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.
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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.