Why Is WordPress Not Favoured By PHP Developers | #SimplyAdvice

This video is a short clip from out TOL podcast #11 when our two developers talk about WordPress and how it's not favoured by most PHP developers

Follow us on social media:

[shanermahmud]

So, don't modify the theme itself (maybe a child-theme) and don't modify the core of the CMS or Framework. Great advise for a newbie like me! Thanks guys!

[dsuess]

Maintained Drupal sites for years, the backend was easy to get started extending, but the frontend management lacked a lot. Switching to WordPress was great for the frontend management, but the backend PHP was like jumping into a cold swimming pool.

[arnelgo]

These people don't realize WordPress is a framework. We are aware of how things operate as well as how they do not. WordPress is one of the reason PHP has survived to this day.

[MarkoDjukic]

Better - honest title would be: "What WordPress is not meant for"

[pouyatoutounchy]

I do hate WordPress as a full-stack developer, however when the client doesn't meet my expectations in terms of payment, that is my go-to solution. The CMS is a mess but low budget invites that mess.

[johnny]

Just dont edit the core and nothing will break.

[vigilantezack]

WordPress is a mishmash. It's not for "beginngers" nor developers. Go ask a beginner to use it and tell them to make a custom theme. There is zero help for this, no tools inside WP, no generators, no built-in instructions, it's a 2nd class citizen. A beginner might know some HTML and CSS but they'll have no idea how to put those into WP. You want a custom theme, go dig into docs or find a 3rd party to generate one, etc. Nothing beginner about that. Ask the beginner to set up custom fields for their needs and output them into their templates. Whoops, no real information or built-in abilities for that, and if you have a theme, you can't edit those template anyway, and there is no built-in help to create a child theme so that you can override templates. No instruction that any of that even exists.
How does the beginner add some functionality? They can't, not unless their commercial theme provides tools and settings in the UI to tinker with things. The beginner is 100% dependent on a theme, the settings the theme gives, and finding plugins for every feature they think they want. WordPress is heavily plugin focused. Writing your own modules/plugins is not a built-in experience and there is no help how to do it without exploring Google to figure it out.

So we turn to the advanced side of things. Even this is still dependent on plugins. Even developers will use ACF Pro or Metabox or something to deal with their custom post types and fields. And while WP can theoretically do whatever is needed through its PHP framework (functions, filters, hooks), we still rely on plugins for the complicated stuff. In other words, "we have complicated stuff to do, so better not use WordPress!" But it's actually the opposite I find. "We have complicated stuff to do, but here are plugins that do it on WordPress so let's do that!"

Nobody wants to write ecommerce from scratch, WP has WooCommerce. Nobody wants to write membership system from scratch, or caching, or calendar/events, ticket sales, scheduling, advanced animated sliders, content indexing, etc. Since WP has plugins for all these, it becomes the CMS of choice. If I have "complicated" things to do, I don't choose Craft or MODX or Processwire where I would have to develop all the complicated stuff from scratch, I would find pre-made options on WP. If I have a simple site without complicated things, then I choose other frameworks/CMSes which will be more performant and modern.

WP still forces a blogging system on you when many sites may not use blogs. I have to install a plugin to remove the blog when it's not needed! Yet it's called a "CMS" but doesn't actually give us any tools at all to manage content. Can't create content types or fields. Any CMS worth its salt will have a way to create the actual content. But as a "framework", it's too bloated, providing too much by default and not making the development of custom themes and modules a first class experience. Both the developer and the beginner have to spend all their time Googling for how to do things, or finding themes and plugins to get the features they want.

There is no longevity for highly custom WP sites either. I've come across custom themes, and they are filled with outdated code, orphan code, unused CSS. I don't see any better architecture writing custom stuff than just using a theme and hope it maintains updates for the future. I've seen so many themes that come and go with a few years of updates and then get abandoned. Themes that are dependent on builders like Elementor or Bakery due to licensing abilities.

We are only just now entering a time where you can create a fresh copy of WP and actually do something custom with theme and templates via the full site building tools. Yet the developers seem to all hate these Gutenberg tools because more developer-friendly advanced tools exist like Bricks, Quicly, Zion, whatever. Even Pinegrow. As websites become more heavily developed with the page builder experience, tools like Framer are getting the spotlight. We are regressing, or perhaps advancing, to a new era where all we need is a robust page builder stacked on top of a database/management interface.

I wish things were better.

[bradzimmer]

Not to mention plug ins may not get updated and overall page speed results.