this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024

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Search for alternative to WordPress surges worldwide amidst rift between WP-Engine and Matt Mullenweg (www.techradar.com)

submitted 1 week ago by ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net to c/technology@lemmy.world

57 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] frezik@midwest.social 23 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 10 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] MisterMoo@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

No one’s going to remember this in a year. Remember when Unity supposedly torched their business? They’re doing fine.

[–] yournamehere@lemm.ee 1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] KneeTitts@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca -2 points 6 days ago

eventhough

You can leave the space in. It's okay.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] mint_tamas@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] mint_tamas@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

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.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/12/24268637/wordpress-org-matt-mullenweg-acf-fork-secure-custom-fields-wp-engine

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.

[–] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 42 points 1 week ago (9 children)

Man baby and WordPress.com CEO apparently forced this on the open-source community.

[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 34 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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"):

screenshot of wordpress.org login page featuring a "Pineapple is delicious on pizza" checkbox.

😂

he's not wrong, though

screenshot of Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) in his car in The Big Lebowski, with meme style caption "You're not wrong Walter, you're just an asshole"

[–] Petter1@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

😂🙏🏻 I love my Pizza Hawaii 🥰

[–] SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 5 points 6 days ago

Canada's best invention since the telephone

[–] 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Is this real?

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If only there was some way to find out. I guess we'll never know.

[–] 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Thanks 🙏

[–] bitwise@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

🤡

Can't wait for Google to add a required login checkbox that says "I accept that Jesus Christ is the one true Lord and Savior"...

And I'm being downvoted. Cute.

Keep em coming, kids. Nothing I've said is wrong.

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[–] riskable@programming.dev 24 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Yes! Finally the world can maybe move on from PHP!

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca -2 points 6 days ago

Huuuurrrr duuuuurrr PHP bad duuuurrrrr

Very mature opinion rit there

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

PHP 7 or 8 + Laravel is fine

[–] Lazycog@sopuli.xyz 16 points 1 week ago (2 children)

PHP 8 is actually really good. Think last time I was angry at PHP was pre 7.4 PHP

[–] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] Naich@lemmings.world 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Have they stopped using every naming convention there is (including some from other planets) in their function names?

[–] Lazycog@sopuli.xyz 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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

[–] diffusive@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

ConventionForReal_real_v2()

[–] OmegaLemmy 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Huh? PHP wasn't the issue

[–] humble_pete_digger@lemm.ee -4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

It is. They need to move to a long running application base and they are not doing it.

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 11 points 1 week ago (10 children)

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.

[–] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] nullPointer@programming.dev 1 points 6 days ago

is Zope/Plone still a thing?

[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 0 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 9 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 6 points 1 week ago

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.

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[–] Naich@lemmings.world 9 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Anything community produced with a tool to transfer over WP sites would do pretty well at the moment.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 9 points 1 week ago

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.

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[–] ctenidium@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Some weeks ago I learned about ClassicPress: https://www.classicpress.net/

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] ctenidium@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

I think it's maybe not for everyone nor suitable for every project. But I think it's a cool idea and maybe i will use it for rather conservative projects.

[–] OmegaLemmy 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] ctenidium@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

Yeah, me too. Everything is a subscription nowadays, I hate it just so much.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 week ago

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).

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