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I'm not a fan of the default 'code soup' of wordpress templates and themes, which is why I tend to use timber to create a more MVC like structure to my code.
Despite its' peculiarity, however, I find wordpress to be a lovely, easily customisable CMS with a huge breadth of plugins out the to provide advanced functionality. If you can curate your plugins to only those that are essential and make sure your code is well tended it can be a lovely development experience.
I personally use my own starter theme, though I don't think that's particularly uncommon in the WP dev community.
You mean you don't want to just use bootstrap and jQuery?? 😉😉
Ugh, I'm still not quite able to remove jQuery from most of my builds yet just because of a couple of plugins that are reliant on it - so annoying!
I'm going to be honest I don't know what it is about WordPress but I kinda don't like it, however!!
When I'm looking through freelance sites me seeing WordPress and saying go away go away go AWAAAAAAAY !!!! isn't going to help me and I'm well aware I have to learn it properly soon 😂😂
I only find that it is smaller sites/jobs that want WordPress, but even then I get them to understand WordPress is chunky and slow. We have static site/blog generators like Gatsby that are friendly can use a content API like Contently for web masters to manage the content, and loads super quick and easy.
If they needed more then an editable static site/blog with contact form, then WordPress isn't a viable option anyway.
You sir have convinced me, I've been looking at gatsby on and off for a while as well, think I'm going in that direction instead,
Cheers bud.
If you live in the real world, then you'll probably end up with some WordPress clients. It works great for small business with great e-commerce integration.
Of course a Gatsby JS site will blow the doors off a WP site. But some people already have WP sites. And they still need help. 👍
Plus WordPress has some great local communities
If the client is using the site as a blog or just for public content (like a restaurant), Gatsby is great!
I had a client who needed a membership area, with progression-based content release, and a shopping cart to gain access. I rolled up a WordPress site + LMS + shopping cart plugin in a few hours.
Overall, it really depends and learning about the tradeoffs is valuable as a freelancer
And how do your clients edit the contents of their Gatsby web site? By writing Markdown files, listing them in a JS file and committing everything to Git?
If it's a simple site like a restaurant within gatsby, they won't be making design modifications.
If they want blog/edit pages, Gatsby's CMS has that feature without having to dig into the code.
Gatsby has a CMS? Or you have to make it get data from a third party CMS?
You use a third party CMS. There are lots of free ones, like netlify-cms or even WordPress. Also you can use Sanity.io or Contentful there's great integration with those
Wordpress is a great backend/dashboard management boilerplate, I love to design custom websites and use wordpress as a "admin dashboard" to let my customers handle their website data independently.
Wordpress is a great tool, if you know how it works and how to extend it without destroying everything ^
I am not a WordPress fan mostly because I find it limiting and everything seems unnecessarily difficult to really customize outside of just building a child theme. That being said I have been working with the WordPress API so that I can build a react front end for my client that uses WordPress as a backend so you get all the ease of adding content with the freedom of not being restricted on the front end.
WordPress is limiting indeed but when it comes to having an out of the box, easy to use, fast enough website, with a lot of theming and extendibility options platform, WordPress is probably the best at this.
We as developers cant judge everyone by our own standards. Example, how much an end-user really cares about a website that does not load inside 1s but loads in 2s? Not much, to a normal end-user, he wont even notice this.
Also how can an end-user switch the theme on his gatsby based website?
Now i am biased since i have a lot of experience with WP but the thing is, lets be realistic about what the end-user really needs.
I agree with your point, but the example is not the best choice imho. Sure, if you ask them they’re not gonna tell you they prefer a lightweight website over a customizable one.
Yet, a website that takes 1s more to load under normal conditions will take 5s more on an entry level smartphone and/or poor access to the network, which is not uncommon. And studies tend to show that it’s damaging the bounce rate of a website, and therefore its turnover.
It’s part of our job to educate customers about what really matters, and on the long run performance is often more critical for their business than the ability to tweak the design.
I agree and i went a bit offtopic. Noticed it when i re-read later on my comment and the topic.
I go with the principle, use the right tool for the right thing. Dont try to fit or adapt something into doing something else.
And i know WP is not well suited for large projects, but for 90% of the real world websites (which are mostly presentational websites), WP can do the job very well.
It requires to be configured well, when it comes to security, performance and stuff like that.
It requires to be maintained, updates for example but the rest is mostly easy enough for an end-user to take care on himself.
With this, going back on topic, i would say we as developers should know, IMO at least, the tools and should know the capabilities of each tool and should have the skills to present correctly to the client their options so the best choice can be made.
I've had this conversation. And my clients would prefer to do things like add their own modal pop-up on specific pages when they want to, rather than hire me to make every little change.
I would say that while you don't need to know it, being able to handle it will significantly widen your pool of jobs.
Thanks so much...