Definitely glad more entities are taking notice of the WP turmoil and moving to fill the gap. I use Ghost for my website and wish it could be expanded more readily for use cases outside of newsletters and old school blogging.
I get the feeling WP is seriously resting on its laurels now. Matt especially seems to love gloating about that old "40% of websites use WordPress" stat, but that doesn't consider:
- Many old, unmanaged sites
- How many are high profile? e.g. $1M+ turnover compared to competitor platforms
And the development of direction overall for WordPress seems as tangled as ever, no clear direction in terms of what it wants to be (CMS? Framework? Blog platform?)
So much room for contenders to take over and make a bigger dent imo. Many already are.
WordPress has a huge lead in terms of the plugin ecosystem, I don't think there's anything else that can currently offer the same breadth of add-on functionality, but I can easily see that changing within a couple of years.
My biggest gripe with WP tho is the responsiveness. TTFB is always laggy compared to Ghost by a wide margin no matter how many server resources I throw at it. (I host my WP sites on Linode)
Yeah that plugin ecosystem is their greatest asset for sure. Everything I do in WordPress usually involves a plugin that extends functionality aside of adding custom code to the functions.php file.
Absolutely. It makes the way Matt is treating ACF/WPEngine even more ridiculous. Is he even aware that ACF is a significant reason for many people to even choose WP as a dev tool?
I assume the main attraction is that it’s possible to build on it with Drupal’s framework flexibility, probably quite difficult to directly challenge modern WP’s feature set.
I started using drupal 20 years ago, it was my first content management system and they were definitely calling it a cms at the time. I switched to wp 10 years ago because my small business clients needed something cheaper for me to set up and easier for them to use. Anyone used it? Thoughts?
I’ve never used it heavily myself but I always recall it being labelled as a mix between a CMS and a framework. More work to get up and running than WP but much more powerful.
I assume this current CMS release brings that learning curve right down. Will check it out over the next few days.
This is exactly what Drupal CMS is trying to do -- make the entry into it much, much easier. And make it easier for site owners to manage without a full CI/CD pipeline.
This initiative started last May, before all the WP drama -- it's just fortunate timing!
I used for a government newspaper, with around 1.2 million articles and 600k photos, with around 250k visitors daily. Wordpress would never even get close to Drupal. The culture of selling plugins on WP is toxic, they are not true developers and as a 25 year experienced dev, i see them as a joke.
It’s a trade off, essentially. Clients do love the simplicity of plugins and they solve a lot of common use cases but they absolutely will not scale significantly without hitting a lot of pain points.
I'm not bashing on WP per se. And you are absolutely correct, it's a trade off. I invite you to try the new Drupal CMS, i think you will find it interesting.
My choice as lead developer to go for drupal, was essentially for the true nature of Drupal, of being truly scalable, integration with Varnish, and custom modules i created to integrate and import content from QuarkXPress Server. Also integrated with Apache Solr due to the nature of search.
Comments
- Many old, unmanaged sites
- How many are high profile? e.g. $1M+ turnover compared to competitor platforms
So much room for contenders to take over and make a bigger dent imo. Many already are.
I assume this current CMS release brings that learning curve right down. Will check it out over the next few days.
This initiative started last May, before all the WP drama -- it's just fortunate timing!
Its overall post type structure is so inefficient (easy to see why it struggles with revisions) but it does work well on smaller sites.
Larger sites I will go with eg Laravel (and I hear similar good things about Drupal)