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.

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.

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.

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

DrupalCMS is a new project that aims to radically simplify for end users https://new.drupal.org/drupal-cms

> Drupal

> new

Pretty sure Drupal has been around for like, 20 years or so. Or is this a different Drupal?

Drupal has been around for a while, but I've never heard of "Drupal CMS" as a separate product until now.

It appears Drupal CMS is a customized version of Drupal that is easier for less tech-savvy folks to get up and running. At least, that's the impression I got reading through the marketing hype that "explains" it with nothing but buzzwords.

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.

> 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.

Part of that is Frontpage needing a Windows server, and all that entails.

The other part is clients freaking out after Frontpage had a series of dangerous CVEs all in a row.

And then finally every time a part of Frontpage got popular, MS would deprecate the API and replace it with a new one.

Wordpress was in the right place at the right time.

Yeah, getting Frontpage working on a Linux/Apache system and supporting it back then wasn't exactly a treat. Good idea, maybe, but bad implementation.

I think you're mistaken. The use of WebDAV was not a requirement. Frontpage could function in "HTML editor" mode and just write to the filesystem. In that case, any WYSIWYG editor would do but FP was there and available.

A previous workplace of mine did the same with Netscape (and later, Mozilla) Composer. Users could modify content via WebDAV.

For those on macOS, RapidWeaver still exists: https://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/. (Shame that it's now subscriptionware, though – could've sworn it used to be an outright purchase per major version.)

“best viewed with Internet Explorer in 1024x768”

Statamic https://statamic.com/

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.

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.

Not sure why sibling was downvoted to oblivion, the license could be easier to find. Here it is: https://statamic.com/license

Seconded. It's absolutely phenomenal as a headful or headless CMS.

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.

Which plugin?

Good question - didn’t set it up myself, but nothing too obscure I think

I've had some luck using Decap for that. An initial dev setup, followed by almost never needing support from the PR team running it.

[0] https://decapcms.org/

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.

You need to build your own frontend, but PayloadCMS is my go-to.

Static site with Jekyll?

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.

Have you checked static site CMSes?

For example (not affiliated with them) https://www.siteleaf.com/

what are your favorite static site generators? I googled it and cloudflare article came up with Jekyll,Gatsby,Hugo,Next.js, Eleventy. But would like to avoid doing research if can be helped on pros/cons of each.

I looked recently when thinking of starting some new shared blog. My criteria was "based on tech I know". I don't know Ruby so Jekyll was out. I tried Eleventy and Hexo. I chose Hexo but then ultimately decided I wasn't going to do this new blog.

IIRC, Eleventy printed lots of out-of-date warnings when I installed it and/or the default style was broken in various ways which didn't give me much confidence.

My younger sister asked me to help her start a blog. I just pointed her to substack. Zero effort, easy for her.

I work with Ruby but I never had to use Ruby to use Jekyll. I downloaded the docker image and run it. It checks a host directory for updates and generates the HTML files. It could be written in any other language I don't know.

I don’t have much experience with other SSGs, but I’ve been using Eleventy for my personal site for a few years and I’m a big fan. It’s very simple to get started with, it’s fast to build, it’s powerful and flexible.

I build mine with GitHub Actions and host it free on Pages.

Jekyll and GitHub pages go together pretty well.

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

Wiki software is the way to go here.

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..

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.

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.

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.

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.

Does anyone actually still use jQuery?

Everything I've built in the past like 5 years has been almost entirely pure ES6 with some helpers like jsviews.

jQuery's still the third most used web framework, behind React and before NextJS. If you use jQuery to build Wordpress websites, you'd be specializing in popular web technologies in the year 2025.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-web-framew...

Sure, why not? It's lightweight and works well, and there's a lot of good solutions that you can find already made for you online.

jQuery hasn’t been necessary for many years. Vanilla JS equivalents of jQuery code are well-supported.

https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

I've seen this site linked for many years among web devs, but I just don't understand the purpose? jQuery code is much cleaner and easier to understand, and there's a great amount of solutions written for jQuery available online for almost any need you have.

The vanilla one is so much longer.

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.

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.

Yeah, true. There are other options that might be better like https://wordpress.org/plugins/staatic/.

I think a crawler that generates a static directory from your site probably the best approach since it generalizes over any site. Even better if you're able to declare all routes ahead of time.

I have better things to do with my time so I happily pay someone else to host it for me.