of Wordpress IMO.

I can tell you that new users like Gutenberg. It is us, the old shortcode style users, that have/had a problem with it. It took me some time to switch to it but I must say that I like it now.

Things like copy/paste from Google docs with keeping all of relevant the styles and links works. And I guess that a bunch of users is doing that - using WP as a platform for distribution of content.

It's not just shortcode using admins who don't want to use Gutenberg. There are many people who have used any one of various visual composers for years. They generally don't have the time or inclination to learn a new workflow that doesn't support what they already do.

Having a classic editor plugin has nothing to do with characterizing people as crufty throwbacks who can't learn new things. Many people are in the business of their business and don't care to learn the next new-greatest-software every few months.

Yes, I get it. I've used Elementor, DIVI, Beaver Builder, WPBakery , ... And I always hated when I had to switch to a new builder for some new project.

Seconding this, end users do seem to like how much they can do themselves with it

Especially when you add custom blocks specific to their site needs

I was on the other side of the table, I was working for a company that was developing WP plugins bunt I'm not a developer. During my years there I've meet a lot of developers. I've seen different approaches. The most surprising thing to me was headless WP. I didn't get why do they even want WP.

Take a look at WooCommerce. I guess that it is much easier to do some of the custom code than to reinvent a wheel. Not to mention learning users on how to do something in a totally different environment.

Headless WooCommerce is actually pretty cool - you get free admin UI for managing the shop, and can build whatever frontend you like without the constraints of WordPress. Seems like a no-brainer for anyone who can do a bit of frontend development.

Only if you don't want/need to tap in to any plugin ecosystem. WooCommerce is the worst in this regard as basically everything is bolted on using actions/filters which only work in the traditional theme route.

I can answer this: because people do not want to pay for a developer, they want to pay for a designer. (It is exceedingly rare to find both in a single person.)

The designer can, within the structure and strictures of Wordpress, build a site with all the whizzy things the client wants, and they can charge $X for it. A developer can do all of that as well, but they will probably need a designer as well (see above parenthetical), and it will cost $X * 2.

The counter to that is, "well, just build a good templating system and tweak that for other clients, and you're good." Which is true, and that's why there are lone PHP developers out there who make a decent living with a stable of clients.

One of the worst aspects of Wordpress is dealing with the infuriating and opaque reasons why a particular site is slow. A relatively simple site can be maddeningly slow for any number of reasons, and finding them is like searching for a contact lens in a full bathtub.

Cause and effect. Pay bad, get bad.

If performance is a real business concern (and when is it not?), hire developers, not designers.

Hire developers, not WordPress developers. Because the latter will push WP onto a project where clearly the downsides, like performance, outweigh the benefits. But the latter may pick WP when it is a good fit.

I was with you until the end there. Tools for performance monitoring exist. Query Monitor is a great starting place for a free plugin. Lighthouse will tell you if you have a million blocking requests. New Relic is offered by any web host worth a damn and WP plays very nicely with it.

Fair enough, but you just listed three different tools, and you may have to go through all of them to find what's going on, and come out the other end just as lost.

I mean, I get it. I've written some stuff that screws the pooch performance-wise, and the solution isn't immediately clear. But with WP, and with enough installed plug-ins, the reason for the slowness may simply be "in order to work with WP, there is a lot of back-and-forth with the DB amongst all these plug-ins," and there ultimately isn't anything you can do about it.

WP is amazing that it does so much and works as well as it does, but let's not pretend it's not a bit of a faff sometimes.

> It is kind of a universal tool: you can make simple web sites, you can use it to build complex systems. It is always better if you have developers that know what they are doing.

Here's a question: suppose that you want to use WordPress as a starting point for a CRUD app with some basic permission controls, the ability to dynamically add content and maybe even write your own search logic which respects those permissions.

Example:

  1. Upon opening your site, you'll be presented with a list of Foos
  2. Each Foo will have a description, a configurable amount of maximum Bars, and a summary of how many Bar instances have already been added, as well a location on a map below the list (a pin, think Leaflet.js)
  3. Upon logging in to the site, you'll be able to open each Foo and see all of the Bars under it
  4. In this list you can click on a Bar to open its view, which shows all of the data added it: typical stuff like text, numbers, dates, times etc.
  5. With the appropriate permissions, you can either edit the Foos/Bars that you have access to, or edit all of them as an admin. As a user, you can only view them.

(just an example that i made up, vaguely like a CRUD that i created in PHP with one of the regular web development frameworks)

How would you go about that? Are there any resources that you would recommend?

For example, if one were to use Slim, they'd look at their documentation: https://www.slimframework.com/docs/v3/

Similarly, Laravel has pretty decent documentation for developers: https://laravel.com/docs/8.x

Whereas with WordPress, i don't think that there is such an informative, guided resource for implementing things like that: https://wordpress.org/support/

A lot of it seems to focus on how to maintain installs of WordPress or how to work with its built in concepts (like pages/posts/etc.), but there's nothing along the lines: "Here's how you're supported to mess around with its internals in an idiomatic way and introduce custom views, validations, persist the data in the DB and add whatever you need to cover what constitutes a business process". Maybe i haven't dug inside of it enough.

Are you just supposed to hack things together with a custom theme or custom widgets, custom post types and storing most of the information into custom fields that are attached to the post? Why does the documentation have such a lack of PHP in it, then? Is there a separate set of developer docs somewhere?

Actually, i wonder if there's some super lightweight boilerplate theme, that attempts to do almost no styling and has very basic layouts, to be used as a boilerplace, e.g. what the likes of Skeleton are for CSS: http://getskeleton.com/

This actually seems like a pretty bad use case for WordPress, TBH. To be fair to WordPress, you can set up custom tables and permissions to do this, but you will be writing a lot of code to render overviews, validate forms, and so on. A lot of WordPress's admin UI isn't reusable in a way that works for a CRUD app, or it's only reusable in one specific way (e.g. the default overview you get if you ask for it in your custom post type definition).

Slim and Laravel are both proper application frameworks specifically designed for your use case. That's why they properly document all of the CRUD use cases. However, they don't do CMS stuff at all.

If you absolutely need a working CRUD app to live inside of a CMS, then your best bet would actually be a Drupal module with a custom entity type. However, that requires you to actually know the ins and outs of Drupal's Entity and Field APIs, which are rather overengineered[0]. On the other hand, if you do manage to figure all that out, permissions are relatively easy to hook up, forms are just filling out an array, and you get Views support basically for free.

[0] In Drupal's defense, they're a CMS, so they need to support use cases like letting users define custom node types and custom fields on those types. This makes the interface for interacting with Entities way more complicated than an ordinary CRUD app needs.

> This actually seems like a pretty bad use case for WordPress, TBH. To be fair to WordPress, you can set up custom tables and permissions to do this, but you will be writing a lot of code to render overviews, validate forms, and so on.

This was also a sneaking suspicion of mine after diving into some plugins and seeing how they work, e.g. things that definitely aren't pages/posts beings stored in those tables in the database regardless, hinting that maybe the base functionality needs to be stretched out a bit for custom use cases.

I don't think you'd want to build a crud application in wordpress. Wordpress probably won't help you there much. You could probably turn it into a "plugin" but even then you'd be writing a lot of your own code.

We're working on switching to wordpress for the volunteer organization I work at. Right now all the "information/kinda static" content is on wordpress with pages and posts. Its a win, anyone with permission can edit. Our custom application isn't there and has its own separate database and code. We're thinking of moving the whole thing into a sort of plugin, but we're very symphony based.. Which we like

> Right now all the "information/kinda static" content is on wordpress with pages and posts. Its a win, anyone with permission can edit. Our custom application isn't there and has its own separate database and code.

This is a nice approach - getting to leverage WordPress for the typical use case at which it is good, using something bespoke for the more advanced use cases. I've actually done something a bit similar in the past (the particular app i made used Lumen which is essentially stripped down Laravel, but the concept was close enough).

It's just that many made WordPress seem like a pretty much universal tool and while i've seen some pretty advanced things be done with plugins, i personally didn't quite feel like it's well suited for certain tasks where you'd typically reach for a general purpose web framework instead.

https://developer.wordpress.org/ has everything you're looking for. Is it as organized as Laravel's docs? No. Not even close. But most of the information is there.

The PHP side of WordPress has been very stable for over 5 years at this point. All the new stuff is happening in JS unfortunately...

Thanks! This does indeed seem more like what i was looking for, couldn't for the life of me find it in their main navigation menu on the site.

Usually the designer route in WP is to watch a tutorial that shows you worthwhile plugins and how to use them effectively. Things like Elementor, TablePress and WordFence changed my life and made plenty of clients happy, while my developer knowledge was still (and still is, really) in its infancy.