I commend you for plugging AI into a commonly used tool in this space vs creating your own platform for building websites with AI. It's refreshing to see someone working back from a great user experience and meeting the users where they are today. This requires focus in the face of constant integration challenges and lots of design restrictions/limitations. Best of luck going forward!
That's a very good question. In WordPress, Full Site Editing (FSE) allows you to design your entire site—including the header, footer, and everything in between—using blocks. Blocks are the components for adding content in the new WordPress block editor, enabling you to easily incorporate text, images, videos, and more.
For this new approach, your site will require a Block theme, designed specifically for compatibility with this new editor. Also, one thing to note here is that the traditional theme customizer is no longer present in this environment.
Instead, FSE allows direct manipulation of site elements within the WordPress Block Editor
interface.
The full site editing thing really changes the wordpress paradigm. It's a different mental model. I've had people reach out for help because it ends up being a wall for them. The communication/education aspect of it needs work.
WordPress has become an unwieldy mess of plugins and licensing nightmares. Until Automattic addresses the core technical debt, WordPress will continue disappointing developers seeking a clean, modern CMS foundation.
That is absolutely true. But if you're just blogging and only need the base install with Classic Editor and Akisment, it's actually quite nice and still better than most other platforms for self-hosting.
There are some high-quality GPL-spirited plugins and themes (like those by Anders Norén https://andersnoren.se/teman/ or Oliver Juhas https://www.webmandesign.eu) amid an utter avalanche of SEO cruft so you have to know where to look.
It is _if_ you self-host. Paying wordpress.com has been a crappy experience IMHO. You don't get much for the base tier and you don't get plugins until you pay for a much more expensive tier. I just wanted a place to blog and was tired of managing my ghost self-hosted blog and didn't want to pay for ghost. I ended up having to move up a tier to do basic things (sunk cost) and I blog probably 1-2 times a year if that. Whatever, I've paid up for a year or two now and once that expires I'll re-evaluate.
These are us programmers' trappings. The users don't give two sh*ts about that. They care whether what they use is easy and it works. And Wordpress is both of them.
None of the 'better coded' competitors have been able to eat into its market share ever - demonstrates the gigantic gap between what programmers think to be important and what users think to be important.
Genuinely interested: which are the “better coded” competitors? An earlier post here on hn by dan about web bloat seemed to show wordpress was actually the best option in that category?
Name your pick. Most of the competitors of WP back in the late mid-2000s went the way of 'better coding', busying themselves with MVC implementations, migrating everything to OOP because it was 'the way' and so on. WP went for ease of use, ease of modification and easy extensibility etc. At one point the disparage between it and its competitors was so high that in some wp competitors, you had to code an entire module just to add some text to a web form. With WP you just edited a file.
> An earlier post here on hn by dan about web bloat seemed to show wordpress was actually the best option in that category?
Yep, that's the irony. All the competitors kept adopting 'better coding paradigms' as their respective fads hit their maximum, ending up in bloated stuff. They occasionally had to break backward compatibility to get rid of the code that was adopted in that fashion too - doing much harm to their ecosystems.
But WP went for ease of use, simplicity, and from another angle, having to protect backward compatibility that WP project gave so much importance helped it keep itself lean, mean and simple. So now WP is something you can just launch in a total of 2 second from zero to production-ready thanks to one-click installs, hosts and all the infra providers that offer it, with ridiculously low initial and ongoing costs. Also because it didn't buy into the recent frontend fads and stayed server-side rendered, it still remains very lightweight and renders in an average of ~1.5 seconds in any device/browser. Of course, some of the framework craze made its way to wp in the form of React and full site editing, but still, the general landscape remains lightweight especially if you use hybrid themes. (they allow all the fse and page builder functionalities by trading off only not being able to edit header & footer by dragging & dropping, so its a good trade-off).
In a way, WP having to deal directly with the actual users whose priorities were always on the practical side helped it a LOT in getting the market share it has and the reliability, extensibility and ease of use it still excels in.
As long as WordPress is around, PHP will never die. Great for me with my 15 years of PHP experience.
Once upon a time, I was involved in creating the largest WordPress media platform in the world with WordPress. You can view it at news.com.au, but there are about 20 other publications hosted on the same platform.
Sounds interesting and promising, I just hope it doesn't fall into the WP pricing trap that I have seen becoming the norm lately. The extreme case was this theme I downloaded for free, but later found out that in order to make all functionality work as I've seen in the demo, I would have to subscribe to an X number of paid plugins, something around a thousand dollars per year. This has nothing to do with the WP mentality from years ago.
Veteran of WordPress here: Pretty much every theme on Envato Marketplace comes bundled with plugins that at some point will create a licensing nightmare. It's been this way for years, and is not a recent development. The problem is in order to "bundle" these premium plugins (think Slider Revolution) the theme authors often devise their own propriety update mechanism that after a few years becomes...wonky at best. Separate licensing that relies on "native" update processes would actually be ideal.
The process goes like this:
1. Login to update plugins.
2. Some plugins don't auto update because they require licenses.
3. Search for the theme's proprietary update process or plugin.
4. Discover that the Envato support license is expired.
5. Renew license (typically 6 months).
6. Update plugins again and... pray that it works because support is always a gamble.
We stay away from Envato and the like if we can, but inevitably we acquire clients with themes purchased this way.
hey now, when using terms like 'Slider Revolution' always remember to include a trigger warning to avoid sending all the salty wordpress webdevs into fits of insurmountable rage
I hear you, just yesterday I was telling someone in my office how that plugin just gives me the sweats. I can stumble around sure but woah is that UI a beast. Very capable but not for the faint of heart.
Yes, I began to work with Envato back in 2008 and saw this licensing tsunami coming. I have canceled my subscription with them last November. I couldn't find a single theme without Elementor bundled up. I feel sorry for those many unadvised people who actually bought the theme to later had to open the wallet again to pay Elementor for a subscription.
I made a website for a small non profit I'm a member of recently, wordpress seemed like the natural fit but wading through the hive of scum and freemium that is wordpress plugins made me feel dirty.
With all the awesome open source self hosted apps these days I'm surprised there's nothing better for generic websites.
I'm working on a WordPress site for a test campaign right now, and pretty much came to the conclusion that most themes/plugins send me down two rabbit holes: 1) Licensing / security issues 2) Getting them beyond 80% of what I need.
Ended up using only a single third party plugin (Polylang), and doing the other stuff we need in a custom theme based on Automattic's (possibly a bit unmaintained) _s base theme.
Feels like a good decision, only took me about a day more to fiddle with the CSS to make things look right and write a bit of PHP code for some functional requirements we had. Seems way more economical than dealing with a soup of plugins and some shady theme. Since you can nowadays just create custom blocks for all the site elements, it's a pretty OK development experience.
But I also can't quite believe this is the state of the art... I use static site generators whenever I can, but for a bit more dynamic websites, it seems WordPress is one of the best out of what seems like only bad options.
Also an interesting case: Automattic seems like a company that's set up to resist enshittification. But all those theme and plugin authors with profit motives are not, which has about the same effect as if Automattic was ruining the platform for short term profits.
Same experience, i’d go for static any time i get the chance but needed something easier to edit for non techies for a non profit’s site. Ended up going with squarespace because I was so over wordpress licensing issues and plugin bloat. Now squarespace has its own frustrations like their terrible events calendar but at least the budget is under control.
> Also an interesting case: Automattic seems like a company that's set up to resist enshittification. But all those theme and plugin authors with profit motives are not, which has about the same effect as if Automattic was ruining the platform for short term profits.
What??!? Automattic took VC money. Not those small time plugin and theme authors who are trying to make a living by doing open source. When those smaller plugin and theme authors want to exit the business, they sell their businesses to people who are inside the WP space instead of investment funds or VCs. They keep things inside the ecosystem.
Whereas the 'not enshittifying' Automattic is trying to get money out of its entire ecosystem by doing a lot of shady things - from flooding google with plugin listing links that go to wordpress.com instead of wordpress.org so that those who want to use plugins will have to buy the $300/year Automattic hosting plan instead of being able to download the plugin from wordpress.org and use it at a $5 dollar hosting that they could get from anywhere. All the Automattic plugins are full of popups for upsells and upsold features too.
Its amazing how people have a lot of grand-standing opinions without accompanying levels of information.
That hive of scum and freemium makes those plugins keep existing. Like in the rest of open source world, anything that cannot fund itself eventually disappears. You install a free plugin, it works great and you are happy - for a few years. Then one day you find out that the maintainer cant continue maintaining the plugin anymore because of work/personal life getting busy, and voila - you have to find another plugin again.
Its much better to have that 'hive of scum and freemium' and pay some money to those plugins than having to look for another plugin to build your site on every few years.
But there is no guarantee that the person will not outgrow, need, or want some other plugin later. Just because somebody paid for something, doesn't mean it will be continually useful.
Well, it doesnt work like that in reality. The reality is that people scarcely shell out money for premium plugins, and that is only after using their free version enough time and then needing things from the paid version. So the freemium format keeps working.
I'm curious about whether there are any ethics boundaries for the website generator, as the demo video posted on twitter shows that fake 5 stars "user" reviews are automatically included in the website created...
Depends on the context here. In our tool, we comply with OpenAI policies to avoid generating anything like hate speech and etc. For the review, you get more of a starter-content as a website admin to start customizing, not the final edit but a start point. Hope it makes sense.
Anyone know of any good multi site options other than Wordpress? Say you were running 300+ sites by your lonesome, what would you pick, Wordpress or something else?
I’m asking because for this use-case Wordpress Multisite seems to be the only option, but I’ve also always despised its structure and inner-workings.
We've got a hundred tenant multisite running on WP and have been looking at other options over the last couple of weeks. I am most interested by PayloadCMS https://payloadcms.com/blog/how-to-build-a-multi-tenant-app-... . However our CMS needs, for this product, are very simple, so Payload suits.
We've also been looking at a multitenancy option for WordPress, in particular using Gridpave https://gridpane.com/kb/using-gridpane-multitenancy/ but you need the $5000 annual dev pro plan (annual for unlimited sites). We use Gridpane already on their lower cost plan and have found it excellent value for money.
We will probably go with Payload. WP is getting messier by the day. With the AI coding tools getting better and better it feels like having as much flexibility as possible will have a huge benefit down the line.
Look at Craft CMS multi site for a better implementation. It’s also multi-lingual, e.g. you can maintain Spanish and French translations for your global elements and then designate language for each of your sites and it’ll translate any shared content.
However, for 300 sites, anything but a custom web app will get out of hand because that’s too many to manage in a UI that’s primarily meant for a handful of sites.
I'm using it for a 10.000+ multisite installation (quite simple personal blogs), and even though it has it quirks it works quite well. Almost nothing is best in class and a slight pain to get it working, but the sheer size of the ecosystem is still it's biggest plus. In general every problem or feature you can imagine already exists or is easy to bolt on.
I’ve seen drupal routinely implemented for larger clients, along with ezpublish and typo 3 at a previous job (i designed templates for these). The fact those were large projects that required multiple devs to implement led me to believe those were not a good fit for smaller projects/clients/personal sites.
Yeah, it's weird. All the modules (plugins) are free and open source as well so it looks like a no brainer. It probably has something to do with the steep learning curve which can be intimidating.
I don't think there is any other option. If those are very simple websites, there are some wp plugins that allow you to map them to domains, i.e you can use a single instance of WordPress and map the content to different domains. One plugin for this use case is WP Landing Kit.
Commenting w/o reading the article. WordPress triggered me.
Last month I created a brand new site using WordPress. I followed a 90 minute video on YouTube where I was instructed step-by-step on what to do. The result is that I'm happy with the finished product and learned a lot about WordPress along the way.
However, I would have NEVER got there on my own absent this remarkable YT video. WordPress is too complex, too bloated, too filled with messages from plugins, too reliant on magic, too reliant on plugins to do anything advanced beyond setup a post or page.
I hate WordPress so much. I'll still use it because it's entrenched, and because it's less time that coding a Jekyll site to equivalent functionality.
> that coding a Jekyll site to equivalent functionality.
With me it's the exact opposite. Jekyll, a GH actions, deploy to a static site hosting takes under an hour. I know Jekyll, so it's a bit cheating, but yesterday I did the same with hugo, that I never used before and within 1:30 I had a site running on Digital Ocean.
And It's also not because I don't know WP. I've build and scaled a dedicated WP hosting company so I know quite a bit about setting it up :)
In my case it's always because I know the primitives of the web very well: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (and the JS/HTML Web APIs).
WP has layers upon layers upon layers between me and these primitives. Hugo or Jekyll don't: they are as close to these primitives as possible. I know the primitives, I never know these layers upon layers upon layers. They are shifting targets, poorly documented and often horribly executed. So instead of "just using flexbox for this thingy", In WP I need to learn yet another "site builder", or "theme framework", or, worse but rather common: all combinations of all options; infinite amount of permutations that interact, or conflict, or both.
(And yes, I know I can build a WP theme from scratch, staying close to the primitives. But that's far, far more work than 1:30h)
This is just the startup cost. Which is, in my experience, rather high with WP. The real cost comes at maintaining and future development and scaling.
I’m building pretty complex stuff with just Flask and Jinja, and as somebody who also has deep fundamentals it’s so much easier than wading through layers of useless crap these frameworks de jour push in your face.
The problem is that right now the pathways to quickly bootstrap a WordPress site with a good enough, customized theme are hidden under SaaS providers, like hosting companies. Use InstaWP or ZipWP, for example, and you can start in just minutes.
But while you can start in just minutes, you don't have that publishable site that you have in your mind, in minutes.
It takes hours to learn where to find what. To select a good theme. To find the right plugins. To remove the wrong plugins. To then fix some error that comes from removing the plugin. Or to fix an error from installing the wrong one. Experienced WP devs even ask hours for this: people who do this all day, for a living, will charge you hours to build this for you.
Sure, you may be lucky and have some goal in mind that happens to be ridiculous easy with WP. Or you may not have something in mind and just go-with-the-flow to end somewhere that happens to be easy with WP (a good strategy really).
But, in general, I have something in mind. A landing page for a startup. Or the outlines of a webshop, or a simple blog even, and it will take me hours or days banging against WP to get there, whereas with hugo or jekyll that's less than a few hours of banging.
> I'll still use it because it's entrenched, and because it takes less time than coding a Jekyll site with equivalent functionality.
I wouldn't count on that. It required a 90-minute video for you to get going with Wordpress. I would say, if you know some basic stuff (e.g., know how to install gem, how to write markdown/html), you can set up Jekyll in under 90 minutes:
gem install jekyll bundler; jekyll new myblog; cd myblog; bundle exec jekyll serve
Now, you have a server up and running. You can start creating a post by creating a markdown file in the _posts folder.
For me personally, it would be faster to learn any easy-to-use static site generator than Wordpress.
I had this mindset for years. "It's not real programming. It's for people with no brain", I would tell myself. A lot of other developers share this idea, I think.
However, I currently am in the plan of launching a series of blogs, somewhat related to each other. I figured I'd try out wordpress, just to see what it's like, and also because I plan on having other people working on these blogs.
Whoah! Completely blown away by wordpress and how quickly I can set things up. PHP is quite simple, and the built-in functions are very helpful.
If you plan on just launching some products, learn wordpress. If you want to learn a programming language, go ahead and write the entirety of the code base yourself - that's the only reason I can think of to not use wordpress (for myself).
I recently was forced to use WP for a site due to third party constraints. It simply wreaks of being a swiss cheese of security vulnerabilities once you start adding plugins - so that would be my main reason for staying away from it for a simpler site. For a more complex site you will wind up with so many plugins you are better off custom since something will definitely break from an update down the road.
My favorite thing was how easy it was to create a simple plugin from where I could inject my own php / html / js/ css at just about any stage of the pipeline, and crazily enough, I tried too many cms that would not allow me to override and direct edit the html on a page. It does win in the "easy to deploy but fully customizable" category, just because of that.
But my thought when using it was sometimes "they made this more complicated and difficult than doing it directly, because they managed to convince people the direct programming was out of reach". But that is how I feel about most frameworks, so I might not be objective on that one. Overall it was faster, but the tradeoff was massive opacity. I recently noticed a tracking pixel on my site and have to figure out which a**hole plugin dev is injecting it, then find a different plugin or write my own. I have always been vanilla for my other sites, so learning to combat other vendors and having an adversarial relationship with my own site really breaks the mental model for me.
1. You can install it in a toaster. The cheapest hosting service will offer PHP and MySQL. It will run slow, but it will run. It will be easy to install and start working right away.
2. You can train anyone to use it and put content on it in an hour.
WordPress is best viewed as a framework for people who don’t want to touch code. The reason it feels more difficult to ‘do it directly’ is because most WP users really aren’t expected to do so; they’d be using plugins rather than writing their own code.
I completely understand that, but in the real world, you will need to get your hands dirty with a bit of code because no matter how complete, there will be an edge case where you need to jump outside the box.
> It simply wreaks of being a swiss cheese of security vulnerabilities once you start adding plugins
The security industry in WP space is bigger than most open source spaces, comparable with Linux. If you go use plugins with a few hundred installs, yeah, you may end up with security risks. But if you use plugins with a few thousand installs and more or use plugins that are from maintainers who have other plugins with such large amount of installs, you should be safe.
I’ve built my own websites running on NextJS, Django, Rails, Jekyll, and Hugo and it was great as a developer getting exactly what you want. Recently we brought on some marketing people and trying to get things out on a custom Django app was blocking them because of a lack of engineering resources. Their campaigns were delayed and they were getting frustrated. We moved to Wordpress and have setup a vetting process for plugins which they just need 2-3. Marketing can update the website as needed and don’t need engineering time. Most of what they create are forms, blog posts, and pages. So nothing super complex anyways.
As an entrepreneur I see why WordPress has such a large command. Plenty of people who can work on it. If you are nontechnical and use a hosted solution you can create a good enough MVP with all of these plugins. As an engineer everything about it is annoying but it commands 42% of the web so it must be doing something right.
> I had this mindset for years. "It's not real programming. It's for people with no brain", I would tell myself. A lot of other developers share this idea, I think
Yeah. I also had the same mentality until I started interfacing with actual users, site owners and customers and they started telling me that they don't give two sh*ts about the things that we programmers think to be 'important'. They care whether something is easy, cheap, it works and that's it. And they are right - they have actual businesses to run, and their livelihoods depend on it. Then I tried setting up and using a few WP sites - holy crap, that was easy. Even if the coding paradigms in some parts of its code were not 'up to date', it worked like a clock, and it took away all stuff that I had to do manually before. Then with time I understood that the project was not changing those 'not up to date' code inside the codebase to keep backward compatibility - which is critically important for the users (who now included me), and I came to appreciate it. I also did some coding on it and got some users and learned that users really, really, REALLY hate their websites and businesses getting disrupted because some programmer/maintainer thought to update something in a backward compatible way because it was 'better programming'. So now I don't do it either.
Mind sharing that video? I have a friend that set himself up on a WordPress site because he wants to be able to have control over his very small private training business. I'm a full-stack dev, but don't know anything about how WordPress does things to be able to help him out.
" followed a 90 minute video on YouTube where I was instructed step-by-step on what to do. The result is that I'm happy with the finished product"
Now try doing that as a non technical person with anything else and report to us if you succeeded. You won't. This is why WordPress is popular. Liking or hating doesn't matter. No one has been able to build something that can replace WordPress.
Same. I tried many times in the last 10 years to see if it improved, but every time it got worse. Especially the plugins. Automattic should have killed many of them by integrating the functionality, but they have seem to have stagnated years ago.
Automattic are one of the worst offenders when it comes to plugins, a bunch of features that should be in core are in their jetpack plugin that integrates with their proprietary SaaS.
Background: I got my start dabbling in WP around 10 years ago, and still maintain a few WP sites.
If you needed a 90-minute video — I daresay you either did it wrong, bit off too much to chew, or were better off using a high-code framework instead.
One of the reasons WordPress got popular is its at-the-time famed ‘five-minute install’. [1] You just throw the files on a server with PHP, give it a MySQL database and that’s it. (Nowadays, even this five-minute process is usually abstracted away behind a mouse click.)
With that, you get the core WP functionality, i.e. a modern theme, the ability to create blog posts, pages, and have visitors leave comments. For many people who just want to get a relatively simple website, this is quite enough, and IMO there is still no comparable no-code site engine.
Want a different look? Just search on the official theme directory (quality varies, but there are decent ones — just try not to get forced into the old ‘classic’ editor), use one of the first-party themes, or write your own.
Want to extend the core functionality? Just search on the official plugin directory (again, quality varies, so exercise judgment) or write your own.
Now, is it possible to blindly throw a cocktail of plugins at the wall, resulting in an unmaintainable abomination? Yes, it is — but as you’ve already discovered, you won’t necessarily like the result.
I'd love to share the link to that video with someone who will benefit as much as you have, so that I can continue to never think about WordPress myself.
Folks here are commenting about this FSE feature that allows you to build a full site starting from a block theme. I did a quick search on YT for 'FSE full course' and found some. I think it's worth the time checking out.
> WordPress is too complex, too bloated, too filled with messages from plugins, too reliant on magic, too reliant on plugins to do anything advanced beyond setup a post or page.
Huh?
The out of the box Wordpress is everything one needs to publish things on the internet. Its easy as hell and that's why its 43% of the websites on the planet.
If you BUILT a site, then it means that you did use it for a specific purpose other than just blogging or having a presence on the internet. If that is the case, how did you expect it to happen? Without zero effort on your side? Have you tried doing the same in React or any modern frontend for comparison?
I get it, i had used a half dozen blogging platforms before switching to wordpress in the early 2000s and beyond the ease of creating a new site, the ui felt very crowded with tons of menus I didn’t need or care about initially. Yes it relatively simple and everything one needs but I get it can be intimidating and feel bloated if you just want a simple blog. The menu structure takes some getting used to. It’s easy to forget after using it for a time. I’m back to thinking it is bloated after a decade of using it, but for different (philosophical) reasons now.
I warn people that even though a good and easy to use tutorial like XYorZ may help teach, be wary that if they are teaching using elementor, bricks or similar page builder (added plugins), that it may be good knowledge, but that's not really wordpress per se.
Anyhow, with the new FSE editing options, I will say that I finally feel we can put the separate page builders to pasture for the most part, and all the bloat that comes with them for most use cases.
Super Appreciate the vids that Jamie Marsland has been releasing - many showing how to do nice designs with base WP, watching the process is helpful getting up to speed with current options - and shows how modern stuff can be crafted without tons of fancy addons these days.
Navigating the new FSE stuff is very different than previous WP ways like the customizer or 'additional css' blocks, it's finally getting noob friendly again.
I first used WordPress in ~2008 and that wasn't the case then, you must have been a real early adopter for that to have been true, or have done something seriously wrong during the install.
Tried and used WordPress since its beta or early release 2003-ish. If I remember correctly, it has no option to have multiple pages, hence the need to install another instance for Pages.
(I see, my original comment was downvoted -- I've no idea. We started WordPress with no option to have multiple pages and now see where we are and what we can do with it. Isn't that an interesting titbit.) :-)
No shade to the creators as I'm sure the tool is great but if I didn't know better I'd say this seems like an astroturfed effort by WordPress to stay relevant.
Existing AI tools alongside other open-source builders (Puck for React, Primo for Svelte, etc.) equals all the good things about WordPress's "WYSIWYG-ness" minus all the unnecessary bloat that's piled up over the years.
