Front End Frameworks like React, Vue and Angular have become quite popular for creating websites. Despite this fact WordPress still seems to have a lot of popularity and many companies are consistently looking for developers that know WordPress. However WordPress and PHP go hand in hand and PHP is not as popular as it used to be which is probably one of the main reasons for developers avoiding WordPress jobs.
The JAMSTACK and Headless CMS are still fairly new. Not many developers are familiar with using that technical stack for creating a website with a CMS yet. Whereas it is still very common in the WordPress world and I think that companies are yet to adopt these new ways of building websites. What are your thoughts on WordPress?
Top comments (6)
Hah, you reminded me that I want to write a blogpost on my most recent WP experiences. As a quick summary; I have part of my career to thank to WordPress and used it a lot as a freelancer, worked at an agency which was specialised in custom WordPress sites. Eventually I became way more framework orientated and I didn't use WP in years. This year I helped someone out with converting a static site to WordPress and it was an interesting experience, and not as bad as I remembered.
As an all-round web developer WordPress was awesome because I was able to deliver a site with just me and a designer to create a custom theme. All the back-end stuff was already there and most importantly, the editor was almost universally understood by clients. Functionality that wasn't there I could hack together in PHP or buy some custom plugin for.
As a front-end developer, PHP always felt like a huge nuisance though. Something I wanted to learn just enough about to do what I want, but nothing more. I was way more invested in HTML, JS and CSS than in PHP. And then I also had to deal with badly written plugins, hosting shenanigans, database migrations, security problems, caching, etc, etc.
As for back-end developers, especially the ones with a deep knowledge of PHP, most of them I spoke to barely wanted to touch WordPress because apparently it's not greatly written / has a huge amount of legacy stuff. I can remember at the agency, it wasn't easy finding a back-end developer who was willing to spend the majority of their time in WP.
As for users, I still think WP can be a great solution. WordPress has a very user friendly editor, and especially with custom Gutenberg blocks the editing experience can be made very pleasant. Together with some proper caching and DB management, a WP site can be blazing fast as well. Also, using WordPress REST API is an option as well.
So all in all, I think we're quick to dismiss WordPress for a better developer experience whilst sometimes forgetting that it'll take quite a bit of effort to equal the user experience it might deliver.
That being said, even though my last experience wasn't bad, I don't think I'd want to work on WP sites anymore (unless decoupled, maybe)
I was the same I already knew HTML, CSS and JavaScript and the role was front end. So messing about with WordPress templates when I did not have much experience with PHP was frustrating. Because it’s not really a language I was that interested in and this was before I started to get more into back end development.
Most companies adapt pretty slowly. If they chose WordPress some years ago, chances are they'll stick with it for quite some time. Sure this can change if the person in charge changes or whatever but generally choices are done for a longer period of time, thus making the jump to newer technologies difficult.
I personally will never touch WordPress because I loathe php, but luckily I'm in a position where I can choose my tools all by myself.
I also think that there are a lot of devs who get stuck in time and just stop learning new things - so they know their one way around and that's it. I personally had to work with a few people like this and to be honest it just made me show that I really do not want to end up stuck. Keep learning and improve :)!
Agreed I have worked in roles where the CEO who was not tech savvy only wanted to use WordPress and nothing else because thats all he knew. I recall interviewing with one company and they were trying to find alternatives to WordPress so at least they were forward thinking.
But I don't think everyone is knowledgeable in this area especially recruiters. Some assume that just because you know web development you must know WordPress as well which is not the case. They don't seem to realise that WordPress developers typically know PHP and not everyone knows that programming language. I much prefer Node and Python on the back end.
I love using WordPress, probably because I've used it professionally for college, at my last job and for my fun blog and I've applied for so many jobs using WordPress but always get turned down because I know JS instead of PHP.
I will admit that when it comes to making a website that has a good CMS, customisation and is easy to use. Then WordPress is still hard to beat. I used to use advanced custom fields back in the day I think now DIVI is the popular option?
Using a headless CMS with the JAMSTACK is a more modern approach however not everyone has learned how to use a headless CMS yet as its still a fairly new concept. Until tools like sanity and strapi become more common then companies will still opt for WordPress I think.
Yeah thats annoying every time a recruiter shows me a job description with WordPress I try to avoid it because it requires PHP which I am not keen on learning at the moment. I already have Node and Python for server side coding. Well if you already know JS then a framework like React is the way to go.