Data from Google Trends noted search requests around the website builder boomed in October 2024, especially on October 8, where it reached a peak score of 100.
The spike in interest signals a shift in user behavior, indicating an active search for options which align more closely with user expectations around performance, control, and transparency.
Man baby and WordPress.com CEO apparently forced this on the open-source community.
I looked at that, and thought “ha, that is a funny and obviously fake screenshot of a headline, created to ridicule photomatt for being petty in his fight with his company’s biggest competitor”.
Then, after closing this tab I did a double take and thought: maybe it’s actually real?
And, it turns out, yeah, he really actually did that (after a court injunction required them to remove the checkbox which required users to pledge that they were “not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise”):
😂
he's not wrong, though
😂🙏🏻 I love my Pizza Hawaii 🥰
Canada’s best invention since the telephone
Is this real?
If only there was some way to find out. I guess we’ll never know.
Thanks 🙏
Billionaire power is corrosive to maturity; you can make everyone do what you want, so why find common ground or compromise when you can just throw a shitfit and demand that people agree that pineapple is tasty?
Just think, they could’ve spent this energy making WordPress not suck for Kubernetes deployments instead, but that’s fine, we can settle for being told what to think and feel instead.
🤡
Can’t wait for Google to add a required login checkbox that says “I accept that Jesus Christ is the one true Lord and Savior”…
And I’m being downvoted. Cute.
Keep em coming, kids. Nothing I’ve said is wrong.
Sorry, i’m already partial to banana-mascarpone pizza.
I’ve been giving static site generators a go, specifically Hugo. Webdevs have always treated static sites as unserious, but there’s plenty of sites out there where it’d be ideal. An awful lot of those sites are currently on WordPress.
Does your local mechanics shop need a dynamic site? No. Local restaurant that points you to an external site for online ordering? No. Little gift shop selling locally produced goods? If they don’t intend to sell online, then no. A manufacturer with product pages that have a “where to buy” button that sends you to their sales partner in your country? Nope.
How many CPU cycles are wasted on these sites that could be nothing more than reading a file and streaming it back to the client?
It’s open source. The alternative, if project governance actually starts making problems for end users is that someone will fork it. Cloning the plugin/theme repository makes that a bit more hassle, but it’s entirely doable.
That’s not to say there’s no room for more CMS projects. Wordpress is a little clunky, and variety is good.
Some weeks ago I learned about ClassicPress: https://www.classicpress.net/
Is there a better alternative though?
I was pretty disappointed at the options for a FOSS CMS when I last looked a year or so ago. Ghost looked good but is held back by the lack of a genuine plugin system.
Drupal has been the main competitor for decades, but the biggest difference is that it’s not blog-style with a timeline of posts, it’s nodes and categories.
I moved to a static site generator, Hugo in this case, because I felt that WordPress was too much for a simple website with some articles.
WordPress itself isn’t a problem. Leach away my FOSS fans. Heck, customization up the wazoo. For a developer, it’s really really easy to make it your own. A competent developer can be taught WordPress CMS and understand what’s under the hood within a few weeks.
Contributing back to WordPress? Getting harder and harder with Matt being the biggest barrier.
It’s becoming one of those scenarios like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Fuck those companies. But I’ll build apps on your platform and play by your stupid ass rules to earn a living while also giving you the finger.
Just learn HTML?
/s
Depends on what you want. A one-size-fits-all? Hopefully not.
If I were building a larger site, I’d probably use Drupal.
It’s a bit of a departure from the “blogware” mindset though. You’re not managing “posts” and “static pages”. You’re managing stuff. …Which can manifest itself as pages or posts. Different kinds of content, different kinds of fields. Blogware gets hacky if you are posting anything but pages and posts, but in Drupal, every type of content is equally tweakable.
The spike in interest signals a shift in user behavior, indicating an active search for options which align more closely with user expectations around performance, control, and transparency.
Good. Maybe people still can draw conclusions from the barrage of security holes in plugins (of which anything other than a blog had way too much and shouldn’t have used a blogging engine from start).
it is not about wp engine. wordpress has just gotten really shit. gutenberg forced onto users eventhough it is the worst rated plugin in history. connect to wordpress,woocommerce,elementor,yoast so they also have a store to sell you shit with a subscripton. woocommerce pdf slip plugin…4$/month on the woostore…
enshittification has won this game.
wordpress has just gotten really shit. gutenberg forced onto users eventhough it is the worst rated plugin in history
meh I make entire sites with gutenberg, nothing was forced on me cuz I could have used (yuk) elementor… I prefer not to
eventhough
You can leave the space in. It’s okay.
No one’s going to remember this in a year. Remember when Unity supposedly torched their business? They’re doing fine.
The point of free software is that it doesn’t have owners and you (individually or collectively) can just create an “alternative” yourself by forking it if you disagree with anything its maintainers do.
Yet, wordpress relies on a defacto central store for plugins, where properties (along with the userbases) of private companies can be taken over by Matt Mullenweg.
That definitely sounds like a problem. I am not familiar enough with WordPress, is that store not FOSS or are the plugins not or what is going on?
The plugin was an open source, but commercial product. It was forked and its store page was taken over by wordpress.org which unilaterally controls this store. Plugin updates were redirected to the fork, so essentially all users (bar the ones on wp engine, ironically) were stolen. Also, many sites were broken overnight by this move.
It’s a jarring situation, and frankly, I think it goes beyond the CEO being an asshat (he surely is). But I think this whole story shows signs of a mental illness.
