10 ms·

A case for something, anything more simple than WordPress

47 points by cdevroe 13y ago

dkuntz2 13y ago
I used WordPress for a while, but switched to a host of static site generators about two years ago. One of the big reasons I switched was because WordPress was so huge, and unnecessarily so. Their big overhaul of the wp-admin section, in 2.5 I think, de-emphasized the post writing page (something which was previously instantly accessible). That's what started pushing me away from WordPress. Recently I've started looking for another server-side platform. I've been getting annoyed with the extra work involved with static site generators, especially for a rather trivial "look what I saw" blog. I installed Anchor [1] last night, and plan on playing with it. I'm also interested in Ghost, but it hasn't been publicly released so far as I know. [1]: Anchor CMS: http://anchorcms.com http://anchorcms.com
- egypturnash 13y ago
  These days there's a "+ New" button at the top of every single page of a Wordpress site - both the admin section, and the public section if you're logged in - that lets you add a new post, piece of media, page, or user. Or more; I use the Comic Easel plugin to manage my webcomic, and it lets me add a new page that way. That said if you want a CMS that only does the five things you need, you don't want WP.
  - dkuntz2 13y ago
    That's exactly the conclusion I came to. Which is a shame, because there was a point where WordPress basically did just what I wanted to, and put the emphasis on those things. Now it's a full blown CMS, which I don't want or need.
jtreminio 13y ago
About a year ago I moved my blog completely off of Wordpress and onto Piecrust[0]. I realized I didn't need all the dynamic tools available in Wordpress, because blog, and Piecrust has so far worked beautifully. Comments were replaced with Disqus. No more opening my site to any possible security holes, no more having to keep on top of plugin updates, no more crying tears of shame when I snuck a peek at said plugins' source code, I can check in my whole site into github and be done with it. [0] http://bolt80.com/piecrust/ http://bolt80.com/piecrust/
- Kronopath 13y ago
  I'm in the process of doing the same for my personal site with Jekyll.[0] It's so much more convenient to be able to structure and style my website the way I want without having to mess with Wordpress's PHP-based themes. And I find writing in Markdown with optional custom HTML snippets to be much more powerful than trying to wrestle the Wordpress browser-based editor into doing what I want. [0] http://jekyllrb.com/ http://jekyllrb.com/
jamesbritt 13y ago
I'm using Wordpress for a project because of the wealth of existing templates and plugins. Without these Wordpress is not terribly interesting; it's not Wordpress. Once you drop the ecosystem there are plenty of alternative to creating static or near-static sites. edit: I should point out that more alternatives for creating Web content is, on average, a Good Thing. Presenting a tool, however good, as an alternative to Wordpress however brings a lot of assumptions that may cause people to focus on the wrong things. There's probably a market for a form of Wordpress that could use existing themes but not plugins, and only allowed basic posts and pages, with perhaps a more robust security model. E.g. prevent commenting (in order to avoid having to accept external content) except via Disqus or something.
- jsdalton 13y ago
  It's also very easy to extend. It may not be the prettiest code base, but I very rarely hit a blocker where I can't do what I have set out to do. Even if you're not the one actually extending it, the fact that it's easy to extend means there is a wealth of plugin offerings.
  - jamesbritt 13y ago
    It's also very easy to extend. True. I hadn't done any PHP coding in many years, and knew essentially nothing about how WP worked, but Google + tenacity = useful results. Shortcodes, for example; super cool. There are plenty of WTF moments in PHP and Wordpress but nothing that prevents pragmatic results.
    - Karunamon 13y ago
      Worth mentioning though, that level of easy extensibility, combined with Wordpress' absurd popularity, makes it very easy to get into trouble. It's the Internet Explorer of the blogging world. Consider: http://wpmu.org/why-you-should-never-search-for-free-wordpress-themes-in-google-or-anywhere-else/ http://wpmu.org/why-you-should-never-search-for-free-wordpre...
darkFunction 13y ago
The first comment on the article is by Jason Schuller, who created a great little open source blogging platform called Dropplets (http://dropplets.com/ http://dropplets.com/). I use it myself and it's fantastic. Simple and elegant and I feel in control of my blog now- there's no magic.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ryansan 13y ago
I agree that WordPress is a little convoluted for simple projects. However, you can get great starter themes that eliminate that complexity for you from the get-go. Like the _s starter theme or something like Bones. I think WordPress is often the go-to platform because it's just what people hear about -- plus, it's free. My preferred CMS for websites is ExpressionEngine because it's flexible enough to make it what you want. There's no "loop" that you have to deal with over and over and there aren't a gajillion default things that you have to strip out at the outset of a project. The trouble is that clients are afraid to try something that isn't what their neighbor is using. I often get, "Yah, but this is what I used in a past project." or "A buddy of mine used WordPress and he gets 10 million hits a day!" Getting them to pay $299 for a commercial license for EE seems like a really steep cost when they could just get WordPress for free and it's "good enough."
joetech 13y ago
I'm liking Ghost so far, but it's still a very early release and yet to include some base features
jinushaun 13y ago
The problem with this post, and other "WordPressis too complex" posts like it, is that WordPress did not intially start off this way. Wordprrss was originially a simple blog. Once Barley gets enough users, people will want it to do more and more things until it becomes yet another blog turned CMS platform. As for me, I use Jekyll and disqus because I'm just one guy.
- cdevroe 13y ago
  jinushaun: We agree. Sort of our company mantra is "we have a passion for saying no" which means, to us at least, that we think we have the ability to say no to new features that do not fit who we think our target is. Time will tell if we're able to do it. That being said, all software and services as they age begin to suffer from scope creep and feature bloat. Then it will be time again for something new.
jackmcdade 13y ago
Another one: statamic.com. Flat file, live routing and caching, with a responsive cp.
tlongren 13y ago
I think Anchor CMS has done a nice job of filling this space. It's FAR from complex.
mikeschinkel 13y ago
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-blogging-platform http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-...
- frankydp 13y ago
  this should be released by the 15th of oct
Riley 13y ago
I couldn't agree more. In fact, this is why I started building a project for my girlfriend so she could create her own site. And now it's grown into something powerful that I really enjoy using too. http://simplpost.com/blog/what-is-this-thing/ http://simplpost.com/blog/what-is-this-thing/
marban 13y ago
If you're into simple, hosted services, you might give http://www.postagon.com http://www.postagon.com a try.
dsowers 13y ago
You should try out Silvrback (https://dsowers.silvrback.com/introducing-silvrback https://dsowers.silvrback.com/introducing-silvrback). It's a hosted, markdown powered blog as clean as medium.
- silverbax88 13y ago
  Well, I like the name.
knieveltech 13y ago
It's like Wordpress has turned into Drupal and Drupal flipped the hell out and is trying to become Sharepoint. Crazy pills.
buckbova 13y ago
I point complete novices to http://www.weebly.com/ http://www.weebly.com/. It has a gui site builder (wysiwyg) and what not, and is considerably simpler than wordpress. What does barley have over weebly? Can I download barley and install on my servers like I can with wordpress? If not, this is apples and oranges.
homosaur 13y ago
I'm so weary of people pitching the solution to WordPress and then tossing a proprietary cloud hosted thing at me. That's a complete non-starter. All the time I hear from fellow devs "oh don't advertise you use WordPress, it's irrelevant to clients." Tell that to my bank account and all the jobs I've stolen from agencies who wanted to use their BS proprietary CMS. I sell WordPress like this: when you want a rebuild in 10 years and I'm in Thailand smoking drugs with your money pile you just gave me, you'll be able to find someone to work on it no problem. There's plenty to dislike about the WP codebase, but we all have to remember that WP was made in an era when coding reasonable software in PHP was nearly impossible. Nothing backwards-compatible can happen there that isn't going to destroy all the millions of existing sites. It's still pretty freaking easy to build a site with, especially when you compare it to other CMSes of that era. Moreover, their development roadmap is actually really solid. I like where WP is going. I unfortunately would no longer recommend it for basic blogging due to its complexity but as a CMS, there's really not a lot of free software options that can function on that level without extensive database programming and security knowledge.
- ZoFreX 13y ago
  So the advantage of Wordpress isn't anything you could find by looking at Wordpress itself... it's the popularity and huge amount of support that brings? Makes sense. So the "next Wordpress" won't be able to be the next Wordpress until it's popular. It'll have to be good for other reasons until then.
  - jamesbritt 13y ago
    Yes. People who say they are creating a Wordpress replacement need to make clear what they understand Wordpress to be and what exactly they are replacing.
  - lobotryas 13y ago
    You got it! The same Catch-22 applies to many other products like social media (facebook), online auctions (ebay) and the email protocol.
  - homosaur 13y ago
gmays 13y ago
Here's a crazy idea: You're a developer. If it's too complex for your customer, then simplify it. Fight the urge to build something new just because you can. You're really the only person that cares that you built it, everyone else just wants something that works. I understand why you're following 37signals' simplicity model, but those markets didn't have flexible CMS' to start with like we do. The beauty of WordPress is that it's easy to hide and remove extraneous features. It has everything you need and you can just remove the stuff you don't, just like the way a sculptor chisels away the unneeded parts. It's building from a different direction. WordPress is a tool, not an end product, and it's been around for over 10 years. Face it, websites are a commodity these days. What new features, processes, or anything else exist that WordPress can't do with a few tweaks? Front-end editing, one-click setup, drag and drop, it's all easier to add than building from scratch. If your goal is to create value, then think hard about what problem your customer is trying to solve. If it requires something new, then by all means build it! But I don't see this as one of those cases.
- rocky1138 13y ago
  In my experience developing websites for clients, I've found the ones that ask for simplicity up-front (or ones I assume will need simplicity) end up requiring other more complex features down the line, making WordPress a great choice to start with and then expand into without much rework.
AsymetricCom 13y ago
Perl/CGI is pretty simple..
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  Well that brings back memories! use CGI;
matthewbaker 13y ago
The only differentiator that I see you offering is inline editing, which can be activated very quickly with a Wordpress plug-in. I think you're traveling down a meat grinder of a road by choosing to spend time on this.
lrem 13y ago
Incidentally I just released my me-too static generator. It's targeted for academics, with all the features an academic expects (hyphenation, LaTeX math support and so on). If anyone's interested: https://github.com/lrem/phdoc https://github.com/lrem/phdoc
kartikkumar 13y ago
> Some sites are blogs, others are small business web sites, others are photo galleries, others are one pagers of information, and some are pages that let you buy things. There shouldn't just be one tool to build all of these. I find that above text a bit odd. Maybe I'm misinterpretting it, but why exactly shouldn't there be one tool to build all of those websites? It might very well be that Wordpress is not suited to build all those things, but it doesn't follow logically that there should not be a "mastertool", no matter what. I understand the general sentiment of "horses for courses", but I also think that it's important to make sure that your tools are performing well, rather than trying to make a blanket statement about what web dev tools should and shouldn't do in general.
jere 13y ago
Just wanted to say: you've got yourself a pretty amazing promo video for Barley. Love the quote, song, style, everything really.
rocky1138 13y ago
Consider Perch. http://grabaperch.com/ http://grabaperch.com/

47 points by cdevroe 13y ago

I used WordPress for a while, but switched to a host of static site generators about two years ago. One of the big reasons I switched was because WordPress was so huge, and unnecessarily so. Their big overhaul of the wp-admin section, in 2.5 I think, de-emphasized the post writing page (something which was previously instantly accessible). That's what started pushing me away from WordPress. Recently I've started looking for another server-side platform. I've been getting annoyed with the extra work involved with static site generators, especially for a rather trivial "look what I saw" blog. I installed Anchor [1] last night, and plan on playing with it. I'm also interested in Ghost, but it hasn't been publicly released so far as I know. [1]: Anchor CMS: http://anchorcms.com http://anchorcms.com

egypturnash 13y ago
These days there's a "+ New" button at the top of every single page of a Wordpress site - both the admin section, and the public section if you're logged in - that lets you add a new post, piece of media, page, or user. Or more; I use the Comic Easel plugin to manage my webcomic, and it lets me add a new page that way. That said if you want a CMS that only does the five things you need, you don't want WP.
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  That's exactly the conclusion I came to. Which is a shame, because there was a point where WordPress basically did just what I wanted to, and put the emphasis on those things. Now it's a full blown CMS, which I don't want or need.

jtreminio 13y ago

About a year ago I moved my blog completely off of Wordpress and onto Piecrust[0]. I realized I didn't need all the dynamic tools available in Wordpress, because blog, and Piecrust has so far worked beautifully. Comments were replaced with Disqus. No more opening my site to any possible security holes, no more having to keep on top of plugin updates, no more crying tears of shame when I snuck a peek at said plugins' source code, I can check in my whole site into github and be done with it. [0] http://bolt80.com/piecrust/ http://bolt80.com/piecrust/

Kronopath 13y ago
I'm in the process of doing the same for my personal site with Jekyll.[0] It's so much more convenient to be able to structure and style my website the way I want without having to mess with Wordpress's PHP-based themes. And I find writing in Markdown with optional custom HTML snippets to be much more powerful than trying to wrestle the Wordpress browser-based editor into doing what I want. [0] http://jekyllrb.com/ http://jekyllrb.com/

jamesbritt 13y ago

I'm using Wordpress for a project because of the wealth of existing templates and plugins. Without these Wordpress is not terribly interesting; it's not Wordpress. Once you drop the ecosystem there are plenty of alternative to creating static or near-static sites. edit: I should point out that more alternatives for creating Web content is, on average, a Good Thing. Presenting a tool, however good, as an alternative to Wordpress however brings a lot of assumptions that may cause people to focus on the wrong things. There's probably a market for a form of Wordpress that could use existing themes but not plugins, and only allowed basic posts and pages, with perhaps a more robust security model. E.g. prevent commenting (in order to avoid having to accept external content) except via Disqus or something.

jsdalton 13y ago
It's also very easy to extend. It may not be the prettiest code base, but I very rarely hit a blocker where I can't do what I have set out to do. Even if you're not the one actually extending it, the fact that it's easy to extend means there is a wealth of plugin offerings.
- jamesbritt 13y ago
  It's also very easy to extend. True. I hadn't done any PHP coding in many years, and knew essentially nothing about how WP worked, but Google + tenacity = useful results. Shortcodes, for example; super cool. There are plenty of WTF moments in PHP and Wordpress but nothing that prevents pragmatic results.
  - Karunamon 13y ago
    Worth mentioning though, that level of easy extensibility, combined with Wordpress' absurd popularity, makes it very easy to get into trouble. It's the Internet Explorer of the blogging world. Consider: http://wpmu.org/why-you-should-never-search-for-free-wordpress-themes-in-google-or-anywhere-else/ http://wpmu.org/why-you-should-never-search-for-free-wordpre...

darkFunction 13y ago

The first comment on the article is by Jason Schuller, who created a great little open source blogging platform called Dropplets (http://dropplets.com/ http://dropplets.com/). I use it myself and it's fantastic. Simple and elegant and I feel in control of my blog now- there's no magic.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ryansan 13y ago

I agree that WordPress is a little convoluted for simple projects. However, you can get great starter themes that eliminate that complexity for you from the get-go. Like the _s starter theme or something like Bones. I think WordPress is often the go-to platform because it's just what people hear about -- plus, it's free. My preferred CMS for websites is ExpressionEngine because it's flexible enough to make it what you want. There's no "loop" that you have to deal with over and over and there aren't a gajillion default things that you have to strip out at the outset of a project. The trouble is that clients are afraid to try something that isn't what their neighbor is using. I often get, "Yah, but this is what I used in a past project." or "A buddy of mine used WordPress and he gets 10 million hits a day!" Getting them to pay $299 for a commercial license for EE seems like a really steep cost when they could just get WordPress for free and it's "good enough."

joetech 13y ago

I'm liking Ghost so far, but it's still a very early release and yet to include some base features

jinushaun 13y ago

The problem with this post, and other "WordPressis too complex" posts like it, is that WordPress did not intially start off this way. Wordprrss was originially a simple blog. Once Barley gets enough users, people will want it to do more and more things until it becomes yet another blog turned CMS platform. As for me, I use Jekyll and disqus because I'm just one guy.

cdevroe 13y ago
jinushaun: We agree. Sort of our company mantra is "we have a passion for saying no" which means, to us at least, that we think we have the ability to say no to new features that do not fit who we think our target is. Time will tell if we're able to do it. That being said, all software and services as they age begin to suffer from scope creep and feature bloat. Then it will be time again for something new.

jackmcdade 13y ago

Another one: statamic.com. Flat file, live routing and caching, with a responsive cp.

tlongren 13y ago

I think Anchor CMS has done a nice job of filling this space. It's FAR from complex.

mikeschinkel 13y ago

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-blogging-platform http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-...

frankydp 13y ago
this should be released by the 15th of oct

Riley 13y ago

I couldn't agree more. In fact, this is why I started building a project for my girlfriend so she could create her own site. And now it's grown into something powerful that I really enjoy using too. http://simplpost.com/blog/what-is-this-thing/ http://simplpost.com/blog/what-is-this-thing/

marban 13y ago

If you're into simple, hosted services, you might give http://www.postagon.com http://www.postagon.com a try.

dsowers 13y ago

You should try out Silvrback (https://dsowers.silvrback.com/introducing-silvrback https://dsowers.silvrback.com/introducing-silvrback). It's a hosted, markdown powered blog as clean as medium.

silverbax88 13y ago
Well, I like the name.

knieveltech 13y ago

It's like Wordpress has turned into Drupal and Drupal flipped the hell out and is trying to become Sharepoint. Crazy pills.

buckbova 13y ago

I point complete novices to http://www.weebly.com/ http://www.weebly.com/. It has a gui site builder (wysiwyg) and what not, and is considerably simpler than wordpress. What does barley have over weebly? Can I download barley and install on my servers like I can with wordpress? If not, this is apples and oranges.

homosaur 13y ago

I'm so weary of people pitching the solution to WordPress and then tossing a proprietary cloud hosted thing at me. That's a complete non-starter. All the time I hear from fellow devs "oh don't advertise you use WordPress, it's irrelevant to clients." Tell that to my bank account and all the jobs I've stolen from agencies who wanted to use their BS proprietary CMS. I sell WordPress like this: when you want a rebuild in 10 years and I'm in Thailand smoking drugs with your money pile you just gave me, you'll be able to find someone to work on it no problem. There's plenty to dislike about the WP codebase, but we all have to remember that WP was made in an era when coding reasonable software in PHP was nearly impossible. Nothing backwards-compatible can happen there that isn't going to destroy all the millions of existing sites. It's still pretty freaking easy to build a site with, especially when you compare it to other CMSes of that era. Moreover, their development roadmap is actually really solid. I like where WP is going. I unfortunately would no longer recommend it for basic blogging due to its complexity but as a CMS, there's really not a lot of free software options that can function on that level without extensive database programming and security knowledge.

ZoFreX 13y ago
So the advantage of Wordpress isn't anything you could find by looking at Wordpress itself... it's the popularity and huge amount of support that brings? Makes sense. So the "next Wordpress" won't be able to be the next Wordpress until it's popular. It'll have to be good for other reasons until then.
- jamesbritt 13y ago
  Yes. People who say they are creating a Wordpress replacement need to make clear what they understand Wordpress to be and what exactly they are replacing.
- lobotryas 13y ago
  You got it! The same Catch-22 applies to many other products like social media (facebook), online auctions (ebay) and the email protocol.
- homosaur 13y ago

gmays 13y ago

Here's a crazy idea: You're a developer. If it's too complex for your customer, then simplify it. Fight the urge to build something new just because you can. You're really the only person that cares that you built it, everyone else just wants something that works. I understand why you're following 37signals' simplicity model, but those markets didn't have flexible CMS' to start with like we do. The beauty of WordPress is that it's easy to hide and remove extraneous features. It has everything you need and you can just remove the stuff you don't, just like the way a sculptor chisels away the unneeded parts. It's building from a different direction. WordPress is a tool, not an end product, and it's been around for over 10 years. Face it, websites are a commodity these days. What new features, processes, or anything else exist that WordPress can't do with a few tweaks? Front-end editing, one-click setup, drag and drop, it's all easier to add than building from scratch. If your goal is to create value, then think hard about what problem your customer is trying to solve. If it requires something new, then by all means build it! But I don't see this as one of those cases.

rocky1138 13y ago
In my experience developing websites for clients, I've found the ones that ask for simplicity up-front (or ones I assume will need simplicity) end up requiring other more complex features down the line, making WordPress a great choice to start with and then expand into without much rework.

AsymetricCom 13y ago

Perl/CGI is pretty simple..

jlgaddis 13y ago
Well that brings back memories! use CGI;

matthewbaker 13y ago

The only differentiator that I see you offering is inline editing, which can be activated very quickly with a Wordpress plug-in. I think you're traveling down a meat grinder of a road by choosing to spend time on this.

lrem 13y ago

Incidentally I just released my me-too static generator. It's targeted for academics, with all the features an academic expects (hyphenation, LaTeX math support and so on). If anyone's interested: https://github.com/lrem/phdoc https://github.com/lrem/phdoc

kartikkumar 13y ago

> Some sites are blogs, others are small business web sites, others are photo galleries, others are one pagers of information, and some are pages that let you buy things. There shouldn't just be one tool to build all of these. I find that above text a bit odd. Maybe I'm misinterpretting it, but why exactly shouldn't there be one tool to build all of those websites? It might very well be that Wordpress is not suited to build all those things, but it doesn't follow logically that there should not be a "mastertool", no matter what. I understand the general sentiment of "horses for courses", but I also think that it's important to make sure that your tools are performing well, rather than trying to make a blanket statement about what web dev tools should and shouldn't do in general.

jere 13y ago

Just wanted to say: you've got yourself a pretty amazing promo video for Barley. Love the quote, song, style, everything really.

rocky1138 13y ago

Consider Perch. http://grabaperch.com/ http://grabaperch.com/