Considering I am a javascript person.
None of the solutions right now seem to be close.
Not even ghost.
I think it'd best to just stay. I see one of two likely things happening:
1. Matt comes to his senses and formally secedes his control of the WordPress Foundation and WordPress OSS to a qualified group of people.
2. He doesn't and the project gets forked to something that gets traction and will be immediately compatible.
This is all avoidable if Matt can restore confidence in WP's governance and give the community a sense of a positive vision for the future. That would probably have the side effect of being financially beneficial to Automattic and bring WPEngine into the major contributor fold.
I'm not sure how likely the good version of this is but for everyone's sake I hope WP ends up with some kind of positive resolution.
Matt would basically have to sell the company and the only buyer would be... cough cough ... private equity!
Don't you think Matt could de-integrate himself[1] with and achieve proper governance[2] of the Foundation, while retaining control of Automattic? I don't see the issue, there.
1. I think having Matt as a part of a properly-governed Foundation would be best.
2. "Proper governance" meaning one person can't go apeshit and single-handedly do crazy stuff like what has been happening.
- static website generators (Hugo, etc)
- WYSIWYG editors (Wix, Squarespace)
- Frontends (NextJs, etc) backed by Headless CMS (Strapi, firebase, etc)
There really isn't a good spiritual successor currently. Someone should clone the UX of WP Admin panel, plugins, etc and drop the worst tech debt. Base it on React and make it really easy to deploy.
(edit: formatting)
Most people do not care about this drama. And they dont want to care about it because it is their golden goose and customers are used to it.
Yes, some people do care, and yes they are very vocal. And yes there are a lot for those voices here.
Just look at X.
Is still around and still has an extreme amount of users. and it looks like some of folks that switched to Mastodon are not loving it.
Now personally I want WordPress to die because its a nightmare of code.
I find the data schema pretty good. Now with Pods it takes care of extending the schema. The back-end code is decent.
The front end story is different. But after I quit using plugins and started doing a lot of my own coding it is somewhat better but the layers upon layers upon layers of CSS is still a nightmare.
I dont believe the world will accommodate my wish on WordPress.
I also want social media to die. I dont belevive the world will accommodate me on that either.
Can't recommend it enough.
Probably WordPress. The user-base is so huge that you'll be in good company. There will be an easy migration to whatever the future version is that Matt doesn't have the ability to supply chain attack.
I don't think the drama will kill Automattic or any of the other involved orgs either. The post-WordPress thing for me, I think, is going to be something that successfully ejects the Gutenberg editor and builds around it. Probably something that borrows from what Drupal has done with Gutenberg and what Corcel has done with WordPress models.
I have always considered Drupal to be a pretty industrial-strength system, but quite complex.
One of the nice things about Drupal, is that you could customize the backend. I have always hated WP's backend.
1. You need a deep knowledge of Drupal to put together something good. It's not beginner-friendly, you will build a couple clunkers before things click.
2. The mind-share is not there like it was for Drupal 7 - the devs still contributing are great, progress is being made, but if you're used to Wordpress plugins or an NPM package being available for whatever you need, Drupal can be frustrating.
On the other hand, Drupal does not have the WordPress ecosystem habits where many modules/plugins have paid upgrades and/or scatter ads all over your site. The WP plugin ecosystem feels so scummy in comparison.
I agree the switch to Drupal 8 really killed its momentum though. (Drupal was reimplemented on top of Symfony and all existing modules/plugins had to be almost entirely rewritten to work with it - which was quite a difficult hurdle for people used to the previous conventions. Also being able to implement a site's configuration entirely in code, a beautiful feature of D7 albeit one that required third-party modules to implement, was still not quite working properly last time I checked.)
> you could customize the backend. I have always hated WP's backend.
Ironically, this is something the Wordpress Foundation has made worse over the years.
As we all realize, WordPress itself is not an immaculate piece of code, but it's the plugin library that makes it. But we now know that even the plugins themselves are liable to hijacking from within.
While it would be nice to start from scratch with a modern, better CMS - the reality is going to be something like ClassicPress but using only premium, manually installed plugins.
you can still use Payload headless of course with any frontend but out of the box you have everything you need. it's pretty nifty
I have been considering pouring energy into this problem or at least offering advice, our approach is definitely bespoke and not scalable in the way WP is, but I've long thought the middle ground is in need of ~something~.
I do have one complaint. It can be remarkably difficult to learn how to use Statamic properly. The documentation is a bit lacking. I often struggle to find a solution to a blocker only to find out there's a simple solution that wasn't documented very well. I think this is one of those things that will likely improve as the community continues to grow and mature.
When I last did my survey of what I could use as a CMS I ran into this, looked at the licensing and walked away quickly.
But I may be wrong since I didn't do any more research, .
You can connect these frontend frameworks with a Headless CMS which is, ideally, open-source and written in JavaScript/TypeScript too. This way, you can customize both the frontend and the CMS using the same programming language.
We created Strapi, the most popular open-source Headless CMS, to replace legacy stacks with full JS stacks: from the frontend framework to the CMS.
The biggest difference for daily use is you don't get an editor. You can pick your markup language (markdown being the most popular) then it's just files. If you're a developer this should be natural.
I am also using Ghost on a different site, I like their clean editor.
I was also hoping that Ghost would become much larger than it has.
Used WP for 7 years and now Squarespace in its place for 5.
The builder has gotten so much better in the last 3 years, and I am very impressed. The plugin library is expanding at a faster clip now, too.
To do what?
For blogs, static-site generators (Eleventy, Astro, or Hugo). For CMS, a combination of a headless CMS with something on the front (e.g. Eleventy + CloudCannon). For ecommerce, dunno, Shopify?
1. Try ClassicPress
2. Move to Drupal
3. See if you like something else. E.g. BoltCMS, OctoberCMS, or one of the october forks.
4. Go back to Joomla
5. Quit your job and do something you'd like to be doing
For a larger site with multiple contributors, I'd probably still stick to Wordpress, though. Its admin experience and ecosystem are just too mature to not take advantage of.
> tl;dr After Matt Mullenweg, BDFL of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, has dragged WP Engine publicly through the mud for not paying a ludicrous amount of money or contributing (enough) to the open source project, WP Engine is suing Automattic and Matt Mullenweg, while Automattic claims misuse of WordPress trademarks.
It is confusing.
I would like to think that Core is open source and free but fromt the site it appears that the "control panel" is limited to 1 user in the core / free version?
I have not used it in a long while but last time I did it was insanely fast.
WordPress is open source and free to use no matter how many users yo have.
