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Disclaimer: I'm a Wordpress plugin developer and my opinions are my own. This is a really weird offering from Automattic and IMO the price is pretty insane. I

by xzel 3y ago

Disclaimer: I'm a Wordpress plugin developer and my opinions are my own. This is a really weird offering from Automattic and IMO the price is pretty insane. I would love for Automattic to actually focus on Gutenberg/Wordpress and get it in a decent state for development. They're at major version 16 and continue to push breaking changes to peoples page layouts. They've made countless decisions that just plan don't make sense. Until the past year I'd consider Gutenberg an abject failure; now, it is at least usable. There's a good reason its had a 1 star rating on the Plugin marketplace until a few months ago. It still doesn't have 5% of the feature set of something like Divi, Elementor, Avada, Salient or any of the other big names in WP themes/website builders. Elementor is so massive people sell themes built for it! I think it is incredible what Matt has accomplished with WP and his vision is admirable but I think its time for him to step aside and let Automattic find someone else to lead and refocus on their core product.

avg_dev 3y ago
Hi, can you perhaps explain what Gutenberg, Divi, Elementor, Aveda, and Salient do? Just a curious party without much knowledge. I hosted WP on a VPS maybe a decade ago. I wasn’t very skilled with it but my friends needed a site. I forgot about it for a while and I guess it wasn’t at the time evergreen/self-updating and eventually it was used to send a lot of spam emails somehow. That’s about the extent of my knowledge of WP. I tried building a simple static site generator once on that same VPS where you could have HTML page headers and footers and page content templates, and it worked fine for me, but I tried to get a non-tech user to use it and they could not, and were ecstatic after I finally suggested that they try WP.com - they loved it.
- xzel 3y ago
  Gutenberg is attempting to be a Frontend / UI style site editor (example here: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg https://wordpress.org/gutenberg ). An amazing example of this type of editor is Webflow. Lesser examples include Square Space and Wix. What these other plugins, Divi/Elem/Avada/Salient, do is provide professional templates that allow users to build from along with a visual editor. These push WP output, that is what is rendered in your browser, from simple blog to an actual website experience. They also all provide something similar to what Gutenberg does but they built it 10 years ago on the original WP PHP backend (Gutenberg is all React). WP pushing to Gutenberg has actually kind of screwed them a bit, but I digress. You can think of them, and Webflow imo, kinda like photoshop for websites, or maybe Figma for web development. They allow designers to learn a tool instead of CSS / JS. What I think the WP theme builders really excel at is getting something that looks modern and fast really really quickly. I'm happy to talk about the market and who buys licenses for the WP theme builders but this post would be a book! haha. Vanilla WP is excellent for beginners who aren't trying to do anything fancy, in fact I think its one of the best things to ever happen to the web. Yes there are exploits etc but that comes with all software. But most other software doesn't run something like 30-40% of the web though so their bugs are really magnified. Same goes for the WP plugin theme builders I mentioned above.
  - avg_dev 3y ago
    Thanks. This is quite helpful context. (As for myself I used to write quite a bit of PHP; haven't touched it in some time but I'm rather fond of the language. I don't know anything about React, I think I built a tic tac toe tutorial once. I like the idea of htmx but mostly I do back-end development these days.) Just one question as an aside: Would you recommend self-hosting WP these days? I am curious about the market and who buys license for the theme builders also, but only if you would care to write about that.
    - xzel 3y ago
      I totally can provide as much info as you'd like about it but would probably be better off forum. Shoot me an email xzel at protonmail.com . Still going to add a bit here but like I said there are so many companies that exist in slightly different niches in this massive space it would be a small novel. Generally the people who buy licenses for these products are either people who want to make their own website with WP and stumbled upon the website builder tools or, more significantly, agencies or single person companies who are making a lot of websites for small businesses. Lots of restaurant, small businesses, etc need simple websites that look good, have the info there they need, are editable without blowing up and don't want to spend a lot of money. So they will pay 400-1000 dollars to their web dev who buys a website builder license with part of it. He will know the ins and outs of the tool (like my photoshop comparison earlier) and can whip up pretty unique but "gets the job done" website on the cheap with the tooling that provides a huge amount of short cuts. Basically these tools allow beginner / non-super technical designers or web devs to short cut most of the coding, as I said before. Someone like Elementor, probably the biggest company in the space, is used by a huge number of people and businesses big and small. On the hosting front, there are a lot of good and cheap hosting options these days. Self hosting is so much better than its ever been as PHP security and in general VPS security is a lot better that it was in the past. I don't want to recommend someone specific for paid for hosting because we may have contracts with hosting partners and like the previous post these opinions are my own and I like to keep my HN posting separate from my business but I'm more than happy to talk about that via email as well. Wowzers that was a run on sentence. Hope this helps!

by xzel 3y ago

avg_dev 3y ago

Hi, can you perhaps explain what Gutenberg, Divi, Elementor, Aveda, and Salient do? Just a curious party without much knowledge. I hosted WP on a VPS maybe a decade ago. I wasn’t very skilled with it but my friends needed a site. I forgot about it for a while and I guess it wasn’t at the time evergreen/self-updating and eventually it was used to send a lot of spam emails somehow. That’s about the extent of my knowledge of WP. I tried building a simple static site generator once on that same VPS where you could have HTML page headers and footers and page content templates, and it worked fine for me, but I tried to get a non-tech user to use it and they could not, and were ecstatic after I finally suggested that they try WP.com - they loved it.

xzel 3y ago
Gutenberg is attempting to be a Frontend / UI style site editor (example here: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg https://wordpress.org/gutenberg ). An amazing example of this type of editor is Webflow. Lesser examples include Square Space and Wix. What these other plugins, Divi/Elem/Avada/Salient, do is provide professional templates that allow users to build from along with a visual editor. These push WP output, that is what is rendered in your browser, from simple blog to an actual website experience. They also all provide something similar to what Gutenberg does but they built it 10 years ago on the original WP PHP backend (Gutenberg is all React). WP pushing to Gutenberg has actually kind of screwed them a bit, but I digress. You can think of them, and Webflow imo, kinda like photoshop for websites, or maybe Figma for web development. They allow designers to learn a tool instead of CSS / JS. What I think the WP theme builders really excel at is getting something that looks modern and fast really really quickly. I'm happy to talk about the market and who buys licenses for the WP theme builders but this post would be a book! haha. Vanilla WP is excellent for beginners who aren't trying to do anything fancy, in fact I think its one of the best things to ever happen to the web. Yes there are exploits etc but that comes with all software. But most other software doesn't run something like 30-40% of the web though so their bugs are really magnified. Same goes for the WP plugin theme builders I mentioned above.
- avg_dev 3y ago
  Thanks. This is quite helpful context. (As for myself I used to write quite a bit of PHP; haven't touched it in some time but I'm rather fond of the language. I don't know anything about React, I think I built a tic tac toe tutorial once. I like the idea of htmx but mostly I do back-end development these days.) Just one question as an aside: Would you recommend self-hosting WP these days? I am curious about the market and who buys license for the theme builders also, but only if you would care to write about that.
  - xzel 3y ago
    I totally can provide as much info as you'd like about it but would probably be better off forum. Shoot me an email xzel at protonmail.com . Still going to add a bit here but like I said there are so many companies that exist in slightly different niches in this massive space it would be a small novel. Generally the people who buy licenses for these products are either people who want to make their own website with WP and stumbled upon the website builder tools or, more significantly, agencies or single person companies who are making a lot of websites for small businesses. Lots of restaurant, small businesses, etc need simple websites that look good, have the info there they need, are editable without blowing up and don't want to spend a lot of money. So they will pay 400-1000 dollars to their web dev who buys a website builder license with part of it. He will know the ins and outs of the tool (like my photoshop comparison earlier) and can whip up pretty unique but "gets the job done" website on the cheap with the tooling that provides a huge amount of short cuts. Basically these tools allow beginner / non-super technical designers or web devs to short cut most of the coding, as I said before. Someone like Elementor, probably the biggest company in the space, is used by a huge number of people and businesses big and small. On the hosting front, there are a lot of good and cheap hosting options these days. Self hosting is so much better than its ever been as PHP security and in general VPS security is a lot better that it was in the past. I don't want to recommend someone specific for paid for hosting because we may have contracts with hosting partners and like the previous post these opinions are my own and I like to keep my HN posting separate from my business but I'm more than happy to talk about that via email as well. Wowzers that was a run on sentence. Hope this helps!