I agree about builder plugins -- they are expensive mossy lock-in.
WordPress now has a full-site editing system that lets you GUI edit the templates that are in the normal flow. It is not what I would call easy to master at the code level, but there is a global styles system and a way to use Gutenberg blocks to control layout outside the main content flow.
So we are getting towards a point where page builder plugins won't be needed for skilled shops. But IMO until there are really easy to use themes based around FSE (there may be some), small design shops are still likely to use Elementor, which is a slow, frustrating experience (slower and more frustrating than Squarespace can be)
I've "inherited" a website using Divi for all of its styling.
It's absolutely one of the worst pieces of commercial software I've ever seen. Just saving a blog post is capable of putting the entire website in an unrecoverable condition if there's even the slightest timeout in the execution of the terrifying javascript UI they wrote on top of Wordpress. The italian and french localization is genuinely abysmal, on par with some japanese games from the '90s. Responsive options are absolutely non-working, unless by responsive you mean "hide and show content on specific breakpoints". And even then, everything is absolutely brittle given that the front-end "theme" is basically an unreadable dump of jquery-era javascript.
I'm 100% sure nobody would use that if Elegant Themes (Divi authors) weren't massively spending on advertising.
There are a few deeply frustrating things, if you ask me:
All the media files are stored in a single uploads/year/month (maybe year/month/day) directory, which can mean some very big directories of file variations
There's code that cannot be fun to support anymore, like the Pluggable functions (that still let you get Wordpress to check some external login system)
There's still really not enough of a sense of a "model" anywhere.
It still (AFAIK) stores some things in the database using PHP serialization (which is unambiguously the most annoying serialization format on earth, and means that search and replace tasks must be done in PHP)
I mean... it's hard to blame them for not wanting to break stuff, and the commitment to backwards-compatibility is very nearly unprecedented.
I think WordPress is great, and I am not judging. I'm just saying, there are decisions that might have gone better with a little more foresight. But some of them are literally twenty years old and hard to change now.
Not that WP is alone in that -- FreeCAD is just getting through its "fix a two decade legacy problem" as we speak!
Matt is right about zip uploads. I mean it's better than explaining to random users how to upload nested hierarchies over FTP, but still.
Small beer when it's also built in very large part on stolen land, eh? If giving stuff back is important (and I think it is), I'd love it if the knee-jerk thinkers of HN would start by looking at where they live and which tribe it was stolen from by force and murder.
> If giving stuff back is important (and I think it is), I'd love it if the knee-jerk thinkers of HN would start by looking at where they live and which tribe it was stolen from by force and murder.
Okay. Where do you live, who was it stolen from, and what are you going to do about it?
In the south east of England. It's not really clear it was stolen by anyone. The only people in even slightly recorded history to really steal it buggered off a few hundred years later because they missed olive oil and hated the climate. Everyone else pretty much just turned up to run it better, like slightly violent management consultants.
The point is that commenters arguing a museum should give stuff back from where they took it are often arguing from a country that has documentary records in its current legislative body that it faux-legalistically stole the very land it is on.
In many cases, the USA stole that land well after the British Museum (which is older than the USA) acquired some of its objects. It's astonishingly well-documented.
If the argument is that all land has changed hands at some point in history and that excuses the documented way the USA murdered people, used biological warfare, and walked them to their deaths off their own land, then I'm not sure what all the po-faced American social media fuss is about the Elgin Marbles.
In many cases, the USA knows the names and families of the people it stole land from. Knows their lineage. Even has photographs of some of them!
In historical terms it is a recent, deliberate, judicially-supported, documented theft. Not some undocumented invasion in hazy pre-history. Acts of Congress were passed to do it.
The British Museum (along with the V&A) has some stuff (well looked-after) that people want back. Currently the law literally prevents it being returned, and these organisations are in many cases trying to find ways to work around that law so that it is long-loaned back forever, until the law is changed. There's no simple intransigence; there is dialogue and politics.
The British Empire did some amazing things, and many, many ugly things. You won't find a person in the UK who doesn't understand that now, and there are all sorts of reparation campaigns, restitution campaigns, history projects, etc. etc.; nationally we rub our own noses in it so often that there's a right-wing backlash.
So it's tedious in the extreme the way Americans keep prattling on about British museums as if there is only stonewalling, and as if there is no appropriation from native culture in its post-independence history. It's literally on paper.
Well, the USA was completely stolen, every single square inch, and the natives genocided. Whereas the Basques for example, if they stole their land, did it in deep prehistory.
The natives weren’t one political group of people. They were hundred or thousands of tribes. And at some point each tribe “stole” it from some other tribe and territory. Some tribes (example: the Iroquois) were genociding other tribes.
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not. I didn’t think the UK even provided IaaS services.
On the other hand it seems like half the business of The City is providing cover for dodgy foreign companies, which would be perfect for people trying to get around these laws.
... and really shouldn't be needed.
(It's not the only useful tool on the iPad -- I adore the rather idiosyncratic GoCoEdit -- but I am a VSC-Remote person now)