“Can’t bill a minute of it” is the crux of the problem.
There are all sorts of ways you can improve the management of customer WP sites. You can put each site in its own small VM, with caching, with FrankenPHP, set that up with cloud-init, manage the entire fleet remotely with WP-CLI, etc.
You can have your own themes, lock down your plugin choices, only use your own code in functionality plugins, all that.
But if your customers can administer the sites, something is going to burn you nonetheless, and when it happens nobody is paying.
Part of it is just that WordPress exists in the middle of the continuum between content and functionality, part of it is the odd mix of users: you can have technically unaware users who you inadvertently empower to make bad decisions. It’s not their fault: it’s an over-permissive architecture.
WordPress, in your own careful hands, can run brilliantly for years. In all the time I have run it (18 years now) my own sites have been fast, busy, stable, reliable: I have even run WP brochure sites for finance industry clients, and I have had full confidence in them.
But if you’re not going to be in charge of it, don’t run it. Because really no amount of monitoring and security mechanisms can stop this eventually happening.
Ultimately I have also decided I am not going to roll out any new WP sites that I have to maintain. But then (despite my admiration for Laravel) I am going to get out of using scripting languages for server side code at all. AI is going to make all internet-facing interpreters dangerous. It’s too large a surface and I don’t have the energy for php2shell Groundhog Day.
Yesterday it was a Show HN[0] about how you've built a CMS.. today it's a blog post about the incumbent. Of course you don't recommend your competitor, you probably never did.
You are entitled to your opinions. That doesn't make them right. You clearly did not read the post. It begins by saying we have built over 1500 sites in wordpress.
The number one criticism against Wordpress seems to be the plugin architecture. But if you only use a small set of plugins, maybe Akismet, and Loginizer, you can do a lot of things already. Plenty of people don't need many plugins. So maybe this alternative CMS is good too, but I think for a basic blog/website Wordpress is still a good choice. Of course, the author has a point if you have to use hundreds of plugins....
seems like these days ai can create a better design layout and backend than WordPress in significantly less time. It's lost its edge in spinning up semi-complicated websites quickly. Any site I can create on wordpress I could have Ai replicate or recreate in a matter of hours.
This. I now get Claude to spin up sites as needed, with dynamic functionality using vanilla JS and CSS. No frameworks, no CMS, nothing. If it needs a server and database then there's a ton to choose from, I'm currently using Cloudflare Workers and D1 but that could change in an instant to any similar service. Posting a new page is a matter of editing the text and images and then asking Claude to upload it and format it properly. 2 minutes' work.
There are all sorts of ways you can improve the management of customer WP sites. You can put each site in its own small VM, with caching, with FrankenPHP, set that up with cloud-init, manage the entire fleet remotely with WP-CLI, etc.
You can have your own themes, lock down your plugin choices, only use your own code in functionality plugins, all that.
But if your customers can administer the sites, something is going to burn you nonetheless, and when it happens nobody is paying.
Part of it is just that WordPress exists in the middle of the continuum between content and functionality, part of it is the odd mix of users: you can have technically unaware users who you inadvertently empower to make bad decisions. It’s not their fault: it’s an over-permissive architecture.
WordPress, in your own careful hands, can run brilliantly for years. In all the time I have run it (18 years now) my own sites have been fast, busy, stable, reliable: I have even run WP brochure sites for finance industry clients, and I have had full confidence in them.
But if you’re not going to be in charge of it, don’t run it. Because really no amount of monitoring and security mechanisms can stop this eventually happening.
Ultimately I have also decided I am not going to roll out any new WP sites that I have to maintain. But then (despite my admiration for Laravel) I am going to get out of using scripting languages for server side code at all. AI is going to make all internet-facing interpreters dangerous. It’s too large a surface and I don’t have the energy for php2shell Groundhog Day.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50256725
Imagine the backwards compatibility.