[xzel]

Gutenberg is attempting to be a Frontend / UI style site editor (example here: 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]

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]

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!