With Astro you can build a static site and if you do want dynamic content later on you can, so you aren't really backed into a corner nowadays.

I've managed a couple of WordPress installs for friends and family and my experience has largely been the opposite in that there's very little truly dynamic content. Of the dynamic content, the vast majority could just be an API (either home-grown or paid 3rd party SaaS).

The flip side of the dynamic content is that every Wordpress I've ever worked on is a horrifying mountain of plugins managed by the world's worst package manager. Plugin A needs to be updated because it has a vulnerability, which requires plugin B to be updated, but the theme hasn't gotten updates in 6 years and plugin B is using new stuff the theme doesn't support, so either the site has to be re-built with a new theme or plugin A just needs to be left at a vulnerable version.

Static sites get around some of that because vulnerable plugins only exist at build-time. I'm not worried about using an old version of Hugo or Jekyll, but I'm very worried about using old Wordpress plugins.

A contact form is a really bad argument for not making the rest of the website static first.

Is this not often trivially solved with islands?

This is the main reason why WordPress is so popular still to this day. You can cache the crap out of the frontend to the point that it’s basically a static site at that point but then it’s still all running on top of a dynamic platform if you need that flexibility in the future.

I got my start in webdev slinging WordPress sites like a lot of self taught devs and I definitely see the pain points now that I’ve moved on to more “engineering” focused development paradigms but the value proposition of WP has always been clear and present.

Given how WP leadership is all over the place at the moment, I can see how Cloudflare sees this as an opportunity to come in and peel away some market share when they can convince these current WP devs to adopt a little AI help and write applications for their platform instead.

Let’s see if it pays off!

My wife's wordpress blog has at least 5 different plug-ins for publishing an article without a header. Every time I fix it for her by removing all but 1 plug-in, she'll install a million others because that's what ChatGPT told her to do.

I have no hope nor expectations of non-technical people performing technical tasks no matter how advanced AI becomes. The only solution is a platform/CMS that already has the all bells and whistles included.

a friend of mine owns a very popular psych/stoner label

until 3 days ago the website was a bunch of static pages, updated by the "webmaster", no shopping cart, no search, no contact form, just the email on the website

he and his employers have been living out of selling records and band merchandising for more than a decade, before he even created a real company

wanna buy a record? press a button that sends you to the paypal cart

wanna pre order? there is a preorder product on paypal, were you can put your shipping address and when it's ready, it'll be shipped to you

he's been selling in Europe and overseas in the US since the day he started

Now it got to the point where he needed to put different currencies for different regions, taxes, tariffs (UK, USA) so he built a new website that (automatically I guess) show the prices in the local currencies and stuff like that

p.s. still no contact form :)

This is why we built https://sumar.io/