Re: WordPress Move to JavaScript

[Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss]

James,

I am a PHP dev and find most php apps to be one size fits all.

On 2025-01-18 02:15, James Dugger wrote:
I know this is old but thought I would add some perspective.
WordPress' plugin ecosystem is too big.

I agree... once size fits all.

Its primary audience is what I
call site builders - individuals with some coding experience mainly in
html, and CSS and maybe a bit of javascript's jquery library. Although
that latter is probably pushing it. I went to WordCamp 8 years ago in
Phoenix as a GoDaddy rep.  Most of the people and even the talks were
geared towards non-coding professionals.  Most people there wouldn't
have been able to explain what an object was in any language and
couldn't blueprint a class declaration or any of its mechanics.

Interesting assessment!!


Where do they go - If they don't want to pay for real development they
head to Squarespace or Weebly or other no-code solutions.

Most of the use cases for WordPress I am familiar with are for small
businesses.  Most hosting companies have auto site builders that
construct the website in 30 seconds.  But then people quickly get
bogged down in even finding, picking, installing and implementing the
plugins correctly after the initial build. Often they are left with
hacked, or bloated sites that leave them exposed and filled with
malware.

I can see this happening.


I helped an agency clean up a WordPress website for a
plastic surgeon where the MySQL database had been injected with
Russian phishing data.  The site was 5 years old and I found over 150k
nefarious entries that had to be cleaned up and removed.

Great example!!


Later I worked for a tech firm that consults for large corporate
clients that use WordPress for limited sites, like a digital magazine
for high end real estate holdings, almost like a brochure version of
Architectural Digest. In these cases WP works because we would limit
the number of plugins and user interaction with the site.  We could
have easily built these sites without WP and often did, but if they
were going to maintain the site the contracts would dictate that we
had to build it in WP.

I think that the current metrics are around 43% of the web uses
WordPress.

I've read 30% however 43% seems like a reasonable number.

I would estimate that easily 70% of the database and the
codebase in WP is for managing the application and has little to do
with the actual visual website that the general public see and
interact with...

Interesting assessment.

... - excluding ecommerce and subscription-based web apps
that need user account transactions.  A typical WP site is over 1
million lines of code.


Wow --> that is the one size fits all!!


But when the same companies hired us to build enterprise-based
solutions and wanted a PHP-based web application the choices were
usually Drupal


Yikes.  On it's face Drupal is very cool.  I really liked it until about 
8 or 9 years ago.  During that time I has a subscription with 
https://buildamodule.com/.  The learning curve is astronomical.


for sites that needed a CMS and Laravel for sites that didn't.


I find Laravel to have too much of a learning curve and comes with too 
many dependencies just to get started.



Even if they wanted a SPA (single page application) like
React, Angular, or Vue, we recommended the backend be built in Laravel
and not Express (Node).  Drupal is based on the Symfony PHP framework
and Laravel hooks into it. Symfony is by far the most well supported
open source PHP solution.

Another learning curve.


 The irony is that there are enough good
libraries both on the JavaScript and PHP that are better written, more
secure, and just as easy to implement than going to a WP-based
approach.  Plus I have to wonder what is going on with Automatic and
WP Engine and what is the future of WordPress.

For sites that need to be sped up and are limited to remain on older
server instances.  My advice is to simplify the code base as much as
possible.  So roll your own framework or use a lightweight MVC
framework. Turn on opcode (APC) and object caching (Redis) and if you
are using Apache as your Webserver play with the MaxClient settings to
dial in the amount of preforking that Apache does.  Setting  the
number too high in MySQL will cause thrashing when the database
constantly has to write data out to the disk to clear up memory to add
threads.  Or switch to Nginx as the webserver.


Man power to do all these things is expensive.  Hardware is cheep.  
Without knowing anything about the case, I say throw hardware at it and 
save developer costs.



Package These up in a Docker container or containers (web server,
database server) running a lightweight Linux instance and you have a
portable web application that can be installed anywhere and spun up in
seconds.


Docker is another learning curve.  I worked with some guys who were 
doing Magento development.  They were having server compatibility issues 
so they went to Docker to standardize things.  My recommendation is to 
ditching Magento and it's one size fits all. My customer was bleeding 
cash and finally moved away from Magento.

I was a programmer before the Internet.  I was a xBase dev.  Loved it.

Fast forward.  I do not like WordPress much.  They keep adding features 
and the ecosystem is huge.

I went through the Plugin Handbook 
https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/

and the Theme Handbook : https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/

My main website is on WordPress and I ham having unexplained redirect 
errors with Google.  I created a semi M-V-C and CMS website 3 or 4 years 
ago.

I've decided, given the current state of things, that I am going to 
build my own M-V-C PHP/MySQL framework and host my websites on this 
homegrown framework.

Keep It Simple Stupid KISS.

M-V-C is easy to expand and if create correctly will only run a subset 
of the application's code.  AND a lot of the code is reusable.

Keith




On Fri, Nov 15, 2024 at 12:17 PM Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss
<plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

Thank You David,

I agree WordPress is bloated and it is one-size-fits-all.  I saw a
video
recently that WordPress has 40% market share.

I am hoping to build my own infrastructure within a year and a half.

I think potentially the back end JS issue is my problem.  That is
why I
mentioned my daily driver is a 10 year old Dell with an i5 and 16G
of
RAM. It is running an SSD that helps. Seems 32G is the minimum
now....Yikes

Another issue is Google has removed 12 of my articles because of
redirects.  I've looked at it several times and cannot figure it
out.  I
did not add the redirects.  I wonder if it is WordPress that is
doing
something.

Other than a more powerful CPU and more RAM what is the solution?
Is
there a point when people start to exit WordPress, and where do they
go?

On 2024-11-13 12:47, David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss wrote:
Javascript runs in the browser. Most issues I hear about and
encounter
myself end up being browser-related.

You mentined all of the things that aren’t connected to JS, and
did not
mention the one(s) that are. JS is the primary source of problems
today. And hackers that break into the back-end.

I operate almost exclusively on Macs and my Android phone, and
I’ve got
between three and six browsers on each one. None of them work the
same
— which is to say, when I run into a problem on one, I can
usually
solve it by switching to another browser. Every week it’s
something
different.

The source of the problem is not worth my time to figure it out,
and
it’s really easy to switch to another browser.

Don’t blame php or the back-end for quirks that are endemic to
JS
running in one specific browser. Even updates of the same browser
can
behave differently. And the behavior on the same browser can
change
from one day to the next, or one hour to the next. Nobody is
changing
the back-end that frequently, I can assure you. It’s the
libraries the
pages are loading up, or the code the site’s developers changed
last
night.

I’ve been writing code in Delphi using TMS WEB Core, which is
available
both as a Delphi addon and a standalone package that runs in
Visual
Studio Code. It takes Delphi code (Object Pascal) and translates
it
into JS and packages it up so it runs in the browser. NONE of it
is
running in the back-end! It’s 100% browser based. And 100% of
the weird
issues I have are all browser related. Sure, there are bugs in the

platform, but they are typically reproduced the same in every
browser.
Browser issues show up differently in one browser, maybe two, but
not
in all of them.

A lot of browsers are using the Chromium engine, so quirks in it
can be
reflected elsewhere, but they usually need to be running the same
version of the engine for them to show up.

It used to be that you had to test software on different machines
from
different vendors, different versions of Windows or MacOS, and it
cost
you a lot of money to have all of those combinations of software
and
hardware available for testing.

Today you just need to test on one hardware platform with
variations of
browsers loaded on it, probably running in separate VMs or docker
images to ensure you test with different versions of Chromium and
whatnot.

Same old sh*t, different approach.

As far as WP goes, I think it’s internal architecture has become

obsolete. Layers and layers of crap have been added to convert
asynchronous events into something that serializes them, and the
people
writing plugins and themes are mostly inexperienced coders who
don’t
have a clue what’s what. Meanwhile there are people who have
nothing
else to do with their life but find ways to sneak into cracks and
crevices in the back-end, and sometimes wide-open doors, left by
said
inexperienced coders who didn’t do a good job testing their
code. “It
works! Ship it!”

The UX/UI logic is all being pushed out to the browser, and the
business logic is being hidden behind REST APIs. I can build
something
in TMS WEB Core way faster than it takes to build in WP — it
runs
faster, is more solid, and is far easier to maintain. That can
probably
be said of most JS-based UX/UI dev tools today.

The problem with Wordpress is … it’s Wordpress. The UX/UI is
tightly
coupled to the back-end because all of the user’s state is
managed in
the back-end. And it’s not an API, but just a huge mess of
functions
that are designed to be hijacked by programmers to get it to do
pretty
much anything out of the ordinary — if you can’t get it to
support
something in the UI, you need to build a plugin or theme to add
it. And
that code lives on the BACK-END and is susceptible to all of the
myriad
ways there are for hackers to throw sand in the gears. The whole
damn
platform is open to anybody who wants to poke and prod it’s
guts! They
even added an API but nobody uses it.

If I need something to work a certain way using WEB Core, I can
easily
program it. I hide necessary business logic behind an
authenticated
REST API and the JS in the browser manages it all. The events are
all
asynchronous and I don’t have to worry about someone hacking
into the
back-end code and hijacking everything. I can build the services
in any
language and host it on any platform I want.

In WP, you have to build a plugin and plan to maintain it as
further WP
updates will very likely break it in some unexpected way. Or if
not the
WP code than maybe one of the UI libs you’re working with change
and
someone updated a theme that loads a different version and screws
up
your code.

IMHO, WP is just a big fat ugly mess that only gets worse over
time.

Just switch to a no-code / low-code solution that lets you
custom-build
what you need, and that isn’t dependent on dozens of things that
can
change from week to week and month to month as the underlying
platform
is patched to fix newly-discovered exploits and the UI libs get
updated
by updates in the plugins and themes.

-David Schwartz




On Nov 13, 2024, at 9:12 AM, Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss
<plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

Hi,

This is kind of off topic, however WordPress is Open Source and I

would expect that the vast majority of WordPress is run on LAMP
servers.

My daily driver is a 10 year old Dell that has an i5 with 16G of
RAM
that runs Kubuntu 24.04lts.

I am running a blog using WordPress that is hosted on an Ubuntu
server.

I am having issues with the WordPress Gutenberg back end.  I
cannot
get it to do the things I want to do like bold text. At times is
is
sluggish.  I've read that WordPress has a 10 year plan to move to

JavaScript.  There is not a lot of info available so it is
unclear if
the PHP code will be replaced as well.  If WordPress replaces the
PHP
back end I will leave WordPress.  As it is WordPress is hanging
by a
thread.

These problems are new. I am also having formatting issues which
might
be due to my theme.

Is anyone having these issues or maybe other issues with
WordPress?

Ultimately I may create my own infrastructure or start building
my own
theme.

Any feedback is very welcome.

Keith
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James

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