Open Concerns

in #wordpresslast month

There is some drama in opensource land and maybe more specifically in CMS land. As anyone who has tried to find a flexible blogging system that can become a Ecommerce or Paywalled platform at the drop of a hat knows: "Not much competes with Wordpress."

Now sure you have Shopify, Ghost or something like Webflow and even weirder than that you have "AGENCIES" who use those exact tools which are self-service all-in-one paid for things already and make bank on it.

Anyway I will get sidetracked by the scummy vendor-lock these developer "AGENCIES" employ with custom this that and a goose who-ha.

No matter the premium option available it has always been quite nice to think with a little bit of time you can build something equal or better for free on Wordpress.

Sure there are platforms dedicated to providing Wordpress this and that, but for all intents and purpose they are scamming the end user and none of them is bigger than WP-Engine.

I only came to know that a money gauging platform like WP-Engine exists because the founder of Wordpress went and lost his damn mind.

For the low down you may watch the above video because it is all rather tedious but in a "got yo popcorn?" kinda fashion.

The unfortunate part for me is now that many who do in-fact build their careers on Wordpress (not the scummy ones) but the real developers who provide plugins of real value, themes that aren't designed to rake you wallet, those people would be in a bit of a panic.

Since Wordpress can essentially take their work and run with it then lock the original creator from the ecosystem it creates a horrible precedent.

I did see the one guy complain about losing $40K in revenue from his "AGENCY" not getting to sign someone... I might be stupid but I can't imagine a Wordpress site that would cost that much unless you are building "custom" as these little bitches do...

I think the bigger concern for many is the absolute inconvenience of now likely needing to start learning and using other CMS options like Drupal maybe.

The problem is that Wordpress is pretty much the only self-hosted web solution with a huge community of tools for almost any endeavour, and of those the main 3 would be looks, money and data.

Wordpress plugins make it stupid simple to start an ecommerce site that looks good and build forms to capture data is a no-brainer.

I don't think there is any other system that is open with remotely the same customizability out of the box - so I think that would be the biggest issue. The inconvenience.

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I saw some of the huge outrage on X about wordpress but wasn't sure what the whole issue was about.

The main dude is upset that a company is not giving wordpress money so he started doing things to hijack their access to wordpress code etc. Dude is batshit crazy.