Wordpress Drama

[yavuz]

As someone who's built most of their stack on WordPress over the years, I’m honestly blown away by how things have gone downhill. Matt Mullenweg no longer feels like a visionary, more like a bitter kid trying to micromanage everything. The drama around plugins, hosting, and policies feels completely unnecessary. Just petty and disappointing.

These days, I’m building frontends with Lovable and Builder.io, and going either custom or with Strapi on the backend. Honestly, it outperforms WordPress in every way. It’s cleaner, faster, and way more flexible. WordPress just can’t keep up anymore.

 

[Suzanne O]

I was not saying he is a saint. Just that he fell less from where he's already been. And less than other CEOs did.

Zuckerberg is not the problem.
It's more the fact that Matt lost his mind at everyone over everything.
Imagine if the guys at XF did that to us on here and they weren't able to generate any funding because of it.

 

[RobinHood]

Got any examples of what you've made with these tools?
How much customisation do you do to the underlying code on top of what they produce?
Not had a chance to try any of these AI builders yet.

 

[Milen]

Let me find out if I have read and understood correctly! If I make a website and host system for XenForo under the domain XFengine.com, which host will be the best solution. Then I will have to pay XenForo Ltd for the fact that thanks to me more and more people use their system? Did I understand correctly or.....?

 

[TLDR]

Let me find out if I have read and understood correctly! If I make a website and host system for XenForo under the domain XFengine.com, which host will be the best solution. Then I will have to pay XenForo Ltd for the fact that thanks to me more and more people use their system? Did I understand correctly or.....?

Ok to be completely fair, it is a little more nuanced.

So first of all, Matt was mad (see what I did there) because WPengine "looked" like an official, WordPress-affiliated service. I mean, in a way, it has been, because Automattic had stock until they sold it.

And when this point started to look ridiculous, he was mad at WPE for using Automattic's infrastructure for plugins and themes. Which, maybe, kinda, sorta, might be a somewhat fair point. I mean Linux distros also ask providers (of servers and clouds and whatnot) to mirror the repos so the customers don't flood the server with requests which is all the same anyway.

The first point is completely up to you to hit the tone right. The second point would not happen on XF because the repo is the Resources, and those are not freely available anyway but locked behind a user login (with license check and everything).

 

[Digital Doctor]

whatever happened with Wordpress ?

 

[Alpha1]

WordPress 6.9 is just out with mostly editing / drag n drop / site builder improvements. Nothing earth-shattering, but the direction is good. i.e. current release is part of phase 2 of the roadmap. 7.0 is planned for next year.

Long term roadmap​

As a reminder, these are the four phases outlined in the Gutenberg project:

1. Easier Editing — Already available in WordPress, with ongoing improvements
2. Customization — Site Editing, block patterns, block directory, block themes
3. Collaboration — A more intuitive way to co-author content
4. Multilingual — Core implementation for Multilingual sites

 

[digitalpoint]

whatever happened with Wordpress ?

It’s still internally terrible, so same ol’…

 

[Wildcat Media]

It’s still internally terrible, so same ol’…

Exactly. And the plugin ecosphere sucks. There are very few plugins that work well and have ongoing development. I can't begin to count the number of times I've had to rebuild entire sites due to developers abandoning plugins, while they sit there still available in the wp.org repository. It sucks that I have to stick with them for a couple of remaining sites.

WP is shamefully bad. And their versioning...it's more like they're on version 1.84 not 6.9; they are totally clueless how versioning works. They think 7.0 comes after 6.9, for the same crappy code base they've used since day one.

 

[digitalpoint]

Exactly. And the plugin ecosphere sucks. There are very few plugins that work well and have ongoing development. I can't begin to count the number of times I've had to rebuild entire sites due to developers abandoning plugins, while they sit there still available in the wp.org repository. It sucks that I have to stick with them for a couple of remaining sites.

WP is shamefully bad. And their versioning...it's more like they're on version 1.84 not 6.9; they are totally clueless how versioning works. They think 7.0 comes after 6.9, for the same crappy code base they've used since day one.

Yep… 100%. Just yesterday I was adding some new stuff to my Cloudflare addon and I made a conscious decision to do the WordPress version first because I feel like I loose 20 IQ points when working with it. Then the XenForo version afterwards so I can recover the IQ. That’s actually true btw…

 

[Wildcat Media]

Yep… 100%. Just yesterday I was adding some new stuff to my Cloudflare addon and I made a conscious decision to do the WordPress version first because I feel like I loose 20 IQ points when working with it. Then the XenForo version afterwards so I can recover the IQ. That’s actually true btw…

I almost bought your Cloudflare add-on for WP, but then I felt like I really shouldn't be dumping money into something I was going to move away from anyway. I'm already moving one blog to XenForo (using a basic theme with most of the forum features stripped away), and plan on another. There will be one WP site left that hosts recipes with a very popular add-on, but I don't need R2 uploads for that one, and already have Cloudflare configured to protect all the WP sites anyway. Over the past month or so with all the bot traffic and other things going on, I've spent enough time in Cloudflare that I'm actually getting a lot more comfortable with it.

One WP site is somewhat "broken" if I update it, thanks to some plugins that were abandoned several years ago. So I'm kind of stuck on that one. I'm debating if the Resource add-on with XF would work, or if there is another add-on I can use for it. Whatever I can get away from WP...the sooner, the better.

 

[Digital Doctor]

Xenforo - forum = Xenforo platform + Xenforo forum addon.

Xenforo platform + blog addon = Wordpress killer.

 

[digitalpoint]

Xenforo platform + blog addon = Wordpress killer.

Yep… I’ve been saying for years that XenForo should be a framework and things like Forum and CMS is just a fist-party addon you can optionally install.

 

[Digital Doctor]

Yep… I’ve been saying for years that XenForo should be a framework and things like Forum and CMS is just a fist-party addon you can optionally install.

Xenforo inc coders seem to like ideal frameworks (underlying nuts and bolts) as much as the surface (Xenforo forum) ?

Isn't that how Xenforo started ? An argument about vB4 as a retool or new version ?

Time for Kier to get back to what he loves, making ideal frameworks.

Wouldn't that be a HUGE thing in the ever increasing cloud world ? Wouldn't cloud vibe coding benefit from a rock solid base like Xenforo framework ?

Xenforo Framework + Tiptap would be amazing. Google Docs like editing. Notion like Databases. Just making a Notion like platform that people could self host is a billion dollar idea.

 

[Wildcat Media]

Yep… I’ve been saying for years that XenForo should be a framework and things like Forum and CMS is just a fist-party addon you can optionally install.

As we say in these parts...if it happened, I'd be all over it like stink on . Seriously, just altering the standard XF theme by stripping out many of the forum elements brings it awfully close to being a blogging platform. It's like it just needs that extra little shove to push it over the edge.