[zubspace]

I avoided wordpress like a plague. Used stuff like django, flask, grav and who knows what. But recently I had to make a website with lots of unknowns which needed to be authored by dummy users and I just said ** it and went with wordpress.

What I struggled with are: 1) Interesting site design, 2) custom functionality through plugins, 3) making it easy to add pages and blog posts with a nice editor.

I'm glad open source solutions exist, but I swear, they always have drawbacks. Either they are code heavy, plugins are out of date, maintenance takes a lot of time or there is no way to easily design a page.

So for Wordpress I bought Oxygen, for which you can still buy a lifetime license for, and oh my god, even I can make a nice, responsive website without touching code. It's such a game changer.

I think lots of people avoid wordpress because of security. But that is not primarily a wordpress fault. Linux & PHP complicates it a lot. And I'm sure those other open source projects have severe bugs, too, but nobody knows or talks about them.

What could bring down wordpress, imho, are expensive license fees for plugins. Who wants to spend 50 to 100 bucks per year and per page for a builder plugin? Everyone wants one, but no one wants to pay yearly. And it seems that all plugin makers are starting to go that way.

[throw5345346]

I agree about builder plugins -- they are expensive mossy lock-in.

WordPress now has a full-site editing system that lets you GUI edit the templates that are in the normal flow. It is not what I would call easy to master at the code level, but there is a global styles system and a way to use Gutenberg blocks to control layout outside the main content flow.

So we are getting towards a point where page builder plugins won't be needed for skilled shops. But IMO until there are really easy to use themes based around FSE (there may be some), small design shops are still likely to use Elementor, which is a slow, frustrating experience (slower and more frustrating than Squarespace can be)