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As someone that made enough money to make a freelance career from moving people off of awful WordPress sites, WP’s reputation has been in the toilet for a decade, easily. The CMS market has been strong for a long time, and there are countless better options out there.
With the push towards API backends and static sites, WP should have died years ago. I still cannot believe it’s so popular.
If you want a standard CMS, you can’t really go wrong with Umbraco. Some people are turned off by .NET, but for developer experience alone it’s the best I’ve ever worked with.
There are many good choices, if you’re looking for something more lightweight. Kirby, IndieKit, Concrete5, even Ghost are all solid. I also remember hearing about ClassicPress a while back, that was a fork of WP made during some technical and business decisions that some in the community didn’t agree with - never used it though, and it’s a fork of a time when the WP codebase was a joke.
Isn’t Umbraco the one that struggled loading a page that didn’t exist, taking several seconds to load the PageNotFound page and causing very high CPU load in the meantime? Like, an issue they had for years?
Somehow I don’t have great faith in that solution, but perhaps it’s improved in recent years.
I notice you didn’t mention Drupal or Joomla, and last time I did any webdev (11 years ago as an intern) it seemed like those were some of the big ones (though my perspective was probably very limited back then). Are they no good, have they fallen out of favour?
I actually used Drupal a year ago, so it’s definitely still around! Joomla isn’t a name I’ve heard for a while though. To be fair, I mostly work in AI now, so I’m removed from the web dev world also.
I think flat file and API based CMS’s have become more popular now, especially with many people questioning why so many CMS’s were built on relational data stores for largely non-relational data. For many, the ability to drop a CMS in and have it “just work” is why some of the newer ones are growing in popularity.
Drupal scales well and is very extensible with features that allow complicated permissions systems, etc. I have built some complicated courseware with it, and big document archives, etc. It has a skilled developer community. I wouldn’t use it for small inexpensive sites, but it’s top tier and free/liberated.
Joomla’s code a decade ago was so inefficient and clunky to work with I could never recommend it, my main interaction with it was troubleshooting and helping folks escape it. Maybe it’s improved.
I can recommend Grav as a flatfile CMS for those use-cases where the site is 90% static, the customer just wants to get able to sometimes update some of the content.
It’s not early 2000’s Slashdot. .NET and C# have been solid choices for software development for years, and Umbraco in particular is open source and probably the most welcoming CMS I’ve known when it comes to contributions.
.NET & C# is still all coming from Microsoft. Since I don’t use Microsoft products or Windows, I never liked C#. I know there are now maybe open-source and support under Linux, I will never forget. I will never forgive. NO!
Not quite. .NET is owned by the .NET Foundation, and while it’s heavily influenced by Microsoft, it’s an independent entity. C# is owned by Microsoft, but frankly they’ve put together what was even then far more advanced than anything Java could do even now.
To be blunt, back in the 2000’s it was this exact mentality that pushed me towards C#. Instead of people bitching and starting holy wars about Java, Ruby, and other languages, the .NET community just quietly got on with things and built some fantastic tooling. Furthermore, it was one of the communities that helped me go from hapless junior to someone able to give technical talks on what I had learned, or even speak to giants in the industry like Jon Skeet.
I mean these all sound like textbook qualities of enshittification. Everyone hates WP but begrudgingly uses it anyway. WP doesn’t care that their reputation is in the toilet because people still give them money.
WP is so bad that I got hired to help a client set up their site. They had a GoDaddy prebuilt site and wanted to migrate to a GoDaddy WooCommerce page so they could add a loyalty program.
WooCommerce is awful. It was making its own product variants, assigned changes that no one asked for to users that were asleep during the time, and took days for her to load 400 products in their database with the import feature.
It was like it was intentionally bad to push people who don’t know any better into buying an $80 plugin.
As someone that made enough money to make a freelance career from moving people off of awful WordPress sites, WP’s reputation has been in the toilet for a decade, easily. The CMS market has been strong for a long time, and there are countless better options out there.
With the push towards API backends and static sites, WP should have died years ago. I still cannot believe it’s so popular.
Which other options would you recommend?
If you want a standard CMS, you can’t really go wrong with Umbraco. Some people are turned off by .NET, but for developer experience alone it’s the best I’ve ever worked with.
There are many good choices, if you’re looking for something more lightweight. Kirby, IndieKit, Concrete5, even Ghost are all solid. I also remember hearing about ClassicPress a while back, that was a fork of WP made during some technical and business decisions that some in the community didn’t agree with - never used it though, and it’s a fork of a time when the WP codebase was a joke.
Isn’t Umbraco the one that struggled loading a page that didn’t exist, taking several seconds to load the PageNotFound page and causing very high CPU load in the meantime? Like, an issue they had for years?
Somehow I don’t have great faith in that solution, but perhaps it’s improved in recent years.
Maybe? I can’t say I had noticed that issue before, but it’s possible.
I notice you didn’t mention Drupal or Joomla, and last time I did any webdev (11 years ago as an intern) it seemed like those were some of the big ones (though my perspective was probably very limited back then). Are they no good, have they fallen out of favour?
I actually used Drupal a year ago, so it’s definitely still around! Joomla isn’t a name I’ve heard for a while though. To be fair, I mostly work in AI now, so I’m removed from the web dev world also.
I think flat file and API based CMS’s have become more popular now, especially with many people questioning why so many CMS’s were built on relational data stores for largely non-relational data. For many, the ability to drop a CMS in and have it “just work” is why some of the newer ones are growing in popularity.
Drupal scales well and is very extensible with features that allow complicated permissions systems, etc. I have built some complicated courseware with it, and big document archives, etc. It has a skilled developer community. I wouldn’t use it for small inexpensive sites, but it’s top tier and free/liberated.
Joomla’s code a decade ago was so inefficient and clunky to work with I could never recommend it, my main interaction with it was troubleshooting and helping folks escape it. Maybe it’s improved.
Who membas phpnuke
I can recommend Grav as a flatfile CMS for those use-cases where the site is 90% static, the customer just wants to get able to sometimes update some of the content.
.NET? … yea no … if you really need a CMS, try https://ghost.org/
It’s not early 2000’s Slashdot. .NET and C# have been solid choices for software development for years, and Umbraco in particular is open source and probably the most welcoming CMS I’ve known when it comes to contributions.
.NET & C# is still all coming from Microsoft. Since I don’t use Microsoft products or Windows, I never liked C#. I know there are now maybe open-source and support under Linux, I will never forget. I will never forgive. NO!
Not quite. .NET is owned by the .NET Foundation, and while it’s heavily influenced by Microsoft, it’s an independent entity. C# is owned by Microsoft, but frankly they’ve put together what was even then far more advanced than anything Java could do even now.
To be blunt, back in the 2000’s it was this exact mentality that pushed me towards C#. Instead of people bitching and starting holy wars about Java, Ruby, and other languages, the .NET community just quietly got on with things and built some fantastic tooling. Furthermore, it was one of the communities that helped me go from hapless junior to someone able to give technical talks on what I had learned, or even speak to giants in the industry like Jon Skeet.
That “Foundation” is just founded by Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Foundation. And .NET framework like the runtime and everything in mainly written in the C# language: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime.
You don’t fool me.
I mean these all sound like textbook qualities of enshittification. Everyone hates WP but begrudgingly uses it anyway. WP doesn’t care that their reputation is in the toilet because people still give them money.
WP is so bad that I got hired to help a client set up their site. They had a GoDaddy prebuilt site and wanted to migrate to a GoDaddy WooCommerce page so they could add a loyalty program.
WooCommerce is awful. It was making its own product variants, assigned changes that no one asked for to users that were asleep during the time, and took days for her to load 400 products in their database with the import feature.
It was like it was intentionally bad to push people who don’t know any better into buying an $80 plugin.