Got suckered into helping a non-profit with their web presence, and of course, it was a Wordpress site (at least it wasn’t a Facebook page).
Everything about WP is mildly infuriating at best, just regular infuriating at worst. Everything. If you know, you know. It’s like they tried so hard to make it “easy” to use that it went full circle into a fuster-cluck of unintuitive and clunky everything.
With every facet of the experience being an upsell, is there a tier where it’s just not horrible to use?
Specific examples:
- WYSIWYG editor doesn’t match the preview
- Chasing the scroll point in the outline when moving elements
- Can’t edit block properties after they’re added
- Everything is a damn upsell
- Want to remove the Wordpress footer? Upgrade to a paid plan (does not specify tier)
- Okay, I’ve updated to a paid plan that meets our needs. Please remove the footer please.
- “Oh, you have to have a plan two tiers up to do that”
- General clunkyness
- Only supports Apple map embeds which cannot find any of the addresses I need to enter
- Cannot embed a Google map properly (doesn’t support percentage widths for the iframe element so I can’t make it responsive)
- Changing the column widths on a layout grid block never releases the slider, so you have to mash keys until something else selects that locks it roughly where you want it.
Yep. It’s for a good cause (the NP does good work) but I am so regretting my decision to help. If they didn’t already have the site partially setup and the domain registered with WP, I’d have just offered to throw it on one of my own servers and written something with Tailwind (it’s a static site, so they’re not using any of the blog or interactive stuff).
It’s kind of the perfect storm - supposedly simple enough for the average person to use (they can’t), and restrictive enough for the dev that it’s like being forced to type with oven mitts on. At least in my experience.
That’s exactly what it feels like. xD
That is in fact the result every time that claim is made about any product. That was the pitch for COBOL, so simple your business analysts can write it, no need for expensive programmers. That was the pitch for business rules engines. That was the pitch for dozens of drag and drop GUI based programming “languages”. Lastly that’s the pitch for any number of specialized tools that let you “script” them like WordPress.
Not once in the hundreds of times those claims have been made have they ever been true. Every last time the only thing you end up with is a horrible programming language/framework that still requires programmer’s but makes the experience of working with it miserable for them.