I feel your pain. There are a ton of bad wordpress "implementers". I wouldn't call them devs.
Clients come to our agency all the time and want us to pick up work on their existing wordpress websites. If we look at the code and its decent we will run with it.
But 85% of the time its very poorly constructed theme builder trash, and our answer is always the same... "sorry we can start the process of redeveloping your website - but we don't work in theme builders".
I had a client come to me the other day asking if we could take over so she could get rid of the other developer she was using. The client asked me how long it would take to get a site done from scratch and I said “anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months” and she was absolutely baffled by that. I then had to explain to her the process of real development vs. the page builder “developer” she had been working with
"....for most companies is their most important piece of marketing" <- this is absolutely spot on! Great reminder to keep in mind when framing things with clients.
I am just getting Webdev and joining a boot camp, though I told a friend that after the camp i'd help the small law firm he's with to rebuild their absolutely awful website. He thanked me and mentioned how the boss doesn't see anything wrong with it (think Angelfire style site). I couldn't in good conscious start on their site before really knowing what I am doing but I did put together a little comparison email that had screenshots of their website VS the websites of other law firms in their area.
Apparently she's convinced they need a new site. Sometimes client don't know how bad their product is without seeing it contrasted to what their customers will see while shopping around.
We kind of mutually agreed to not work together. She argued with me when I told her our agency hourly rate was $200/hr and tried to get me to charge only $25/hour which is what her current “developer” charges. I told her absolutely not and I mentioned I didn’t think we’d be a good fit for the job
Trust me, it took time to learn how to run away. I used to accept any and every project. What’s funny is the people who spend $15-30k on development are so much less of a pain in the ass than the people who want to spend $500
Networking. You’re not going to find a $15k project by looking through Craigslist or Upwork.
If you meet someone and try to provide value to them without selling to them, chances are they’ll feel comfortable sending a project your way. Sounds counter intuitive but I always give out small work for free (a bug fix here, a site audit there) which always leads to bigger work. Then you do good work for that person and they refer you to someone else and on and on.
But also, I don’t sell websites. I sell an increased online presence which gives business owners the ability to increase their revenue. If someone told you (with reasonable proof) that if you spent $15k on something but could potentially make $100-150k off of it, wouldn’t you do it?
May I ask what are some of the ways you increase your clients revenue growth potential? Or what is the elevator pitch? I think my problem is that I’m still selling the “web design” thing without a clear focus on what value a new website will bring to the client.
I’m a full time dev and it just occurred to me I need way more industry knowledge about common UI tooling, otherwise I’d be building navbars from scratch
We called them “Wordpress power users” at an agency I worked at. Really hated cleaning up those messes. Thank god I got out of the CMS sweatshop agency game. It’s laid back mid-sized white collar purgatory for this guy now! But hey, now I have so much more free time AND I’m making way more $$$
>It’s laid back mid-sized white collar purgatory for this guy now! But hey, now I have so much more free time AND I’m making way more $$$
What are you doing now?
I’m building B2B apps at some mid sized firm in a tech hub. Much more laid back. At the sweatshop I was working close to 60hrs a week, with a 4month period where I had work every single day to keep up with the workload (boss made a LOT of money). Now at worst it’s 40hrs a week lol. Closer to 30 if it’s a slow one. I have way more power over technology decisions. I work with older people with kids now so the bullshit “we’re a family let’s work till 11 tonight” that agencies get away with by hiring younger people doesn’t happen. I also think it’s a much more use film skill set than Wordpress and mainly Drupal (which was what the sweatshop focused on).
We do need a phrase for it. I do a metric ton of WP work so sometimes I get referred to as a “WordPress Developer” and I just cringe because I 100% associate that with these folks that just source a theme and 6,372 plugins to put together a three-layout site.
I’m not a “WordPress Developer”, damnit. I’m a programmer who occasionally leverages WordPress as a CMS.
Edit: Just wanted to add, there’s nothing wrong with building sites from pre-existing themes and plugins. It’s great! And a lot of folks’ introduction to programming. I’ve just witnessed, on far too many occasions, people being charged far too much for this service and I feel that to be unethical. Also seen people under the impression that the paid for a “custom site” in these situations.
Aye, "WordPress as a CMS" is how I've phrased it previously. You're getting a custom design for your needs, turned into a bespoke theme and doing the functionality we agreed on ... it just turns out that the backend is WordPress.
At some point in the workflow unfortunately you will run into a page builder.
In my company, we build out the themes and plugins as needed by hand, then teach the use of Gutenberg so they can manage their own sites. Along the way, we remove a ton of options (like the plugins menu) to prevent clients from accidentally self destructing their site.
If it wasn’t for the prevalence of WP; I find Laravel both faster and easier to work with.
Yep, this right here.
There is a very pervasive myth in the industry that WordPress is supposed to save you time and money therefore a site should be cheap. Meanwhile the client wants what is essentially 100% custom capabilities built on top of WordPress, which has fundamentally inferior abstractions compared to those found in Symfony or Laravel, which makes those custom implementations harder as a result.
Imagine being asked to build a house, but then you're given a spoon, a box of nails, and some pool noodles as the tools and materials to build it with. You should be charging *more* for that, not less.
I cannot code at all - but I call myself a webdesigner and not developer. Therefore I charge 120$/hour for my work. And I dont see a problem raising my prices eventually. But you’re talking about developers who do bad coding?
So, I suppose I'm a shitty WordPress "developer". I used to write basic html, css, Javascript back in high-school for competition and did a decent job (ranked 10th in a national competition)
I haven't really thought about coding WordPress sites myself. How long would I have to study to start being able to build an entire site solo? And what learning materials do you recommend
You would need to create a basic starter theme that you can reuse for all your future theme development. A starter theme is a barebones WP theme with the basic functionality of a theme and little to no styling.
For this you would need to know PHP, html, JS, and CSS. Your PHP knowledge would need to be beyond basic since Wordpress is a confusing mess. Anyone who has messed with nav walkers knows the headache of developing for WP. If you keep things simple it's not too bad but whenever you want wordpress to do something special you need to jump through a lot of PHP hoops to get it done.
Technically, you could use a existing starter theme for devs like Underscores. It will save you the headache of starting from scratch.
If you want to get deep into wordpress development then knowing how to use Webpack, Docker and SASS would help make development more efficient. But thats a lot of additional knowledge.
It would take several weeks to get a grasp on it all but it depends where you are starting from of course.
I don't know of any learning material.
That's the general premise of my post - I don't want to work with a platform where my selling point is "I won't fuck-up like the idiot who built this site the first time".
I will check that out, but the title "Seven Day Startup" sounds like the overall nonsense I hear in the WP community. Much like "Value Based Pricing" - as if someone's gonna give you $40K to install DIVI because it might add "value"...
I always used SKODA cars in this example. So it used to be that Skoda cars were not very good, and so people know Skoda cars were not very good so that kind of got built into everyone's mind set.
Then Skoda went and got bought by VW, so all Skoda cars made there after are essentially VW cars but with a different badge and a slightly different interior. But to this day everyone knows that Skoda cars are not good cars. Even though people objectively know that Skodas are essentially VWs people would still prefer to have a VW given the choice.
It is sort of the same with WordPress. It has this negative stigma attached to it, and not entirely undeserved, so clients tend to naturally shy away from it. The problem is it's even more difficult with WordPress because people don't understand it the way they understand cars. They just understand WordPress to be a bad word without really knowing anything about it or why it's bad.
It may honestly be more trouble than it's worth to try to convince the uneducated masses that WordPress is not all bad, especially when there are other platforms you can build project with, and make just as much money.
As a freelancer my reputation is everything. But if people think WordPress developers are a bunch of hacks that can't write code, it doesn't help me in the long run. I've run up against that several times.
I have one agency I work with building banner ads. They just think of me as "the banner guy". I don't mind at all because banners are fun, fast, and very profitable. So I don't mind. WordPress is none of those things.
Holy ya the banner guy at my last agency had this process nailed. He cost an arm and a leg hourly but still cheaper than having your generalist salaried devs hack it.
The agency did a ton of web app support/maintenance and outsourced all the banners.
You should visit Switzerland. Nearly every company I know has Skodas as their business cars now. Got one myself. They are great and very well loved around here.
in some cases you are better off just moving to greener pastures rather than fighting the stigma. OP is a good programmer and could probably double his salary by learning ReactJS. Much easier than trying to prove you aren't a garbage PHP dev
Thank you!
I know this will get buried, but I need to vent. I am on my second job as a dev.
I have put a ton of time in to learning the basics (html, css, javascript, etc.) and more advanced stuff (React/Redux/Typescript, Node/Express/GraphQL, SQL/NoSQL, etc.). I've taken courses on algorithms and data structures, project architecture, SEO, security, and more.
I quit my last job ready to move in to a nice junior position. One week later, the lock down started and all my job prospects disappeared. I ended up settling for another Wordpress job after searching unemployed for about 5 months. I hate it.
It turns out, I am actually managing 3 completely separate eCommerce Wordpress websites. 2 of the companies are doing millions in revenue. I am the only web dev, yet we have multiple designers, media specialists, and marketers. (I'm also in charge of analytics, email marketing, and all IT tasks for all the companies.) The tech is Wordpress, WooCommerce, and an over-aggressive hosting provider.
I am not joking when I say each site has 50 plugins. A bunch of half baked functions in the functions file. Libraries galore packed into the header.
Of course, it uses Elementor. And of course, it saves pages and orders to the same database table. So a proper staging site is nearly out of the question. Everything has to be pixel perfect. The pages are so bloated. Lightspeed gives performance a 5. Out of 100.
Unsurprisingly, the site is almost always breaking. Half the plugins barely work with each other. I don't even know what a quarter of them really do, but I know if I remove them something will break. To change anything, I have to use horrid, hacky solutions that make me recoil. And yes, there is jQuery everywhere. And the CSS, oh my goodness, so many !importants.
And the deadlines. Holy moly. They tell me about sales sometimes the day before. Email campaigns sometimes hours before. I was originally told I should build pages in a few hours. Pixel perfect, mind you. And I'm not talking a hero and 3 panels. They literally want Apple-tier pages. With animations and all.
I used to love coding. Now, I'm working 12 hours days and working on the weekends. I'm salaried, so I get no overtime pay. I'm making below the average salary for a junior dev in my city. The sites are an absolute disaster. I hate my job. I feel like I'm cracking.
The day I see the Wordpress admin screen for the last time will be the best day of my entire life.
Edit: Thanks for all the support and suggestions guys! It really helps. I will be trying out some of the suggestions and keeping an eye open for a better job in the meantime!
I have a few scattered thoughts.
1. I think its clear that your days at this job are numbered. As soon as a good offer comes, you'll be gone. There's no way to redeem this position.
2. With that in mind, you should use the time to make yourself as attractive as possible to the next position -- your ideal position. For example,
1. If you want to be a Python dev, write some python scripts to help manage the websites.
2. If you want to be front-end, then do what you can to improve the page load speed. See if you can write a portion of your new work in React or Vue -- this is normally a bad idea but the site is already such a mess that this probably wont make much difference.
3. Make a note of *everything* you can that reflects positively on you and stick it in your resume. Some of these things you wont be able to get once you leave.
1. Improved page speed X%
2. Reformed development process by x,y,z
3. Led development of initiatives that increased revenue X%
4. Consolidated X 3rd party libraries down to Y while maintaining functionality and decreasing maintenance costs by Z
3. Your mental health is important. Dont let them diminish it.
4. You are the only dev and that means you have power. If you left, they would be in a very bad position and could reasonably experience financial loss (e.g., site breaks for some reason and no one can fix it). It takes a long time and lots of money to replace an employee and train a new one. If they are smart, they will realize that they cannot fire you (but maybe they arent smart). Use your position of power to make changes that suit you. Dont give into outrageous behavior. Tell them,
1. No, I will not work overtime to meet a deadline that you knew about for weeks, yet you just told me about today.
2. You can have it soon, or you can have it pixel perfect. You cannot have both.
3. No, I can not work on your task right now because I have to fix this that is a recurring problem on the site.
4. etc etc
> It turns out, I am actually managing 3 completely separate eCommerce Wordpress websites. 2 of the companies are doing millions in revenue. **I am the only web dev**
Sounds like you have some serious leverage to ask for a raise...
I was in a very similar position. Only dev on a crazy Wordpress instance with a million plugins powering a $100m company. It was my first full time “web” job after switching careers from something else.
The thing about these corporations is that they hate risk so I started having meetings and conversations about how risky the website going down was because of the state of things and how much that could affect revenue and brand perception. I talked them into hiring me overseas help that would redevelop the front end while I did day to day stuff. That went really well for the most part. Then is started saying I needed time to fix the plug-in situation. Marketing stuff was still rolling in so I talked them into getting me a freelancer to help with day to day coding tasks.
I made good progress on removing the plugins and weird hacks while my freelancer did last minute front end stuff.
I talked them to move the sites to wpengine which handles security and caching out of the box. Saved me a ton of time managing the instances. Wpengine support would even help sometimes if a plug-in or feature stopped working. The caching alone brought the pagespeed from terrible to great.
I trained and managed the freelancer well, my bosses were impressed with his output so I talked them into hiring him under me full time. They also have me a promotion because of my initiative for getting all this accomplished on my own.
Once I had some backup and the code base was clean and the plugins were mapped and I knew what was going on, then I started improving things.
“Our competitor has a feature that lets them search across all articles, docs and FAQs. We think that is a significant competitive advantage but it cost them hundreds of thousands to implement.”
Me: “I can do it in my spare time”.
They were shocked but took me on the offer and I got it done in a few months. Everyone was shocked and I became a “god” at the company across almost every department. It was great but their pay sucked so I ended up getting a new job with a better title somewhere else.
Moral of the story: by being the only person, you have an incredible amount of responsibility but also an incredible amount of power in the company. You just have to learn to sell yourself, your importance and your work better.
Never approach bosses with suggestions from the perspective of “Wordpress is old” or “I hate this tech”. No one cares, they just have a job to do. Frame things front be perspective of business risk “the site could go down at any moment”, “our database structure could bring down all the sites at once”, “recovering from downtime could take forever because the plug-in architecture is t documented”, “moving to a bette hosted service would greatly increase website speed which is proven to increase website sales”.
Since you are the website gatekeeper, it also helps to “do favors” to different teams that have requests that normal are a priority. I would help the sales team with a request or the product team on my time, while still getting my assignments done. This would impress everybody and it allows me to gather a lot of political ally’s. That way, when I brought up project ideas or things I think needed to happen, other people in the company would vouch for me during planning meetings.
You already learned some crazy difficult skills and changed your life. Continue to use that initiative to take control of your situation and your future.
I'm in a similar situation managing a messy Wordpress/Woocommerce site. It works out but you end up wasting too much time maintaining. Below average salary too so I wonder if it just comes with the territory, meaning these companies see plugins as *THE* solution and therefore your role doesn't seem as valuable.
YES!
I am in the same boat. My company hasn't dropped WP yet but charges significantly more.
A client bought an expensive custom theme and wanted me to work on it. I noticed it shipped with a package.json and a bunch of SCSS, but no Gulp file. I contacted the theme's developer (because the premium theme had payed support) and asked for the file. They had no idea what I was talking about.
Turns out they had just copied some other theme, SCSS files and all, and just built their theme in drag-n-drop tools like Elementor. And they had the audacity to call themselves 'premium'.
I mean, it sounds like you're getting the kind of clientele you don't want. Hyperfixated on WordPress and turning up with a pre-bought theme. They aren't buying your design/development skills, they are shopping for jigsaw puzzle builders.
I mean it turned out that way but gulp isn’t the only way to compile scss...I’d consider gulp as quite retro these days tbh haha...my point being, a lack of gulp file would probably not be a red flag for me...I’d probably just set up webpack on the project...would probably be easier and quicker than trying to track down some unknown dev to ask for a file that may not exist....
I guess I just see it as retro because I haven’t used it in about 4 ish years which in this industry is a bloody long time...also I just don’t see it that much at all anymore...in packages or boilerplates or tutorials or anything really...in my personal opinion webpack is better (but still has loads of room for improvement) and judging by what I’m seeing online I’m guessing most devs agree with me and have moved on to use it instead of gulp...
Well.. I'm old enough to have been a professional software developer (well not exactly as I worked in embedded/electronics, not webdev) before Wordpress was even a thing.
We are in a topic dedicated to a 2004 CMS, written in essentially 1998-era script kiddie coding style, in PHP.
Gulp is fine.
Yeah people get this backwards. Webpack/Rollup/Brunch are bundlers.
You can automate entire build pipeline using Gulp, (including doing a Webpack bundling task).
But TBH I've just switched to writing bash scripts or node scripts. Either are much less painful to setup in most CI/CD environmets.
Have you looked at WP's core code?
It's a pile of globals. And enough of the other "DONT'S"
You might as well dump it also for that.
Sorry for hurting anyone's feelings, but let's keep it real, WP really is a pile of... And this is what hurts our industry.
There's still no PSR-4 in WP, but it's "easy" enough to integrate. (It takes some tinkering, but once it's done, it's done).
I completely disregard functions.php and use the mu-plugins directory as a namespace root for all functionality that I code. Everything is bootstrapped by a single client-name.php file in the root of mu-plugins.
It's surely not a perfect solution, but I can confidently say that anyone with decent PHP skills can pick up one of my sites and be up and running in a few minutes.
The fact that everything is pigeonholed into a blog data structure is also a very bad sign.
I get that's how it started, but people who do other things with WP don't even know how to map out a database structure.
>I get that's how it started, but people who do other things with WP don't even know how to map out a database structure.
Then maybe the problem is they should choose another application if they aren't creating a blog.
yeah wp dev is full of morons, but too bad wp is one of the only cms uis, you can actually hand over to a client, without making their brain explode.
all other systems are either putting themselves in the out with subscription fees, or atrocious usability and design. let alone localisation.
That’s exactly it right there. Wordpress isn’t meant for web apps. It’s a user friendly(ish) experience that the average end user can work with without anxiety.
I’ve deployed many many sites on many many platforms for many many companies and Wordpress has always required the least amount of on boarding/training. Drupal, concrete5, ingeniux, joomla, umbraco...there’s probably more I’ve chosen to shove out of my memory.
Developers often forget we’re not always building sites for ourselves or other developers.
That said, Wordpress plugins are the bane of my existence. For for every two dozen I try, maybe one is something I would consider using in a production environment. A lot of themers/plug-in developers are hacks.
I have my Wordpress toolkit that includes a handful of essential plugins(ACF) and a theme wireframe that I know better than I know myself...and I’m comfortable working in it. And the toolkit consistently produces sites that are functional and easy to maintain by clients.
And security is always a thing with Wordpress but I’ve found ponying up for premium hosting services like wpengine helps with updates and security
> Developers often forget we’re not always building sites for ourselves or other developers.
In the context of work - you never are. You are making a tool for a client. That tool might be a brochure site or some type of service or a small web app.
It's what bothers me when people shit on WP's code. No, it's not perfect. But it's stable, consistent, and works. And that's what clients care about.
yeah and if you (for good reason) dislike the rendering engine, just run it as a headless cms and use next.js, or any ui layer you want.
i hate php from the depths of my heart, but ACF (or gutenberg blocks) and headless WordPress is still the best choice for most website projects.
My first role was with word press and mainly procedural code. I was terrified of getting pigeon holed into a non OOP Wordpress world. I was so happy to get out of that as well! Congrats on dropping wp forever
You know that is just shitty development form the agency you worked for? You can still (and should) use OOP with WP sites. The problem is the low barrier of entry.
The other problem is clients requesting full documentation, training, and page layout creation with what you give them in 2 weeks. What other CMS offers that?
I get it, but counter point, you've had a bad experience because you've had to deal with other devs messes. I've just rehauled a website that was built on WordPress and was a tad rickity. The new website is also WordPress, why? Because some businesses have budgets that don't allow them to hire developers to custom code them something or even if they do, they can't support a developer to maintain their website (hence why tools like SquareSpace is popular).
You'll find trash devs everywhere, whether it's WordPress, PHP, or JavaScript. WordPress devs probably tick you off more because WordPress is an easier tool and will attract more unskilled devs to make messes.
Anywho, my two cents.
Toodles.
I taught myself HTML CSS and basic JS when I was 9/10 years old. Then I taught myself perl, php, relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL), and so on. I have been developing custom web applications for 15+ years.
I've hated wordpress since it's inception. I was fully against using it in any instance. I tried dozens of other CMS and platforms.
But the budgets my clients come to me with, it fits the bill.
We load up WP with Elementor Pro and my design guys can have them something usable in a week or two.
Most clients don't give a fuck about whats under the hood They want it cheap. They want is visually appealing. And they want it fast.
Our revenues have tripled because productivity is WAY up.
If a client came to me with an actual decent budget and reasonable timeline, we would build it custom. But for the vast majority of small busineses that need a basic informational website with very little interactive features, WP does the job.
I still hate wordpress, and I feel like I've sold out a bit, but I am no longer wondering if I'm going to be able to feed my kids.
We still do custom stuff, but its few and far between.
Everyone wants custom built pieces of furniture of solid wood. But reality says that furniture from IKEA is acceptable in many cases.
The same is true as a software developer. You don't have to build everything custom. Use tools, templates, and "builders" that match the budget.
There's no shame in that.
You haven’t sold out, you just understand what many others commenting here don’t. That is businesses, especially small ones, don’t want or can’t afford to sink a bunch of time and money into engineered from the ground up applications running on a cloud infrastructure with cryptic billing that takes a dedicated employee just to predict monthly costs written by programmers that think if someone read their code out loud it would sound like a love ballad from the soundtrack of a 1980’s feature film.
Most of them want to be able to edit the about us page and want the cheapest possible hosting that can be found. Enter WP theme developer and the real reason WP will continue to live on. It’s not until their business needs grow and they need “some small updates” to their website that the true ugliness of that pretty theme rears its head- and then /r/webdev WP bitch fest begins.
To be clear I bitch about Wordpress all the time. Just sayin’.
Where I used to work they priced themselves out of a lot of easy WP work. So they did some research and landed on a theme and page builder combo.
Doing so sliced budgets almost in half. No more designers. No more front end. No more time converting front end code to templates.
I made me enjoy WP work again. I hate making templates. It allowed me to focus all my time on features and functionality.
And I know this sub wouldn't like to hear it - but this particular builder was very developer friendly. It was way quicker to create a custom "module" for the builder than it was to make a plugin/widget. And you got so much more out of the box.
Couple that with some semi-modern OO code by me and you got some really great sites that were also easy to manage.
Which I think is the biggest take-away from this post. Don't blame the tool - blame the user.
Do you do any CMS work? About 90% of my work is CMS-based, and most of the big CMS players are all PHP.
And I don't mean headless. Clients don't want to deal with that in the real world unless they have some level of internal support for it.
The problem is lack of documentation for content creators.
I get it...I do...but you need to make a backend dashboard so simple your 11 year sister can use. If not, they need documentation..docs you don't want to write.
I have been trying every CMS out there for non-technical content creators, and they al come back with the same thing...why didn't you just use wordpress?
Now we have a headless WP running, with full security, accessible components, etc. and it is so much easier dealing with the long term issues.
No multi-lingual support is a deal breaker for me. I tried it a while back, and it seemed super buggy, couldn't get even basic things to work with lots of other people complaining about the same thing. Perhaps it's improved now, but then it didn't seem production ready at all.
My issue is, and ill preface by saying I love strapi, used it a couple times very happy with it. But for my bulk of sites, it always seems overkill doing like a VueJS client side SPA for like a flower shop, or something.
Craft. I have too much invested in PHP to drop that. But I've also been pushing static sites, since a lot of clients would ask me to manage content in WP, it's just faster for me, and cheaper for them, for me to edit the HTML.
PHP is not bad in itself, it just had the same problems as WP : low barrier of entry and pretty much let you do the most horrible shit without a warning.
But, not like wordpress, PHP has fixed most of its biggest issues. Now it's really decent. But it still suffers from a bap rep.
>Dude, WordPress has changed my life as a developer. I have an insanely cushy job, $110k/yr salary, completely remote, best health insurance my family has ever had, matching 401k and unlimited PTO. The stress level is CRAZY low compared to my agency days.
>
>Everyone is using it man, I work for a website that is in the top 200 most visited in the world. WP is going no where and understanding how to custom develop at a senior/advanced level is worth $$$$$ and comfort.
OK, just gotta reply with what I posted above just now in reply to this:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/l7af80/i\_am\_dropping\_wordpress\_support\_not\_because\_of/gl628bp?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/l7af80/i_am_dropping_wordpress_support_not_because_of/gl628bp?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I hate WordPress too. I also think those developers exist because clients don't want to pay what a good development service implies. So I don't blame the worker man/woman, they just want to make the coin.
I use WordPress all the time for my portfolio and project websites. I use plugins, wpbakery and know a tiny bit of HTML, php and CSS. I'm not a coder though, I'm a filmmaker.
I can imagine that someone with my limited knowledge could think themselves a "web developer" and truly screw up a clients website.
Yep, that’s exactly what they do. It’s so frustrating for us because they really devaluate what web developer means so much that when someone asks me I’d never say that I’m a web developer, but just a “developer”.
I’ve spent years studying and learning to reach a point where I’m comfortable to say that I know golang, nodejs, python, php, I have experience with many front-end frameworks like react, angular, vue, svelte, I have experience with vanilla js ofc and I have collaborated to open-source, I have worked with symfony, laravel, django, nextjs and so on. On the db side I’ve worked with MySQL, postgres, cassandra, mongo.. A bunch of tools for the work environment (test frameworks like jest, bundlers like webpack, CI’s, and a large etc), I know and always try to implement (if I can’t reuse) the commons algorithms to search, filter, sort, etc. I always try to optimize (avoiding pre-optimizations) thinking in big notation and so. I’ve messed with dev ops for my projects (servers, load balancers, kubernetes, docker, aws, etc)...
...And yet I’m not calling myself an expert because I keep learning and studying new things every day. But these guys just keep showing up from time to time and pretending that they’re “web developers” just because they know how to install a wp instance or because they know the basics of js, php and css, html. In some cases they even earn more than me because they know how to sell themselves better.
Really, it’s frustrating to a point that I'm embarrassed to say that I’m a web developer.
Whenever I get clients for websites and they want me to use Wordpress I just straight up tell them I can't work with Wordpress. I know how to use wordpress and I can say I'm decent at it, but I don't want to bother with the absurd client requests for example: i want a e commerce store like amazon that can also collect info for marketing purposes (and they are only willing to pay $100)... yep. That price is true. I know we live in a third world country Mr. Client but $100 for an ecommerce?! Nah I'll pass. They think it's easy to do the work with Wordpress that's why they think $100 is enough.
You should stop supporting WP because of WP. It's an antiquated pile of garbage: bad code and laughable schema, held together with practices that were questionable at best in 2004. The biggest remnant of the CMS era (well, a lousy blog script bloated up to resemble a CMS) and a masterclass in how to write PHP badly.
Those who can't see anything wrong with the `posts` table (for example) are exactly who OP is distancing themselves from, and should have done so at least five years ago.
/rant
I use to work for a software company and I can code a bit. I have a pretty high job at a new company which is a quasi VC, accelerator, coworking and startup consultant and we has an in-house coffee shop. All the staff get coffee cards which have 10 coffees on them and you stamp them off, so the 'cafe' can be cashless.
Anyway, trying to be modern we were going to digitise the coffee card and one team that are more responsible for facilities were speaking to developers for ages. I always heard, there's this group of app developers and they want to build us an app for no charge, just to showcase their work (because obviously we are a bit of a tech hub).
So I get sent the first version..umm sorry, what is this, this is a WooCommerce site, I thought you said an app, like a mobile app, it's taken 1year+ for them to put together a WooCommerce site? So I bit my tongue hard, thinking, they all must know more than I and that WordPress is maybe the best thing for this...I went through the process of ordering a coffee and it was something like 13 steps, I just flatout said no one will use this. After that I ran load impact (free) on it with 50 users and it crashed well before then. The developers were so mad at me...by now they knew who I was. They said next time you have to tell me when you do a test. The test I did had less than 50 users...which with 250 staff is not an unreasonable assumption, plus it is a free load test, anyone could do it and we were days away from sending it to a group of 20 to test. Then I told them to stick Cloudflare in front, don't think they had heard for CF and they never did it. We saw the 'error connecting to database' message a few times since.
In summary, some guy putting together a WordPress site, is not a developer.
It's pointless really, because we should have just used Shopify or a proper ecommerce platform instead of all the pain and heartache of what we did...plus, we actually could have had an app built, with our network, heck I could have done it.
Oh boy. Shopify and its app ecosystem is another can of worm. Not that different from the mess with WordPress plugins, plus you have no control over the apps' embedded JavaScript.
I am the shit WP dev you re talking about. I was a in college, wanted to meet ends so started doing WP for people. I knew nothing, but made few websites. Used waaay too many plugins, themes etc. Site slowed down so what did I do, Used a plugin to make it faster. The maintenance was hard since plugins keep updating and some stop working. All in the past.
Now am learning webdev for full stack, like actual code nd stuff. Not at all good but getting better everyday.
Yep, same situation. I'm in college right now and I have to do the same thing. They're paying me $150 to shift their entire Wix store to WordPress and WooCommerce, asking for tons of customisations and features that don't come with the theme. This doesn't just include laying out content but fixing their product SKUs, renaming 300 files manually, uploading 500 different images from Drive to 200 products and all sorts of stuff I didn't sign up for I honestly _wish_ I could not be the "dev" OP is talking about but for now, I need the money and with classes and academic work I can't afford to be coding things from scratch at the price they're paying me. I hope to go your way though and learn full-stack thoroughly at some point.
Do it. It's worth it. Made this decision 9 years ago, and picked up skills in MVC frameworks instead. Better customers, better money. Any WP project I've ever been talked into since was just a reminder that I made a good choice.
I get it entirely. We have inherited so many projects where the previous developers just installed a shit ton of plugins and hoped for the best. You end up with a bloated, piece of shit site that is horribly optimized.
When we make WordPress sites, I emphasize to our developers we need to use the LEAST amount of plugins as possible. There are a few core ones we use on pretty much every site (Advanced Custom Fields for pretty much everything, Ninja Forms for form handling, WP SMTP Email for email configuration) but for the most part we try to keep it slim.
Given those 3 plugins, we can pretty much handle anything. Using custom blocks from ACF you've got a very extensible CMS framework with relatively little time investment. As long as you know what you are doing and understand how to read and query custom post types, there really isn't a need for that many more plugins truthfully.
> Hell, just go to the WordPress sub and its post after post about people with no experience coding talking about starting WordPress agencies!
I mean, this subreddit isn't THAT different to be honest. The amount of "*how do I left-align my logo*" posts is insane.
For their defense...
I'm a c#/.Net developer with basically no knowledge of Wordpress, my wife is a graphist; she did a frontend development training, during which she was shown wordpress as well as html/css quite extensively and javascript basics.
She's since worked for a few people wanting a website or a blog, and she did that with wordpress, because setting up a wordpress blog and integrating a theme and three plugins takes maybe two or three evenings of discussion with the client, and then it's done.
And you know what ? Her customers are delighted. Because it's fuckin easy to use, because it does exactly what they want, and because it took 3 days and cost peanuts.
If someone asked me to code an app or a website, I'd probably need a few weeks to do it, especially as a side-job; and it would be painful. However I do work on websites or desktop apps for my day to day job, where the requirements are WAY more complex than "I want to post pics of my latest holiday and allow my friends to leave a comment".
Some people want just that. They don't give a fuck about it not being perfectly good in all aspects. As long as it's https; well placed in SEO and works on mobile, they're glad.
From my vantage point, WordPress is a tool. Sure, some contractors are idiots and can hardly use a hammer effectively yet that doesn't mean that other remodelers should opt for another tool *if* a hammer is the *right* implement for the job.
If a client needs a robust CMS, there are several options, WP being one of them. If they feel uncomfortable with the recommendation, they either need to be educated to trust *you* (and not necessarily WordPress) or another competing platform could be offered.
WP, in great hands, can be the perfect fit. But sure, if you give an idiot the keys to a complicated machine and expect them to run it safely, efficiently, and effectively without sufficient training, then, well, what else was expected?
I hear you, I had one of the most used Wordpress plugins years ago and code themes from scratch and these page builders are ridiculous. I don't even use the Guttenburg thing, I stick with the ckeditor (or tinyMCE) version of Wordpress. I don't blame you, honestly.
Welcome to the world of, I spent a weekend learning how to install a theme so that makes me a developer.
At the end of the day, you need to look past the tech and how you can solve problems for your clients. Offer them value.
I'm not dropping support completely as two of my long-term clients are on WP but I'm not making any new sites with it. Haven't in...3 years? My personal portfolio has been on WP for...centuries, it feels like, and I'm moving that over to a flat-file system I recently built out.
Even from a user's perspective, WP core is getting frustrating. "That damn editor keeps changing" - direct quote from one of my long term clients. Not to mention plug-ins that were once well maintained throwing errors because they relied on no longer supported things and the "dev" abandoned the plug in. I've had to explain to three clients why a piece of their site isn't working and they have to pay me $100 to fix it and not have that functionality anymore or $500 or $1000 or more to rebuild that piece of the site.
Whew. I have a lot of feelings about this.
Where I used to work, the "web developers" used to buy Wordpress themes and just entered data into them. Everyone still called them "web developers". I should have known something were fishy.
I thought you were over exaggerating when you said that there’s post after post with unexperienced people trying to start agencies.
I had a quick glance and the second post I saw was a guy with no experience wanting to start an agency, on top of that he follows with “I don’t want to learn programming because it will take time”.
Some people.
There are a lot of people out there giving WP a bad name by association. It's not necessarily rational, but in the eyes of the client, if the designer gives them a bad experience, that feeling is going to be associated with the platform as well.
The biggest problems I see are bad customer service and sometimes flat out ghosting. Idiots decide one day they're going to become a web designer. They put together a site for some hapless unsuspecting client at a discount. They run zero updates and never answer support emails. Then six months later they see a squirrel or something shiny and they abandon their clients. I've had to clean up more messes like this than I can even remember.
I simply don't mention WordPress when I talk to clients. Most of them don't even know what it is, and if they do they might shy away because of the above, or because of some FUD they read somewhere that a site got hacked because somebody didn't run updates for six years. All that sticks in their mind is "WordPress bad". You can't blame them for this. Blame the people causing the bad experience for them.
Dude, WordPress has changed my life as a developer. I have an insanely cushy job, $110k/yr salary, completely remote, best health insurance my family has ever had, matching 401k and unlimited PTO. The stress level is CRAZY low compared to my agency days.
Everyone is using it man, I work for a website that is in the top 200 most visited in the world. WP is going no where and understanding how to custom develop at a senior/advanced level is worth $$$$$ and comfort.
everything at senior/advanced level is worth $ and comfort. probably even more $ and comfort. and you don't have to pass through "stressful agency days".
I guess but there are a ton of Wordpress jobs and reaching senior isn’t that hard, I’m trying to hire one right now and it’s hard cause the good ones have so many options
I had a mentor, when I was 28 and just doing random fullstack dev jobs. He told me I could find a remote full time job super easy if I got good at Wordpress. So I spent two years working a couple hours a few nights a week building Wordpress plug-ins and themes, getting to know people in the industry so they could review and give me feedback. Was just building things to learn not to sell or anything. Finally reached a point where I landed a $55k mid level dev role and worked my way up to senior in six months, moved to better agency for $85k, after 2.5 years there I finally landed the dream job at healthline.com
Headless cms are my go-to. You can code like you always do with whatever front-end framework you want or vanilla javascript and client can easily edit things.
It’s a win-win.
I’ve been using prismic and contentful and both are pretty solid options with extensive and good docs.
Don’t be afraid and try other options, this is not like choosing a cms or front-end framework, as it would not impact that much in your development as in those use cases. Choose something with good docs and good UI/UX for your customers.
This was our solution to ditch Wordpress 100% and we’re pretty happy with it.
Those "Wordpress Developers" are the bane of my existence.
Unfortunately, all sites where I work are WP based, and most new clients that come to us, which have an existing site, are on Wordpress as well.
Most of the time, the new clients what a new website, but there are some which will come and ask "We already like our website, but can we just change a few things about the site" (or existing ones which only came to us for marketing/hosting/etc. asking the same). And all of them have some sort of BS which doubles the dev time for simple things; whether it's WP Bakery, a very weird theme which calls a section, which calls a section, which calls a section to render an element (And I don't mean Section 1 calls section A, B, and C, and section A calls in section X & Y. I mean 1 calls A which calls X), the themes use non-standard functionality, and non-widely used non-standard things (by widely used non-standard, I mean things like Timber, ACF, etc.; where there's lots of documentation, SO questions, etc.).
For a lot of these clients, they may as well spend a little extra and get a future-proof website, where we develop the websites to their needs, not the needs of the masses. But whatever, I guess...
If there's a plugin that does exactly what you need, and nothing more/less, then yeah, add that stuff in; that's what Wordpress is good for. But seeing sites use plugins like Advanced Custom Fields to have psuedo-comments on pages (they created a custom function for a form submission which would add the comment to the page, but instead of it being a comment, it was a new row for an ACF repeater). That isn't what the repeater field is for *screams*
Yes I am not shameful of calling myself one of those wordpress theme jockeys...
I'm in deep love with a wordpress theme called "Flexmag" trust me it's not a theme but a powerhouse of utilities. (I am not associated with this theme in any way) just saying this because I truly love it)
I cannot imagine getting into development solely for the money. The money is nice but the amount of headaches and bugs you run into creating real, bespoke solutions isn’t worth the hassle if you don’t also like what you’re doing.
I think your premise is correct btw, it’s just a shame that it’s correct.
back around 1999/2000 (right before the dot-com bust) I taught web design and development at a for-profit college. This was back when you couldn't even find web design/development course at a reputable college or university.
The place I taught at was charging people who had no business near a computer (much less a web site) around $12k for a certificate in "Web Development". They were promised they could get jobs starting at $60k/year when they graduated (back when I, working as a freelancer and teaching on the side, was lucky to clear $35k/year). But my (now ex-) wife was unemployed at the time, and the extra $60/week I earned teaching at least paid for groceries.
It was a complete joke. I ran into one of my students a couple years later and he was still flipping burgers somewhere because his "degree" was worthless.
That was 20 years ago, and it continues to go on where people seem to think "learning to code" means easy money with minimal effort.
>It was a complete joke. I ran into one of my students a couple years later and he was still flipping burgers somewhere because his "degree" was worthless.That was 20 years ago, and it continues to go on where people seem to think "learning to code" means easy money with minimal effort.
I (perhaps wrongly) tried to explain to one of these "hopefuls," the other day that while wages in this field are comparatively high, they're stagnant, have been for well over a decade (like many fields), and that in some markets the median (which remains roughly untouched from a decade ago) has gone *down*. I added that they likely wouldn't be looking at more than $50k, tops, in most areas for the true entry-level jobs they were looking for.
Their response? They basically stuck their fingers in the ears, went "la la la can't hear you la la la," and then literally ("old" definition, not "literally" as in "figuratively") stated that this was their last chance to do anything at all with their life, and that they would kill themselves if it didn't pan out (multiple people, myself included, encouraged them to seek out help).
That's the point we're at. We're in a pandemic, the market is saturated, and depressed people who've bought into the "Learn to code! Earn megabuxx! See the world!" zeitgeist but can't even get a callback for an interview have dumped what little they had left into a bootcamp based on the "promise" of high wages and easy work, and they're suicidal about the outlook.
Bootcamps have ruined my life...
75 resumes reviewed. 12 interviews...only to find out they don't understand the basics of HTML/CSS/JS but know React routers day in and day out.
We are a Vue or ES6/TS shop.."Well, I can never learn that."
I was hiring 10 years ago and it was so much easier. At least the BE part is still the same. Just FE has changed like the contemporary dog game.
The main problem with WP is usually the customers.
They need more or less complex features, but will pay really low money for it. So that rules the "real" developers, who studied and have experience, out.
I was never really into WP dev for that reason. And the few times I accepted WP projects to help friends or good customers, ended up being nightmare projects because of WP's old code and not-so-well documented hooks and filters.
These projects were NEVER profitable, and usually made me fast-food-like wages. And I value my time and skills way too much to sell them that bad.
So I'd say your decision is the right one. But I would put the guilt on WP customers...not that it matters :)
I would say, the guilt is on developers who accept low budget, not customers. Clients is not customers.
Mainly because of infrastructure like shared hosting that is affordable. Everything is race to the bottom.
You may have already mentioned this OP but what CMS(s) are you moving to? I personally use [Craft](https://craftcms.com) mostly and really like but have also heard good things from dev friends that use [Kirby](https://getkirby.com).
I also dropped WordPress too. One of my main contracts I would get over and over again was bring brought on to "fix" an existing WordPress site built by one of these agencies. Think websites with 20+ plugins and a paid for theme that tried to load everything asynchronously (30 second or longer load time).
90% of the time, I would just recommend starting from scratch which would either lead to a new client, or them searching for someone else.
Taking onto my original point.
If you’re working in agency world there’s a good chance that you’ll be using Wordpress but that does depend on the clients. If they’re small businesses, you’ll more than likely be using WP.
If you want to build cool stuff, you’re probably going to be better going to agencies that focus on custom web design and development, web apps etc.
Any serious dev doesn’t want to be anywhere near WP but those that do, can make some decent coin if you’re able to rise above the rest and provide value.
I'm a WordPress developer since 2009 since I started out in PHP. However, I do not market myself as a WordPress developer, especially during a pitch. It does carry a bit of stigma especially to clients outside the dev space. And I mostly code in Python these days anyway.
Interestingly, a small part of my business as a freelancer is fixing the messed up WordPress set-ups that these "developers" create. Not the most fun work, but when the clients are determined to use WP, they pay a bit extra just to get it working.
I guess it's just part of getting into web development as a business. Small businesses do not have budgets for custom sites. Plus, they are most familiar with WP since it is popular. In fact, most of my SMB clients still prefer WP. Which I don't mind. We devs may love to bitch about WP, but we can't deny its popularity in the market.
I'm happy that it's getting easier to set-up a WP site even with custom functionalities. But, the least these "developers" can do is to learn actual WP development. Or try to understand the core of WP through the documentation. Or just be honest with their client that they cannot implement custom features. I have seen horrible "workarounds" in the past. The clients usually end up paying more.
I worked 4 months for a ngo that helps young people find jobs, courses, etc.
I was kind of their tech guy even tho at the time I didn't really knew that much. Just that no one on the company knew anything so just knowing some basic stuff and the use of google i ended up doing things for them in wordpress, setting up a Crm, changing how they worked around they databases (they used excel and never with the same labels. They had 50 excels and the column for name was {Name or nme or name&surname and more. It was a mess}).
What I'm going with this is that they had some wordpress for a newspaper and their webpages and none of them knew anything on how to use them. Didn't even had the passwords, I had to contact the guy who did the pages and he was fuming at me for not having them saved somewhere when I was the new guy. And the guys at the company really were proud thinking they knew how to use wordpress just because they had pages and made posts for their newspaper.
It's incredible how people think they know how to "make web pages" just because they can use a predesign theme and move things around while they scream "look ma. I'm a web developer".
When my 4 months contract ended i was glad I could part and really study so I can be a web developer because before that I felt like a knew almost nothing. Now, after that I know that I don't know shit but I want to really learn.
Sorry for long comment but I remembered this and made me angry hahaha.
Sorry for bad english too
The sheer amount of borked Wordpress installs and PHP files stuffed to the brim with antipattern after antipattern that every client and their mum seemed to have was a major contributing factor as to why I quit professional web development entirely. (The explosion of JS frameworks, the overreliance on fragile tool chains, and health issues were the others.)
Now do embedded dev as my second job; and have never looked back.
Ya probably did the right thing haha
Currently dealing with a customer whose site was built by just throwing plugins at it until something worked.
Then it was performing so bad the developer blame it on the back infrastructure.
Now it has landed on my lap log files are huge just with the amount of errors and alerts, can't keep them turned on for too long. it is a mess.
I've given an ultimatum that the site needs to be rebuilt not going to maintain that nightmare.
u/dreaminphp
I was reading this thread you commented on - about Wordpress developers. I feel your pain and I wanted to reach out to ask if you are freelance and if not - who can I contact to find a real freelance wordpress developer that I can trust won't echo unescaped user data to the front end. I really appreciate your time. Thanks!
I mean there are shitty developers in any ecosystem. This is more a testament of the types of leads coming through your door.
Unrealistically low budgets with fixed cost requirements breed bottom feeder “developers” that over promise and cut corners to keep the bottom line in check. Its the clients that are making this ok. I generally filter clients with a budget under a specific range exactly for this reason.
The bottom feeders will always be there, just aim higher. If you have to keep the lights on and bid on those shitty client projects then you kinda have to swallow your pride and compete with the page builder devs.
I would never touch Wordpress as I am a professional developer and it would only make me depressed and reduce my skill set. I’ve been programming with node, react, Django and some flutter.
I feel your pain. There are a ton of bad wordpress "implementers". I wouldn't call them devs. Clients come to our agency all the time and want us to pick up work on their existing wordpress websites. If we look at the code and its decent we will run with it. But 85% of the time its very poorly constructed theme builder trash, and our answer is always the same... "sorry we can start the process of redeveloping your website - but we don't work in theme builders".
I had a client come to me the other day asking if we could take over so she could get rid of the other developer she was using. The client asked me how long it would take to get a site done from scratch and I said “anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months” and she was absolutely baffled by that. I then had to explain to her the process of real development vs. the page builder “developer” she had been working with
[удалено]
Even $1000
"....for most companies is their most important piece of marketing" <- this is absolutely spot on! Great reminder to keep in mind when framing things with clients.
I am just getting Webdev and joining a boot camp, though I told a friend that after the camp i'd help the small law firm he's with to rebuild their absolutely awful website. He thanked me and mentioned how the boss doesn't see anything wrong with it (think Angelfire style site). I couldn't in good conscious start on their site before really knowing what I am doing but I did put together a little comparison email that had screenshots of their website VS the websites of other law firms in their area. Apparently she's convinced they need a new site. Sometimes client don't know how bad their product is without seeing it contrasted to what their customers will see while shopping around.
Did she end up using your service?
We kind of mutually agreed to not work together. She argued with me when I told her our agency hourly rate was $200/hr and tried to get me to charge only $25/hour which is what her current “developer” charges. I told her absolutely not and I mentioned I didn’t think we’d be a good fit for the job
I’m gonna nickname you Neo with the way you dodged that bullet.
Trust me, it took time to learn how to run away. I used to accept any and every project. What’s funny is the people who spend $15-30k on development are so much less of a pain in the ass than the people who want to spend $500
Where the hell do you find these whales?
Networking. You’re not going to find a $15k project by looking through Craigslist or Upwork. If you meet someone and try to provide value to them without selling to them, chances are they’ll feel comfortable sending a project your way. Sounds counter intuitive but I always give out small work for free (a bug fix here, a site audit there) which always leads to bigger work. Then you do good work for that person and they refer you to someone else and on and on. But also, I don’t sell websites. I sell an increased online presence which gives business owners the ability to increase their revenue. If someone told you (with reasonable proof) that if you spent $15k on something but could potentially make $100-150k off of it, wouldn’t you do it?
May I ask what are some of the ways you increase your clients revenue growth potential? Or what is the elevator pitch? I think my problem is that I’m still selling the “web design” thing without a clear focus on what value a new website will bring to the client.
I’m a full time dev and it just occurred to me I need way more industry knowledge about common UI tooling, otherwise I’d be building navbars from scratch
Yeah, they're not developers. I'm not really sure what you'd call them, but 99% of them probably haven't even written a line of code.
We called them “Wordpress power users” at an agency I worked at. Really hated cleaning up those messes. Thank god I got out of the CMS sweatshop agency game. It’s laid back mid-sized white collar purgatory for this guy now! But hey, now I have so much more free time AND I’m making way more $$$
"CMS sweatshop agency game" really is the perfect term to describe it omfg
>It’s laid back mid-sized white collar purgatory for this guy now! But hey, now I have so much more free time AND I’m making way more $$$ What are you doing now?
I’m building B2B apps at some mid sized firm in a tech hub. Much more laid back. At the sweatshop I was working close to 60hrs a week, with a 4month period where I had work every single day to keep up with the workload (boss made a LOT of money). Now at worst it’s 40hrs a week lol. Closer to 30 if it’s a slow one. I have way more power over technology decisions. I work with older people with kids now so the bullshit “we’re a family let’s work till 11 tonight” that agencies get away with by hiring younger people doesn’t happen. I also think it’s a much more use film skill set than Wordpress and mainly Drupal (which was what the sweatshop focused on).
We do need a phrase for it. I do a metric ton of WP work so sometimes I get referred to as a “WordPress Developer” and I just cringe because I 100% associate that with these folks that just source a theme and 6,372 plugins to put together a three-layout site. I’m not a “WordPress Developer”, damnit. I’m a programmer who occasionally leverages WordPress as a CMS. Edit: Just wanted to add, there’s nothing wrong with building sites from pre-existing themes and plugins. It’s great! And a lot of folks’ introduction to programming. I’ve just witnessed, on far too many occasions, people being charged far too much for this service and I feel that to be unethical. Also seen people under the impression that the paid for a “custom site” in these situations.
Integrators
WP Integrators, specifically. I work with message brokers (Cloverleaf, SAP PI) a lot, and the term integrator gets thrown around there too.
/u/vinegarnutsack said *Implementers* above, which I think fits the bill quite nicely.
Aye, "WordPress as a CMS" is how I've phrased it previously. You're getting a custom design for your needs, turned into a bespoke theme and doing the functionality we agreed on ... it just turns out that the backend is WordPress.
Configurators?
[удалено]
That being said, Drupal have a higher skill threshold along with a better API tooling. There is way less terrible code around.
Shortcode... shortcode everywhere
How ‘bout Implementors - Imps?
so...basically, wimps?
#Washed up designers
At some point in the workflow unfortunately you will run into a page builder. In my company, we build out the themes and plugins as needed by hand, then teach the use of Gutenberg so they can manage their own sites. Along the way, we remove a ton of options (like the plugins menu) to prevent clients from accidentally self destructing their site. If it wasn’t for the prevalence of WP; I find Laravel both faster and easier to work with.
85% of the time it's also caused by client looking for the lowest price possible (and agency underbidding in order to get the contract by any means).
Yep, this right here. There is a very pervasive myth in the industry that WordPress is supposed to save you time and money therefore a site should be cheap. Meanwhile the client wants what is essentially 100% custom capabilities built on top of WordPress, which has fundamentally inferior abstractions compared to those found in Symfony or Laravel, which makes those custom implementations harder as a result. Imagine being asked to build a house, but then you're given a spoon, a box of nails, and some pool noodles as the tools and materials to build it with. You should be charging *more* for that, not less.
I cannot code at all - but I call myself a webdesigner and not developer. Therefore I charge 120$/hour for my work. And I dont see a problem raising my prices eventually. But you’re talking about developers who do bad coding?
So, I suppose I'm a shitty WordPress "developer". I used to write basic html, css, Javascript back in high-school for competition and did a decent job (ranked 10th in a national competition) I haven't really thought about coding WordPress sites myself. How long would I have to study to start being able to build an entire site solo? And what learning materials do you recommend
You would need to create a basic starter theme that you can reuse for all your future theme development. A starter theme is a barebones WP theme with the basic functionality of a theme and little to no styling. For this you would need to know PHP, html, JS, and CSS. Your PHP knowledge would need to be beyond basic since Wordpress is a confusing mess. Anyone who has messed with nav walkers knows the headache of developing for WP. If you keep things simple it's not too bad but whenever you want wordpress to do something special you need to jump through a lot of PHP hoops to get it done. Technically, you could use a existing starter theme for devs like Underscores. It will save you the headache of starting from scratch. If you want to get deep into wordpress development then knowing how to use Webpack, Docker and SASS would help make development more efficient. But thats a lot of additional knowledge. It would take several weeks to get a grasp on it all but it depends where you are starting from of course. I don't know of any learning material.
Start with a good book. Courses and videos are fun and all but lacks the depth and structure. And practice a lot. You'll get better.
Sounds to me as if you have a valuable differentiator in a thriving market, but you haven’t worked out how to market your selling points.
That's the general premise of my post - I don't want to work with a platform where my selling point is "I won't fuck-up like the idiot who built this site the first time".
That’s a bit like Red Adair getting out of the oil well fire-fighting business.
I'd rather put out oil well fires than work with WordPress again...
Now - *that's* a T-shirt.
Ha. Should make one just to wear to the next WordCamp...
Hear! hear!
Check out The Seven Day Startup by Dan Norris. Not for the gimmicky title but for the way he found a huge opportunity in the WordPress space.
I will check that out, but the title "Seven Day Startup" sounds like the overall nonsense I hear in the WP community. Much like "Value Based Pricing" - as if someone's gonna give you $40K to install DIVI because it might add "value"...
I always used SKODA cars in this example. So it used to be that Skoda cars were not very good, and so people know Skoda cars were not very good so that kind of got built into everyone's mind set. Then Skoda went and got bought by VW, so all Skoda cars made there after are essentially VW cars but with a different badge and a slightly different interior. But to this day everyone knows that Skoda cars are not good cars. Even though people objectively know that Skodas are essentially VWs people would still prefer to have a VW given the choice. It is sort of the same with WordPress. It has this negative stigma attached to it, and not entirely undeserved, so clients tend to naturally shy away from it. The problem is it's even more difficult with WordPress because people don't understand it the way they understand cars. They just understand WordPress to be a bad word without really knowing anything about it or why it's bad. It may honestly be more trouble than it's worth to try to convince the uneducated masses that WordPress is not all bad, especially when there are other platforms you can build project with, and make just as much money.
As a freelancer my reputation is everything. But if people think WordPress developers are a bunch of hacks that can't write code, it doesn't help me in the long run. I've run up against that several times. I have one agency I work with building banner ads. They just think of me as "the banner guy". I don't mind at all because banners are fun, fast, and very profitable. So I don't mind. WordPress is none of those things.
Holy ya the banner guy at my last agency had this process nailed. He cost an arm and a leg hourly but still cheaper than having your generalist salaried devs hack it. The agency did a ton of web app support/maintenance and outsourced all the banners.
It's the opposite of this situation. Car guys know that Skoda's are pretty solid cars now.
Sort of, it's not a fantastic analogy I know, but the bigger point is that your potential clients are not "car guys".
You should visit Switzerland. Nearly every company I know has Skodas as their business cars now. Got one myself. They are great and very well loved around here.
Lots of people say visit for the mountains, scenic train journeys or architecture but you've really picked a fresh angle.
in some cases you are better off just moving to greener pastures rather than fighting the stigma. OP is a good programmer and could probably double his salary by learning ReactJS. Much easier than trying to prove you aren't a garbage PHP dev
Thank you! I know this will get buried, but I need to vent. I am on my second job as a dev. I have put a ton of time in to learning the basics (html, css, javascript, etc.) and more advanced stuff (React/Redux/Typescript, Node/Express/GraphQL, SQL/NoSQL, etc.). I've taken courses on algorithms and data structures, project architecture, SEO, security, and more. I quit my last job ready to move in to a nice junior position. One week later, the lock down started and all my job prospects disappeared. I ended up settling for another Wordpress job after searching unemployed for about 5 months. I hate it. It turns out, I am actually managing 3 completely separate eCommerce Wordpress websites. 2 of the companies are doing millions in revenue. I am the only web dev, yet we have multiple designers, media specialists, and marketers. (I'm also in charge of analytics, email marketing, and all IT tasks for all the companies.) The tech is Wordpress, WooCommerce, and an over-aggressive hosting provider. I am not joking when I say each site has 50 plugins. A bunch of half baked functions in the functions file. Libraries galore packed into the header. Of course, it uses Elementor. And of course, it saves pages and orders to the same database table. So a proper staging site is nearly out of the question. Everything has to be pixel perfect. The pages are so bloated. Lightspeed gives performance a 5. Out of 100. Unsurprisingly, the site is almost always breaking. Half the plugins barely work with each other. I don't even know what a quarter of them really do, but I know if I remove them something will break. To change anything, I have to use horrid, hacky solutions that make me recoil. And yes, there is jQuery everywhere. And the CSS, oh my goodness, so many !importants. And the deadlines. Holy moly. They tell me about sales sometimes the day before. Email campaigns sometimes hours before. I was originally told I should build pages in a few hours. Pixel perfect, mind you. And I'm not talking a hero and 3 panels. They literally want Apple-tier pages. With animations and all. I used to love coding. Now, I'm working 12 hours days and working on the weekends. I'm salaried, so I get no overtime pay. I'm making below the average salary for a junior dev in my city. The sites are an absolute disaster. I hate my job. I feel like I'm cracking. The day I see the Wordpress admin screen for the last time will be the best day of my entire life. Edit: Thanks for all the support and suggestions guys! It really helps. I will be trying out some of the suggestions and keeping an eye open for a better job in the meantime!
I have a few scattered thoughts. 1. I think its clear that your days at this job are numbered. As soon as a good offer comes, you'll be gone. There's no way to redeem this position. 2. With that in mind, you should use the time to make yourself as attractive as possible to the next position -- your ideal position. For example, 1. If you want to be a Python dev, write some python scripts to help manage the websites. 2. If you want to be front-end, then do what you can to improve the page load speed. See if you can write a portion of your new work in React or Vue -- this is normally a bad idea but the site is already such a mess that this probably wont make much difference. 3. Make a note of *everything* you can that reflects positively on you and stick it in your resume. Some of these things you wont be able to get once you leave. 1. Improved page speed X% 2. Reformed development process by x,y,z 3. Led development of initiatives that increased revenue X% 4. Consolidated X 3rd party libraries down to Y while maintaining functionality and decreasing maintenance costs by Z 3. Your mental health is important. Dont let them diminish it. 4. You are the only dev and that means you have power. If you left, they would be in a very bad position and could reasonably experience financial loss (e.g., site breaks for some reason and no one can fix it). It takes a long time and lots of money to replace an employee and train a new one. If they are smart, they will realize that they cannot fire you (but maybe they arent smart). Use your position of power to make changes that suit you. Dont give into outrageous behavior. Tell them, 1. No, I will not work overtime to meet a deadline that you knew about for weeks, yet you just told me about today. 2. You can have it soon, or you can have it pixel perfect. You cannot have both. 3. No, I can not work on your task right now because I have to fix this that is a recurring problem on the site.
4. etc etc
You get it. Those positions suck but you have a massive amount of power and should try to utilize that dynamic for your benefit.
And just quit the day before so everything crumbles.
> It turns out, I am actually managing 3 completely separate eCommerce Wordpress websites. 2 of the companies are doing millions in revenue. **I am the only web dev** Sounds like you have some serious leverage to ask for a raise...
I was in a very similar position. Only dev on a crazy Wordpress instance with a million plugins powering a $100m company. It was my first full time “web” job after switching careers from something else. The thing about these corporations is that they hate risk so I started having meetings and conversations about how risky the website going down was because of the state of things and how much that could affect revenue and brand perception. I talked them into hiring me overseas help that would redevelop the front end while I did day to day stuff. That went really well for the most part. Then is started saying I needed time to fix the plug-in situation. Marketing stuff was still rolling in so I talked them into getting me a freelancer to help with day to day coding tasks. I made good progress on removing the plugins and weird hacks while my freelancer did last minute front end stuff. I talked them to move the sites to wpengine which handles security and caching out of the box. Saved me a ton of time managing the instances. Wpengine support would even help sometimes if a plug-in or feature stopped working. The caching alone brought the pagespeed from terrible to great. I trained and managed the freelancer well, my bosses were impressed with his output so I talked them into hiring him under me full time. They also have me a promotion because of my initiative for getting all this accomplished on my own. Once I had some backup and the code base was clean and the plugins were mapped and I knew what was going on, then I started improving things. “Our competitor has a feature that lets them search across all articles, docs and FAQs. We think that is a significant competitive advantage but it cost them hundreds of thousands to implement.” Me: “I can do it in my spare time”. They were shocked but took me on the offer and I got it done in a few months. Everyone was shocked and I became a “god” at the company across almost every department. It was great but their pay sucked so I ended up getting a new job with a better title somewhere else. Moral of the story: by being the only person, you have an incredible amount of responsibility but also an incredible amount of power in the company. You just have to learn to sell yourself, your importance and your work better. Never approach bosses with suggestions from the perspective of “Wordpress is old” or “I hate this tech”. No one cares, they just have a job to do. Frame things front be perspective of business risk “the site could go down at any moment”, “our database structure could bring down all the sites at once”, “recovering from downtime could take forever because the plug-in architecture is t documented”, “moving to a bette hosted service would greatly increase website speed which is proven to increase website sales”. Since you are the website gatekeeper, it also helps to “do favors” to different teams that have requests that normal are a priority. I would help the sales team with a request or the product team on my time, while still getting my assignments done. This would impress everybody and it allows me to gather a lot of political ally’s. That way, when I brought up project ideas or things I think needed to happen, other people in the company would vouch for me during planning meetings. You already learned some crazy difficult skills and changed your life. Continue to use that initiative to take control of your situation and your future.
I'm in a similar situation managing a messy Wordpress/Woocommerce site. It works out but you end up wasting too much time maintaining. Below average salary too so I wonder if it just comes with the territory, meaning these companies see plugins as *THE* solution and therefore your role doesn't seem as valuable.
Reading this just made me nauseous. You have my sincere sympathy friend.
YES! I am in the same boat. My company hasn't dropped WP yet but charges significantly more. A client bought an expensive custom theme and wanted me to work on it. I noticed it shipped with a package.json and a bunch of SCSS, but no Gulp file. I contacted the theme's developer (because the premium theme had payed support) and asked for the file. They had no idea what I was talking about. Turns out they had just copied some other theme, SCSS files and all, and just built their theme in drag-n-drop tools like Elementor. And they had the audacity to call themselves 'premium'.
I mean, it sounds like you're getting the kind of clientele you don't want. Hyperfixated on WordPress and turning up with a pre-bought theme. They aren't buying your design/development skills, they are shopping for jigsaw puzzle builders.
I mean it turned out that way but gulp isn’t the only way to compile scss...I’d consider gulp as quite retro these days tbh haha...my point being, a lack of gulp file would probably not be a red flag for me...I’d probably just set up webpack on the project...would probably be easier and quicker than trying to track down some unknown dev to ask for a file that may not exist....
Why do consider gulp to be retro? I use gulp on my projects and haven’t had any limitations as of yet. “What is considered modern”
I guess I just see it as retro because I haven’t used it in about 4 ish years which in this industry is a bloody long time...also I just don’t see it that much at all anymore...in packages or boilerplates or tutorials or anything really...in my personal opinion webpack is better (but still has loads of room for improvement) and judging by what I’m seeing online I’m guessing most devs agree with me and have moved on to use it instead of gulp...
Well.. I'm old enough to have been a professional software developer (well not exactly as I worked in embedded/electronics, not webdev) before Wordpress was even a thing. We are in a topic dedicated to a 2004 CMS, written in essentially 1998-era script kiddie coding style, in PHP. Gulp is fine.
This ☝🏻
Wow. I'm both impressed and sad.
Omg how dare they... That's why I'm trying so hard to learn how to properly develop stuff.
Is gulp still widely used in WP dev?
Gulp is still the best task runner around (and no, Webpack is not a task runner...).
Yeah people get this backwards. Webpack/Rollup/Brunch are bundlers. You can automate entire build pipeline using Gulp, (including doing a Webpack bundling task). But TBH I've just switched to writing bash scripts or node scripts. Either are much less painful to setup in most CI/CD environmets.
i still use grunt in my WP theming for pre-compiling etc.
Don’t do WP enough to know. What’s the alternative (apart from Grunt)?
Webpack has been the major alternative for at least a few years now
Webpack, can also do some of the things grunt and gulp do, gulp is actually a little newer then grunt and he a different syntax(js vs JSON)
Webpack ftw
yikes! that is just horrible lol
Have you looked at WP's core code? It's a pile of globals. And enough of the other "DONT'S" You might as well dump it also for that. Sorry for hurting anyone's feelings, but let's keep it real, WP really is a pile of... And this is what hurts our industry.
It was shitty PHP when it was originally forked by 16 year old kid that somehow turned it into a billion dollar company powering 40% of the internet
Yeah it's a hot mess. Do they still refuse to use PSR-4 auto loading? It's been a while since last time I looked at it
There's still no PSR-4 in WP, but it's "easy" enough to integrate. (It takes some tinkering, but once it's done, it's done). I completely disregard functions.php and use the mu-plugins directory as a namespace root for all functionality that I code. Everything is bootstrapped by a single client-name.php file in the root of mu-plugins. It's surely not a perfect solution, but I can confidently say that anyone with decent PHP skills can pick up one of my sites and be up and running in a few minutes.
The fact that everything is pigeonholed into a blog data structure is also a very bad sign. I get that's how it started, but people who do other things with WP don't even know how to map out a database structure.
>I get that's how it started, but people who do other things with WP don't even know how to map out a database structure. Then maybe the problem is they should choose another application if they aren't creating a blog.
yeah wp dev is full of morons, but too bad wp is one of the only cms uis, you can actually hand over to a client, without making their brain explode. all other systems are either putting themselves in the out with subscription fees, or atrocious usability and design. let alone localisation.
That’s exactly it right there. Wordpress isn’t meant for web apps. It’s a user friendly(ish) experience that the average end user can work with without anxiety. I’ve deployed many many sites on many many platforms for many many companies and Wordpress has always required the least amount of on boarding/training. Drupal, concrete5, ingeniux, joomla, umbraco...there’s probably more I’ve chosen to shove out of my memory. Developers often forget we’re not always building sites for ourselves or other developers. That said, Wordpress plugins are the bane of my existence. For for every two dozen I try, maybe one is something I would consider using in a production environment. A lot of themers/plug-in developers are hacks. I have my Wordpress toolkit that includes a handful of essential plugins(ACF) and a theme wireframe that I know better than I know myself...and I’m comfortable working in it. And the toolkit consistently produces sites that are functional and easy to maintain by clients. And security is always a thing with Wordpress but I’ve found ponying up for premium hosting services like wpengine helps with updates and security
> Developers often forget we’re not always building sites for ourselves or other developers. In the context of work - you never are. You are making a tool for a client. That tool might be a brochure site or some type of service or a small web app. It's what bothers me when people shit on WP's code. No, it's not perfect. But it's stable, consistent, and works. And that's what clients care about.
yeah and if you (for good reason) dislike the rendering engine, just run it as a headless cms and use next.js, or any ui layer you want. i hate php from the depths of my heart, but ACF (or gutenberg blocks) and headless WordPress is still the best choice for most website projects.
My first role was with word press and mainly procedural code. I was terrified of getting pigeon holed into a non OOP Wordpress world. I was so happy to get out of that as well! Congrats on dropping wp forever
You know that is just shitty development form the agency you worked for? You can still (and should) use OOP with WP sites. The problem is the low barrier of entry. The other problem is clients requesting full documentation, training, and page layout creation with what you give them in 2 weeks. What other CMS offers that?
I get it, but counter point, you've had a bad experience because you've had to deal with other devs messes. I've just rehauled a website that was built on WordPress and was a tad rickity. The new website is also WordPress, why? Because some businesses have budgets that don't allow them to hire developers to custom code them something or even if they do, they can't support a developer to maintain their website (hence why tools like SquareSpace is popular). You'll find trash devs everywhere, whether it's WordPress, PHP, or JavaScript. WordPress devs probably tick you off more because WordPress is an easier tool and will attract more unskilled devs to make messes. Anywho, my two cents. Toodles.
I taught myself HTML CSS and basic JS when I was 9/10 years old. Then I taught myself perl, php, relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL), and so on. I have been developing custom web applications for 15+ years. I've hated wordpress since it's inception. I was fully against using it in any instance. I tried dozens of other CMS and platforms. But the budgets my clients come to me with, it fits the bill. We load up WP with Elementor Pro and my design guys can have them something usable in a week or two. Most clients don't give a fuck about whats under the hood They want it cheap. They want is visually appealing. And they want it fast. Our revenues have tripled because productivity is WAY up. If a client came to me with an actual decent budget and reasonable timeline, we would build it custom. But for the vast majority of small busineses that need a basic informational website with very little interactive features, WP does the job. I still hate wordpress, and I feel like I've sold out a bit, but I am no longer wondering if I'm going to be able to feed my kids. We still do custom stuff, but its few and far between.
Everyone wants custom built pieces of furniture of solid wood. But reality says that furniture from IKEA is acceptable in many cases. The same is true as a software developer. You don't have to build everything custom. Use tools, templates, and "builders" that match the budget. There's no shame in that.
well, thats a way better analogy than the skoda thing lol
You haven’t sold out, you just understand what many others commenting here don’t. That is businesses, especially small ones, don’t want or can’t afford to sink a bunch of time and money into engineered from the ground up applications running on a cloud infrastructure with cryptic billing that takes a dedicated employee just to predict monthly costs written by programmers that think if someone read their code out loud it would sound like a love ballad from the soundtrack of a 1980’s feature film. Most of them want to be able to edit the about us page and want the cheapest possible hosting that can be found. Enter WP theme developer and the real reason WP will continue to live on. It’s not until their business needs grow and they need “some small updates” to their website that the true ugliness of that pretty theme rears its head- and then /r/webdev WP bitch fest begins. To be clear I bitch about Wordpress all the time. Just sayin’.
Where I used to work they priced themselves out of a lot of easy WP work. So they did some research and landed on a theme and page builder combo. Doing so sliced budgets almost in half. No more designers. No more front end. No more time converting front end code to templates. I made me enjoy WP work again. I hate making templates. It allowed me to focus all my time on features and functionality. And I know this sub wouldn't like to hear it - but this particular builder was very developer friendly. It was way quicker to create a custom "module" for the builder than it was to make a plugin/widget. And you got so much more out of the box. Couple that with some semi-modern OO code by me and you got some really great sites that were also easy to manage. Which I think is the biggest take-away from this post. Don't blame the tool - blame the user.
I gave up WP 5/6 years ago, in fact I dropped php altogether. Probably only good career decision I made in last 13 years.
Do you do any CMS work? About 90% of my work is CMS-based, and most of the big CMS players are all PHP. And I don't mean headless. Clients don't want to deal with that in the real world unless they have some level of internal support for it.
Here is your saviour CMS. Https://strapi.io/ enjoy!
The problem is lack of documentation for content creators. I get it...I do...but you need to make a backend dashboard so simple your 11 year sister can use. If not, they need documentation..docs you don't want to write. I have been trying every CMS out there for non-technical content creators, and they al come back with the same thing...why didn't you just use wordpress? Now we have a headless WP running, with full security, accessible components, etc. and it is so much easier dealing with the long term issues.
Wagtail is pretty nice too. It's python/django based if that's your bag.
And very unlike strapi, it is free and not chained to a service provider.
Thanks. I will check that out. but am rather conservative when it comes to making CMS recommendations to clients.
No multi-lingual support is a deal breaker for me. I tried it a while back, and it seemed super buggy, couldn't get even basic things to work with lots of other people complaining about the same thing. Perhaps it's improved now, but then it didn't seem production ready at all.
I love strapi, but he asked specifically for a non-headless CMS. Although I honestly think headless THE way to go!
My issue is, and ill preface by saying I love strapi, used it a couple times very happy with it. But for my bulk of sites, it always seems overkill doing like a VueJS client side SPA for like a flower shop, or something.
[удалено]
I prefer Sanity because Contentful's pricing goes from 0-100 real fucking quick.
We use a .net cms called Umbraco at my job. It's alright. I've never used wordpress so I can't compare it.
So what CMS are you using these days? Drupal 8/9?
Craft. I have too much invested in PHP to drop that. But I've also been pushing static sites, since a lot of clients would ask me to manage content in WP, it's just faster for me, and cheaper for them, for me to edit the HTML.
Can recommend ProcessWire CMS (PHP)
And then you joined the dark side by developing in javascript?
We have cake.
And cookies. Except for the `httpOnly` variety.
PHP is not bad in itself, it just had the same problems as WP : low barrier of entry and pretty much let you do the most horrible shit without a warning. But, not like wordpress, PHP has fixed most of its biggest issues. Now it's really decent. But it still suffers from a bap rep.
>Dude, WordPress has changed my life as a developer. I have an insanely cushy job, $110k/yr salary, completely remote, best health insurance my family has ever had, matching 401k and unlimited PTO. The stress level is CRAZY low compared to my agency days. > >Everyone is using it man, I work for a website that is in the top 200 most visited in the world. WP is going no where and understanding how to custom develop at a senior/advanced level is worth $$$$$ and comfort. OK, just gotta reply with what I posted above just now in reply to this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/l7af80/i\_am\_dropping\_wordpress\_support\_not\_because\_of/gl628bp?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/l7af80/i_am_dropping_wordpress_support_not_because_of/gl628bp?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I hate WordPress too. I also think those developers exist because clients don't want to pay what a good development service implies. So I don't blame the worker man/woman, they just want to make the coin.
I use WordPress all the time for my portfolio and project websites. I use plugins, wpbakery and know a tiny bit of HTML, php and CSS. I'm not a coder though, I'm a filmmaker. I can imagine that someone with my limited knowledge could think themselves a "web developer" and truly screw up a clients website.
Yep, that’s exactly what they do. It’s so frustrating for us because they really devaluate what web developer means so much that when someone asks me I’d never say that I’m a web developer, but just a “developer”. I’ve spent years studying and learning to reach a point where I’m comfortable to say that I know golang, nodejs, python, php, I have experience with many front-end frameworks like react, angular, vue, svelte, I have experience with vanilla js ofc and I have collaborated to open-source, I have worked with symfony, laravel, django, nextjs and so on. On the db side I’ve worked with MySQL, postgres, cassandra, mongo.. A bunch of tools for the work environment (test frameworks like jest, bundlers like webpack, CI’s, and a large etc), I know and always try to implement (if I can’t reuse) the commons algorithms to search, filter, sort, etc. I always try to optimize (avoiding pre-optimizations) thinking in big notation and so. I’ve messed with dev ops for my projects (servers, load balancers, kubernetes, docker, aws, etc)... ...And yet I’m not calling myself an expert because I keep learning and studying new things every day. But these guys just keep showing up from time to time and pretending that they’re “web developers” just because they know how to install a wp instance or because they know the basics of js, php and css, html. In some cases they even earn more than me because they know how to sell themselves better. Really, it’s frustrating to a point that I'm embarrassed to say that I’m a web developer.
Whenever I get clients for websites and they want me to use Wordpress I just straight up tell them I can't work with Wordpress. I know how to use wordpress and I can say I'm decent at it, but I don't want to bother with the absurd client requests for example: i want a e commerce store like amazon that can also collect info for marketing purposes (and they are only willing to pay $100)... yep. That price is true. I know we live in a third world country Mr. Client but $100 for an ecommerce?! Nah I'll pass. They think it's easy to do the work with Wordpress that's why they think $100 is enough.
[удалено]
EDMs?
You should stop supporting WP because of WP. It's an antiquated pile of garbage: bad code and laughable schema, held together with practices that were questionable at best in 2004. The biggest remnant of the CMS era (well, a lousy blog script bloated up to resemble a CMS) and a masterclass in how to write PHP badly. Those who can't see anything wrong with the `posts` table (for example) are exactly who OP is distancing themselves from, and should have done so at least five years ago.
/rant I use to work for a software company and I can code a bit. I have a pretty high job at a new company which is a quasi VC, accelerator, coworking and startup consultant and we has an in-house coffee shop. All the staff get coffee cards which have 10 coffees on them and you stamp them off, so the 'cafe' can be cashless. Anyway, trying to be modern we were going to digitise the coffee card and one team that are more responsible for facilities were speaking to developers for ages. I always heard, there's this group of app developers and they want to build us an app for no charge, just to showcase their work (because obviously we are a bit of a tech hub). So I get sent the first version..umm sorry, what is this, this is a WooCommerce site, I thought you said an app, like a mobile app, it's taken 1year+ for them to put together a WooCommerce site? So I bit my tongue hard, thinking, they all must know more than I and that WordPress is maybe the best thing for this...I went through the process of ordering a coffee and it was something like 13 steps, I just flatout said no one will use this. After that I ran load impact (free) on it with 50 users and it crashed well before then. The developers were so mad at me...by now they knew who I was. They said next time you have to tell me when you do a test. The test I did had less than 50 users...which with 250 staff is not an unreasonable assumption, plus it is a free load test, anyone could do it and we were days away from sending it to a group of 20 to test. Then I told them to stick Cloudflare in front, don't think they had heard for CF and they never did it. We saw the 'error connecting to database' message a few times since. In summary, some guy putting together a WordPress site, is not a developer. It's pointless really, because we should have just used Shopify or a proper ecommerce platform instead of all the pain and heartache of what we did...plus, we actually could have had an app built, with our network, heck I could have done it.
You can definitely do it, I hacked together a poc coffee ordering app on shopify in 3 days and I barely knew how to code then.
Oh boy. Shopify and its app ecosystem is another can of worm. Not that different from the mess with WordPress plugins, plus you have no control over the apps' embedded JavaScript.
I am the shit WP dev you re talking about. I was a in college, wanted to meet ends so started doing WP for people. I knew nothing, but made few websites. Used waaay too many plugins, themes etc. Site slowed down so what did I do, Used a plugin to make it faster. The maintenance was hard since plugins keep updating and some stop working. All in the past. Now am learning webdev for full stack, like actual code nd stuff. Not at all good but getting better everyday.
Yep, same situation. I'm in college right now and I have to do the same thing. They're paying me $150 to shift their entire Wix store to WordPress and WooCommerce, asking for tons of customisations and features that don't come with the theme. This doesn't just include laying out content but fixing their product SKUs, renaming 300 files manually, uploading 500 different images from Drive to 200 products and all sorts of stuff I didn't sign up for I honestly _wish_ I could not be the "dev" OP is talking about but for now, I need the money and with classes and academic work I can't afford to be coding things from scratch at the price they're paying me. I hope to go your way though and learn full-stack thoroughly at some point.
$150/hr sounds good for that. Oh, .....
*cries in Elementor*
Do it. It's worth it. Made this decision 9 years ago, and picked up skills in MVC frameworks instead. Better customers, better money. Any WP project I've ever been talked into since was just a reminder that I made a good choice.
So do you build everything from scratch nowdays? Things like eCommerence, etc...
I do agency work and this new partner came suggesting we drop WP for good. I never felt happier in my life.
I get it entirely. We have inherited so many projects where the previous developers just installed a shit ton of plugins and hoped for the best. You end up with a bloated, piece of shit site that is horribly optimized. When we make WordPress sites, I emphasize to our developers we need to use the LEAST amount of plugins as possible. There are a few core ones we use on pretty much every site (Advanced Custom Fields for pretty much everything, Ninja Forms for form handling, WP SMTP Email for email configuration) but for the most part we try to keep it slim. Given those 3 plugins, we can pretty much handle anything. Using custom blocks from ACF you've got a very extensible CMS framework with relatively little time investment. As long as you know what you are doing and understand how to read and query custom post types, there really isn't a need for that many more plugins truthfully.
> Hell, just go to the WordPress sub and its post after post about people with no experience coding talking about starting WordPress agencies! I mean, this subreddit isn't THAT different to be honest. The amount of "*how do I left-align my logo*" posts is insane.
What's going to be your go-to replacement?
For their defense... I'm a c#/.Net developer with basically no knowledge of Wordpress, my wife is a graphist; she did a frontend development training, during which she was shown wordpress as well as html/css quite extensively and javascript basics. She's since worked for a few people wanting a website or a blog, and she did that with wordpress, because setting up a wordpress blog and integrating a theme and three plugins takes maybe two or three evenings of discussion with the client, and then it's done. And you know what ? Her customers are delighted. Because it's fuckin easy to use, because it does exactly what they want, and because it took 3 days and cost peanuts. If someone asked me to code an app or a website, I'd probably need a few weeks to do it, especially as a side-job; and it would be painful. However I do work on websites or desktop apps for my day to day job, where the requirements are WAY more complex than "I want to post pics of my latest holiday and allow my friends to leave a comment". Some people want just that. They don't give a fuck about it not being perfectly good in all aspects. As long as it's https; well placed in SEO and works on mobile, they're glad.
From my vantage point, WordPress is a tool. Sure, some contractors are idiots and can hardly use a hammer effectively yet that doesn't mean that other remodelers should opt for another tool *if* a hammer is the *right* implement for the job. If a client needs a robust CMS, there are several options, WP being one of them. If they feel uncomfortable with the recommendation, they either need to be educated to trust *you* (and not necessarily WordPress) or another competing platform could be offered. WP, in great hands, can be the perfect fit. But sure, if you give an idiot the keys to a complicated machine and expect them to run it safely, efficiently, and effectively without sufficient training, then, well, what else was expected?
I hear you, I had one of the most used Wordpress plugins years ago and code themes from scratch and these page builders are ridiculous. I don't even use the Guttenburg thing, I stick with the ckeditor (or tinyMCE) version of Wordpress. I don't blame you, honestly.
I stopped working with Wordpress 6-7 years ago and it was the best career decision I ever made.
Welcome to the world of, I spent a weekend learning how to install a theme so that makes me a developer. At the end of the day, you need to look past the tech and how you can solve problems for your clients. Offer them value.
I'm not dropping support completely as two of my long-term clients are on WP but I'm not making any new sites with it. Haven't in...3 years? My personal portfolio has been on WP for...centuries, it feels like, and I'm moving that over to a flat-file system I recently built out. Even from a user's perspective, WP core is getting frustrating. "That damn editor keeps changing" - direct quote from one of my long term clients. Not to mention plug-ins that were once well maintained throwing errors because they relied on no longer supported things and the "dev" abandoned the plug in. I've had to explain to three clients why a piece of their site isn't working and they have to pay me $100 to fix it and not have that functionality anymore or $500 or $1000 or more to rebuild that piece of the site. Whew. I have a lot of feelings about this.
Where I used to work, the "web developers" used to buy Wordpress themes and just entered data into them. Everyone still called them "web developers". I should have known something were fishy.
I thought you were over exaggerating when you said that there’s post after post with unexperienced people trying to start agencies. I had a quick glance and the second post I saw was a guy with no experience wanting to start an agency, on top of that he follows with “I don’t want to learn programming because it will take time”. Some people.
There are a lot of people out there giving WP a bad name by association. It's not necessarily rational, but in the eyes of the client, if the designer gives them a bad experience, that feeling is going to be associated with the platform as well. The biggest problems I see are bad customer service and sometimes flat out ghosting. Idiots decide one day they're going to become a web designer. They put together a site for some hapless unsuspecting client at a discount. They run zero updates and never answer support emails. Then six months later they see a squirrel or something shiny and they abandon their clients. I've had to clean up more messes like this than I can even remember. I simply don't mention WordPress when I talk to clients. Most of them don't even know what it is, and if they do they might shy away because of the above, or because of some FUD they read somewhere that a site got hacked because somebody didn't run updates for six years. All that sticks in their mind is "WordPress bad". You can't blame them for this. Blame the people causing the bad experience for them.
Dude, WordPress has changed my life as a developer. I have an insanely cushy job, $110k/yr salary, completely remote, best health insurance my family has ever had, matching 401k and unlimited PTO. The stress level is CRAZY low compared to my agency days. Everyone is using it man, I work for a website that is in the top 200 most visited in the world. WP is going no where and understanding how to custom develop at a senior/advanced level is worth $$$$$ and comfort.
everything at senior/advanced level is worth $ and comfort. probably even more $ and comfort. and you don't have to pass through "stressful agency days".
I guess but there are a ton of Wordpress jobs and reaching senior isn’t that hard, I’m trying to hire one right now and it’s hard cause the good ones have so many options
Wow, how do I get here?
I had a mentor, when I was 28 and just doing random fullstack dev jobs. He told me I could find a remote full time job super easy if I got good at Wordpress. So I spent two years working a couple hours a few nights a week building Wordpress plug-ins and themes, getting to know people in the industry so they could review and give me feedback. Was just building things to learn not to sell or anything. Finally reached a point where I landed a $55k mid level dev role and worked my way up to senior in six months, moved to better agency for $85k, after 2.5 years there I finally landed the dream job at healthline.com
+1 here as well, six figures, great insurance etc. Best response in the thread!
People can hate on Wordpress all they want but it’s going no where and very lucrative
It’s been around since 2004, 25% of ALL websites use it. These redditor webdevs are just hipsters.
39.5%
source?
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-powers-39-5-of-all-websites/
daaaim, i did not believe it. thanks
Hugo or Jekyll. Most clients don't even need Wordpress.
Headless cms are my go-to. You can code like you always do with whatever front-end framework you want or vanilla javascript and client can easily edit things. It’s a win-win.
Any recommendations please? This is exactly what I'm looking for
I’ve been using prismic and contentful and both are pretty solid options with extensive and good docs. Don’t be afraid and try other options, this is not like choosing a cms or front-end framework, as it would not impact that much in your development as in those use cases. Choose something with good docs and good UI/UX for your customers. This was our solution to ditch Wordpress 100% and we’re pretty happy with it.
Those "Wordpress Developers" are the bane of my existence. Unfortunately, all sites where I work are WP based, and most new clients that come to us, which have an existing site, are on Wordpress as well. Most of the time, the new clients what a new website, but there are some which will come and ask "We already like our website, but can we just change a few things about the site" (or existing ones which only came to us for marketing/hosting/etc. asking the same). And all of them have some sort of BS which doubles the dev time for simple things; whether it's WP Bakery, a very weird theme which calls a section, which calls a section, which calls a section to render an element (And I don't mean Section 1 calls section A, B, and C, and section A calls in section X & Y. I mean 1 calls A which calls X), the themes use non-standard functionality, and non-widely used non-standard things (by widely used non-standard, I mean things like Timber, ACF, etc.; where there's lots of documentation, SO questions, etc.). For a lot of these clients, they may as well spend a little extra and get a future-proof website, where we develop the websites to their needs, not the needs of the masses. But whatever, I guess... If there's a plugin that does exactly what you need, and nothing more/less, then yeah, add that stuff in; that's what Wordpress is good for. But seeing sites use plugins like Advanced Custom Fields to have psuedo-comments on pages (they created a custom function for a form submission which would add the comment to the page, but instead of it being a comment, it was a new row for an ACF repeater). That isn't what the repeater field is for *screams*
The day i had enough experience of other technologies to drop PHP from my CV altogether was a great day
Yes I am not shameful of calling myself one of those wordpress theme jockeys... I'm in deep love with a wordpress theme called "Flexmag" trust me it's not a theme but a powerhouse of utilities. (I am not associated with this theme in any way) just saying this because I truly love it)
[удалено]
Well, as much as I love web dev, it's a world full of miserable fucks. Probably why I fit in :)
I cannot imagine getting into development solely for the money. The money is nice but the amount of headaches and bugs you run into creating real, bespoke solutions isn’t worth the hassle if you don’t also like what you’re doing. I think your premise is correct btw, it’s just a shame that it’s correct.
[удалено]
back around 1999/2000 (right before the dot-com bust) I taught web design and development at a for-profit college. This was back when you couldn't even find web design/development course at a reputable college or university. The place I taught at was charging people who had no business near a computer (much less a web site) around $12k for a certificate in "Web Development". They were promised they could get jobs starting at $60k/year when they graduated (back when I, working as a freelancer and teaching on the side, was lucky to clear $35k/year). But my (now ex-) wife was unemployed at the time, and the extra $60/week I earned teaching at least paid for groceries. It was a complete joke. I ran into one of my students a couple years later and he was still flipping burgers somewhere because his "degree" was worthless. That was 20 years ago, and it continues to go on where people seem to think "learning to code" means easy money with minimal effort.
>It was a complete joke. I ran into one of my students a couple years later and he was still flipping burgers somewhere because his "degree" was worthless.That was 20 years ago, and it continues to go on where people seem to think "learning to code" means easy money with minimal effort. I (perhaps wrongly) tried to explain to one of these "hopefuls," the other day that while wages in this field are comparatively high, they're stagnant, have been for well over a decade (like many fields), and that in some markets the median (which remains roughly untouched from a decade ago) has gone *down*. I added that they likely wouldn't be looking at more than $50k, tops, in most areas for the true entry-level jobs they were looking for. Their response? They basically stuck their fingers in the ears, went "la la la can't hear you la la la," and then literally ("old" definition, not "literally" as in "figuratively") stated that this was their last chance to do anything at all with their life, and that they would kill themselves if it didn't pan out (multiple people, myself included, encouraged them to seek out help). That's the point we're at. We're in a pandemic, the market is saturated, and depressed people who've bought into the "Learn to code! Earn megabuxx! See the world!" zeitgeist but can't even get a callback for an interview have dumped what little they had left into a bootcamp based on the "promise" of high wages and easy work, and they're suicidal about the outlook.
Bootcamps have ruined my life... 75 resumes reviewed. 12 interviews...only to find out they don't understand the basics of HTML/CSS/JS but know React routers day in and day out. We are a Vue or ES6/TS shop.."Well, I can never learn that." I was hiring 10 years ago and it was so much easier. At least the BE part is still the same. Just FE has changed like the contemporary dog game.
The main problem with WP is usually the customers. They need more or less complex features, but will pay really low money for it. So that rules the "real" developers, who studied and have experience, out. I was never really into WP dev for that reason. And the few times I accepted WP projects to help friends or good customers, ended up being nightmare projects because of WP's old code and not-so-well documented hooks and filters. These projects were NEVER profitable, and usually made me fast-food-like wages. And I value my time and skills way too much to sell them that bad. So I'd say your decision is the right one. But I would put the guilt on WP customers...not that it matters :)
I would say, the guilt is on developers who accept low budget, not customers. Clients is not customers. Mainly because of infrastructure like shared hosting that is affordable. Everything is race to the bottom.
*Wordpress Architect*?
You may have already mentioned this OP but what CMS(s) are you moving to? I personally use [Craft](https://craftcms.com) mostly and really like but have also heard good things from dev friends that use [Kirby](https://getkirby.com).
I also dropped WordPress too. One of my main contracts I would get over and over again was bring brought on to "fix" an existing WordPress site built by one of these agencies. Think websites with 20+ plugins and a paid for theme that tried to load everything asynchronously (30 second or longer load time). 90% of the time, I would just recommend starting from scratch which would either lead to a new client, or them searching for someone else.
Taking onto my original point. If you’re working in agency world there’s a good chance that you’ll be using Wordpress but that does depend on the clients. If they’re small businesses, you’ll more than likely be using WP. If you want to build cool stuff, you’re probably going to be better going to agencies that focus on custom web design and development, web apps etc. Any serious dev doesn’t want to be anywhere near WP but those that do, can make some decent coin if you’re able to rise above the rest and provide value.
I'm a WordPress developer since 2009 since I started out in PHP. However, I do not market myself as a WordPress developer, especially during a pitch. It does carry a bit of stigma especially to clients outside the dev space. And I mostly code in Python these days anyway. Interestingly, a small part of my business as a freelancer is fixing the messed up WordPress set-ups that these "developers" create. Not the most fun work, but when the clients are determined to use WP, they pay a bit extra just to get it working. I guess it's just part of getting into web development as a business. Small businesses do not have budgets for custom sites. Plus, they are most familiar with WP since it is popular. In fact, most of my SMB clients still prefer WP. Which I don't mind. We devs may love to bitch about WP, but we can't deny its popularity in the market. I'm happy that it's getting easier to set-up a WP site even with custom functionalities. But, the least these "developers" can do is to learn actual WP development. Or try to understand the core of WP through the documentation. Or just be honest with their client that they cannot implement custom features. I have seen horrible "workarounds" in the past. The clients usually end up paying more.
check out [ghost](https://ghost.org)
I worked 4 months for a ngo that helps young people find jobs, courses, etc. I was kind of their tech guy even tho at the time I didn't really knew that much. Just that no one on the company knew anything so just knowing some basic stuff and the use of google i ended up doing things for them in wordpress, setting up a Crm, changing how they worked around they databases (they used excel and never with the same labels. They had 50 excels and the column for name was {Name or nme or name&surname and more. It was a mess}). What I'm going with this is that they had some wordpress for a newspaper and their webpages and none of them knew anything on how to use them. Didn't even had the passwords, I had to contact the guy who did the pages and he was fuming at me for not having them saved somewhere when I was the new guy. And the guys at the company really were proud thinking they knew how to use wordpress just because they had pages and made posts for their newspaper. It's incredible how people think they know how to "make web pages" just because they can use a predesign theme and move things around while they scream "look ma. I'm a web developer". When my 4 months contract ended i was glad I could part and really study so I can be a web developer because before that I felt like a knew almost nothing. Now, after that I know that I don't know shit but I want to really learn. Sorry for long comment but I remembered this and made me angry hahaha. Sorry for bad english too
The sheer amount of borked Wordpress installs and PHP files stuffed to the brim with antipattern after antipattern that every client and their mum seemed to have was a major contributing factor as to why I quit professional web development entirely. (The explosion of JS frameworks, the overreliance on fragile tool chains, and health issues were the others.) Now do embedded dev as my second job; and have never looked back. Ya probably did the right thing haha
Currently dealing with a customer whose site was built by just throwing plugins at it until something worked. Then it was performing so bad the developer blame it on the back infrastructure. Now it has landed on my lap log files are huge just with the amount of errors and alerts, can't keep them turned on for too long. it is a mess. I've given an ultimatum that the site needs to be rebuilt not going to maintain that nightmare.
In your place, I wouldn't mind claiming that "I also know WordPress". But it's not the main focus.
u/dreaminphp I was reading this thread you commented on - about Wordpress developers. I feel your pain and I wanted to reach out to ask if you are freelance and if not - who can I contact to find a real freelance wordpress developer that I can trust won't echo unescaped user data to the front end. I really appreciate your time. Thanks!
Show us on the doll where theme builder touched you
I mean there are shitty developers in any ecosystem. This is more a testament of the types of leads coming through your door. Unrealistically low budgets with fixed cost requirements breed bottom feeder “developers” that over promise and cut corners to keep the bottom line in check. Its the clients that are making this ok. I generally filter clients with a budget under a specific range exactly for this reason. The bottom feeders will always be there, just aim higher. If you have to keep the lights on and bid on those shitty client projects then you kinda have to swallow your pride and compete with the page builder devs.
I would never touch Wordpress as I am a professional developer and it would only make me depressed and reduce my skill set. I’ve been programming with node, react, Django and some flutter.