Musings on my future with WordPress

Regular readers of this blog, if such exist, may have noticed that one of the three (!) posts I published yesterday has gone missing. I unpublished it this morning, as I further contemplate the future of WordPress, and whether or not I want to be a part of it.

First off, I need to make it clear that I will be a part of it, because ICS Calendar Pro has become a substantial part of my business, and I only see that growing. The question for me, however, is whether or not the rest of my business will continue to revolve around WordPress the way it has since 2014.

I’ve been building websites for much longer than that. By 2014 I had already been writing HTML for 20 years, and building websites professionally for 18. My decision to go all-in on WordPress in 2014, and abandon the CakePHP-based custom CMS I had been painstakingly crafting for the previous 6 years, hinged on my realization that WordPress was evolving quickly into a powerful, general-purpose CMS.

But therein lies the problem. I am part of a very large community of serious, professional web developers who embraced WordPress (the open source project) as a general-purpose, if decidedly idiosyncratic, Content Management System (CMS). And we’re the ones who collectively turned it into the dominant platform that it is today. But I don’t think Automattic, or much of the WordPress core team, sees it that way. They’ve never lost the original vision of it as a simple blogging platform, even though the web world has largely moved beyond blogging (at least the open source, self-hosted kind).

Automattic (the company owned by WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg) isn’t competing with Drupal or Joomla. They’re competing with Squarespace, Wix and Medium. And as such, their focus is on how to make WordPress.com (their commercial, hosted version of WordPress) into a stronger challenger to those platforms. The open source WordPress project that I and my fellow developers have grown to love is just an afterthought to that mission. Or at least, so it seems, with the aggressive pushing of Gutenberg (a.k.a. the Block Editor) since 2018, and even more alarmingly, full-site editing (a.k.a. Site Editor) this year.

Gutenberg is one thing. I started off hating it, not because it was a bad idea, but because it was a poorly executed one — or more specifically, that it was forced on the WordPress community before it was mature enough to replace the classic editor. But I absolutely believed in the idea of block editing in general. I had already been working extensively on my own custom theme that was built around ACF Flexible Content. Many others turned to “page builder” plugins/themes like Divi, Beaver Builder, WP Bakery, or Elementor.

I despise those page builders because they introduced their own, often convoluted interfaces that look and feel nothing like WordPress, and most frustratingly, are not easier for end users. The only people they’re easier for are “no code” website builders, and maybe I’m an old man yelling at clouds, but I feel like you shouldn’t be charging people money to build websites for them if you don’t know how to write code. Less curmudgeonly: These page builders require just as much work to learn as writing code does, but if you learn to code, you walk away with a much more valuable skill.

But I digress. For the sake of adding block editing flexibility to the content management aspects of using WordPress, I have no problem with Gutenberg as it stands in 2022. In fact, I’m using it to write these words. It is much nicer than the old classic editor — at least, now it is; not so much when it debuted in 2018 — and more importantly, it’s the WordPress way as opposed to page builders. Even if it’s only “the WordPress way” because WordPress has changed to be like it, rather than it fitting what WordPress was before.

I still have a major problem, in principle, with the entire concept of the Site Editor though. And the blog post I cited earlier this year feels more relevant to me than ever. I still don’t think it’s really for anybody. Except Automattic.

It’s not that the Site Editor is going to put people like me out of work. It’s that, if this is the direction things are going, it makes absolutely no sense for people like us to continue to use WordPress as our platform of choice.

Taking this thought a step further (and following the links), we get to the heart of the matter for me, which is perfectly summed up in a post called The Complicated Futility of WordPress. Specifically (emphasis mine):

The thought of client side marketing interns ‘play(ing) around with site-wide designs’ should make the blood of any professional run cold. Sites that have been painstakingly, designed and built, reviewed and refined to the last detail every step of the way with stakeholders on the client side, optimising UX, legibility, performance and upholding the client’s brand can now be squelched in an instant by someone 3 months into their job who prefers yellow.

No doubt we could work up a system to prevent this, we can restrict access and force use of the classic editor etc, but that’s where the ‘complicated futility’ comes in. It’s one thing to find a way to cherry pick aspects of the software to serve your purpose, it’s another thing entirely to try to build in complete opposition to it.

—coderjerk

For me, it’s been a difficult year of loss, with the death of my mother in September (and several months of decline preceding that), and some distance from my work. It’s also been a year when I have struggled constantly, through my efforts at building a new Block Editor-friendly theme to replace my trusty old ACF-based one, to find some sense in a lot of the decisions that have been made about how Gutenberg works and the direction WordPress is going. My low motivation, easy distraction, and generally slow progress on the theme, I am just now realizing, has been due to the amount of cognitive dissonance I was feeling, as I realized that everything about my approach to building websites as a professional developer, everything I am looking for in the tools I use to do my job, seems, as coderjerk put it, to be in complete opposition to what WordPress is becoming.

As a freelancer, I keep fairly diligent records of my time spent working on client projects. I have to. It’s how I make money. But I am not as rigorous in tracking how I use my personal time. I wish I had logged the time I’ve spent over the course of 2022 experimenting with, and then abandoning, various potential WordPress replacements. It usually only takes me an hour or two to realize that, as much as I am resisting learning the seemingly nonsensical framework (if you can call it that) for building custom blocks, block patterns, block themes, and everything else in the “new way” of WordPress, it is still probably superior to whatever platform I’m testing out that day. So I’ve dismissed ClassicPress as a backwards-looking dead-end. I’ve tried and cast aside more random niche CMSes than I can recall. (But, to prove this isn’t just empty talk, a few of them are e107, Craft, and Concrete, and I’ve even contemplated Drupal, of all things, as well as resurrecting my old CakePHP-based system.)

None of that has gone anywhere, because it was immediately apparent to me that none of them felt right. Not built on the right foundation, not polished enough, not enough momentum behind them. Well, nothing has as much momentum as WordPress. But now I’ve begun to wonder, is it momentum… or inertia?

Today’s discovery feels different. Since I agreed with so much of coderjerk’s post, I took the final suggestion of Twill to heart. I don’t have experience with Laravel, but I know that back when I was in CakePHP world, it was a big competitor. An employee of mine — in the short sliver of time when I had employees — built a custom site for a client using Laravel and he loved it. Twill is built on Laravel, so it seems fitting for me that the next chapter of my career might revolve around a return to MVC frameworks, in their much more modern, mature form. And while this gives me a lot of new stuff to learn — I’ve avoided doing much with systems that rely on Composer and managing dependencies — it all feels like the right stuff to have to learn in 2022, vs. what I’d have to learn to be a Gutenberg ace.

I’ve spent a few hours this afternoon getting the lay of the land with Twill. And while it has thrown me a few surprising challenges even in the basic setup, it’s also giving me a giddy feeling of just having fun geeking out on learning new systems… those moments of delight when I finally get how something works and I see the genius behind it. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the structures underlying Gutenberg, and the only feeling that ever gives me is… “What… why???”

I plan to spend most of tomorrow continuing to tinker with my little Twill test setup. I may still end up scrapping it, and I know I will probably never completely leave the immense gravitational pull of WordPress. But I’m feeling more excited about web technology than I have in years, and more optimistic about my future in this business.

Gruber and Moltz take on Musk

You may not be into nerdy tech podcasts (although if you’re a reader of this blog it’s probably a higher than average probability), but the first main segment of the latest episode of John Gruber’s The Talk Show, dealing with everyone’s favorite billionaire Elon Musk, is really excellent, for a couple of key points:

1. Musk bought Tesla and SpaceX. He didn’t found them. And both of them seem to be succeeding at their missions largely because they have developed a corporate culture that placates Musk’s whims while largely shielding the companies’ primary objectives from the damage those whims may cause.

2. The Boring Company, however, is not a success, and increasingly seems like it may be intended not to be. It’s easy to see Musk as a “world saving visionary,” if that’s what you want to do. But TBC’s main accomplishment, to date, seems to be squashing large public transportation infrastructure projects. And remember that Musk owns Tesla, too. It’s well established by now that mid-20th century automakers exerted their influence to kill public transportation. (Streetcars used to be everywhere!) And it seems quite plausible that TBC is little more than a front for the same activities on behalf of Tesla in this century.

The more I use Gutenberg (the WordPress Block Editor), the more I simultaneously like and dislike it

Where do even I begin with Gutenberg, a.k.a. the Block Editor? Well, I don’t really need to “begin” with it, because I’ve been posting about my various frustrations with it for over 5 years now. (This isn’t even the first Gutenberg-related post I’ve started with “Where do I begin…”)

It took me a long time, but I did finally embrace it. Sort of. I’ve suspended new development on my own pre-Gutenberg block-style theme, 34 Blocks, built around ACF Flexible Content, and for most of the year I’ve been working on its replacement, a Gutenberg-centered theme that I regrettably (for the difficulty of typing it) have named 34 Blocks².

It’s better than bad, it’s good

I will say it, without reservation: Gutenberg, which I will respectfully refer to henceforth as the Block Editor, has gotten a lot better. Taken on its own as a piece of software, I might even, now, describe it as… “good.”

But.

There are so, so many things I would have done differently if I were building it myself. Sure, I take a more “opinionated” (as they say) approach to coding and web design, but that opinion is informed not only by a quarter century of professional experience, but by constantly building to suit specific client needs. Before I started using WordPress full-time in 2014, I had been building my own custom CMSes from scratch, going back to late 2000, when I was using… ugh… ASP and Microsoft SQL Server 7. On Windows NT 4. (I get a sinking feeling in my stomach just remembering those technologies once existed.)

So, a) get off my lawn, and b) WordPress has always done things the wrong way, so why change that now? Like PHP itself, WordPress has long been a marvel of being a tool that just about anybody (relatively speaking) could use to “just get stuff done,” without a soul-crushing learning curve. But its architecture borders on madness. It should’ve used an MVC framework 15 years ago, just like it should be using something like Bootstrap now.

Jane, stop this crazy thing!

I’m really concerned about extending the Block Editor content model to full-site editing, and the Site Editor as it currently stands is (in my estimation) a disaster in every conceivable way. But I don’t want to dwell on that too much at the moment. (Mainly, much like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or cryptocurrency, I want to pretend it doesn’t exist.)

So far I haven’t had much good to say, but believe it or not, I actually like using the Block Editor. When I play by its rules. If you use it to design your pages, great. It gives you way more flexibility than the old “classic” editor.

But you know who doesn’t use it to design pages? Designers. If, like me, you work with designers who deliver you Adobe Illustrator files, and your job is to turn those designs into actual functioning web pages, Good luck shoehorning their designs into the Block Editor. Sure, you can create custom blocks (if you bother to learn React, which, yuck), or you might be able to create a Block Pattern that does the job. But just about any way you go about it, it’s more work than before.

Which brings me to the starkest realization I’ve had about all of this. It happened about a month ago, when I had a rush project. I needed to put together a small site, just a couple of pages, but it needed to be a very precise design, with a lot of polish, and I needed to turn it around in a week. The client didn’t really need the ability to edit content — if they have changes, they’ll come to me anyway.

So I built it by hand.

Oh, I didn’t write every line of code by hand. I used Bootstrap to get my structure started, and I also relied extensively on AOS for some slick animations. I built myself a super-rudimentary PHP framework that is kind of an MVC-lite. (There’s no database, but I did put some content into PHP arrays to allow for loops instead of repeating a ton of identical HTML code.)

The end result looks as close as possible to the designer’s Illustrator file (with my additional adaptations to make the site fluid and responsive), it’s super slick, and the client loved it. And it would have taken me at least 3-4 times as long to do with WordPress and the Block Editor, with inferior results.

I’m aware of the irony… so don’t bother pointing that out

This all brings me back to a question I frequently, and increasingly, ask myself: Who is WordPress for? The core team clearly still thinks it’s for bloggers. Do they still exist? For the past decade, I’ve thought of it as an extremely versatile, open-ended CMS (or CMS-ish at least), suitable for building just about any kind of website and giving my clients easy access to edit their content without messing up the layout.

But I’ve also come to realize over the years that a lot of my clients either a) don’t need or b) don’t want to edit their own content. Or even if they think they do, in practice they edit things so rarely that they need my help to remind them how things work whenever they do actually make a change.

That’s not always the case; I have some very engaged clients who are using their sites constantly, and for them, WordPress has been the perfect tool. Very few of them, yet, are using the Block Editor though, so we’ll see if that remains true.

My business is still very much dependent upon WordPress. Not only do I use it to create most of my clients’ sites, but I have a growing side business building and maintaining multiple WordPress plugins. I want WordPress to be great, and I want it to continue to grow. I want to continue recommending it for my clients.

But I am also realizing more and more that there are definitely some clients for whom WordPress isn’t the best choice. I no longer see it as “suitable for building just about any kind of website.” In cases where either the client doesn’t want/need editing capabilities, or where the designer delivers a highly unique design that isn’t well-suited to the Block Editor, it’s time to consider alternatives. For me, that probably means, ironically, going back to custom-built CMSes, or at least custom-built templates without a CMS. For some clients, that might mean Squarespace or Shopify, even if that then means I’m not the right developer for them.

Update, in the cold light of the following morning: After writing this, I went back and skimmed through some of my previous posts, then read a few other people’s posts I had linked to but had not given a close read initially. That’s when I came across coderjerk’s The Complicated Futility of WordPress (again), and it spoke to me like nothing I have read in ages. Yes! This is me! Yes, I am not alone! Even as I have spent most of my work time this year wrapping my brain around the Block Editor and trying to create my own Block Theme, I’ve also been harboring secret thoughts that maybe this is the end of the WordPress road for me, and have been looking for alternatives. I never get very far though before I abandon the idea of learning a new toolset and retreat back to WordPress. But WordPress is making me learn a new toolset anyway, and it’s one that, deep down, I know doesn’t make a lot of sense. Coderjerk concludes the post with a note about Laravel-based Twill, and I am genuinely intrigued. It looks like it may be “The One.” But I’ve thought that before. Still, I intend to give it some serious consideration.

Debugging WordPress and PHP 8.1: a chicken-and-egg conundrum

If you’re a WordPress developer, trying to debug code on a server that’s running PHP 8.1, you may have noticed an absurd number of deprecation notices overwhelming your efforts to get anything done.

After trying in vain to resolve the issue by updating the value for error_reporting in my server’s php.ini file, I discovered why that doesn’t work, courtesy of a StackExchange answer.

WordPress sets its own value for error_reporting when you turn on WP_DEBUG, ignoring the php.ini value. It kind of has to do this. (Well, not “kind of.”) That’s the only way for WordPress to display more — or less — error output than what’s configured at the server level.

The problem is, when you turn on WP_DEBUG, WordPress shows you everything. Normally that would be desirable, but PHP 8.1 has introduced an unusually large number of deprecation notices in anticipation of PHP 9 imposing strict rules on things that have been generously allowed in earlier PHP versions.

OK, so we know what’s going on. But since a lot of the deprecated code is in WordPress core, or in third-party plugins, there’s not really anything a developer like me can do about fixing these issues. (Sure, I could fix it and submit a pull request, but I’m not currently a WordPress core developer and I am not sure I want to take that on, even in an extremely peripheral way.)

So… uh… how do I just make it stop? That is definitely easier said than done, and the reason is the sequential nature of how code is loaded and executed. “Everything everywhere all at once” is not how it works. WordPress loads one file, that loads another file, that loads several other files, each containing a mix of procedural and object-oriented code, and functions. The way WordPress lets you hook into that flow and insert modifications is… well.. hooks.

Hooks are great, but a) the hook you want has to exist, and b) your code that uses the hook needs to be loaded before WordPress processes the hook. Oh, and of course, c) hooks themselves are functions, so you can’t use them until those functions have been defined.

Hence our problem. The code that tells WordPress to show you all the stuff — errors, warnings, deprecation notices — happens pretty early in the sequence. Specifically (as of WordPress 6.1.1) it is in line 460 of wp-includes/load.php in a function called wp_debug_mode(). By that point, yes, the add_action() and add_filter() functions have been defined. But, WordPress hasn’t actually loaded any plugins yet (even “must-use” plugins in the mu-plugins folder). So if you write a plugin to modify the error_reporting value, it might work, but only on deprecation notices that are generated after your plugin has been loaded, and the ones we’re concerned with are all in WordPress core and get triggered before plugin loading starts.

Realizing this, I thought I might solve the problem by putting my filter into the wp-config.php file, a.k.a. the only “early” file you’re allowed to edit. But nope, can’t do that: the add_filter() function doesn’t exist until wp-includes/plugin.php gets loaded at line 49 of wp-settings.php, which itself gets loaded at the very end of wp-config.php.

Since wp_debug_mode() runs at line 80 of wp-settings.php, that means the only way to do what we’re trying to accomplish is to get it to fire off somewhere within those 31 lines of code inside wp-settings.php. Those lines consist of calls to a handful of low-level functions. I checked the source code of each of them for any hooks — not that it would be correct to use the hooks in any of those functions for this purpose, if they existed — but merely to see if it would even be possible.

There is only one hook in the entire lot, and it’s inside wp_debug_mode() itself. It’s called enable_wp_debug_mode_checks. I wrote my own filter function that leverages that hook to modify error_reporting, and it would work, except for the fact that there’s nowhere to put it. I can’t write any custom code in a plugin or theme to call that filter, because it wouldn’t be loaded yet by the time the filter is applied in wp_debug_mode(). And I can’t put it in wp-config.php because, as noted above, the add_filter() function isn’t even defined yet at that point.

So… there are only two place you can put this code to get it to work: either in wp-settings.php just before line 80, or by just editing the wp_debug_mode() function itself in wp-includes/load.php. And you very much are not supposed to do either of these things, because your changes will get overwritten the next time a WordPress core update runs.

But… what else are you going to do? Well… after going through all of the emotions on my wide spectrum from frustration to rage, I read the comments at the top of wp_debug_mode() that start with a pretty unambiguous statement:

This filter runs before it can be used by plugins. It is designed for non-web runtimes.

OK then.

Also inside the comment is a code example, mirrored in the next reply on the same StackExchange post I linked above. I initially ignored it because I instinctively ignore any PHP code example that includes $GLOBALS… but in this case, it’s apparently the official answer on the matter. Boo.

The code I ended up putting into wp-config.php looks a bit different though:

if (WP_DEBUG) {
  $GLOBALS[‘wp_filter’] = [
    ‘enable_wp_debug_mode_checks’ => [
      10 => [[
        ‘accepted_args’ => 0,
        ‘function’ => function() {
          error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED);
          ini_set(‘display_errors’, ‘on’);
          return false;
        },
      ]],
    ],
  ];
}

I’m not sure why the StackExchange poster put the error_reporting() call outside the conditional. I also found I needed to specifically set ini_set('display_errors', 'on'); because returning false from this function causes the rest of wp_debug_mode() not to execute — which we want, but we need to make sure to replicate any of the rest of its functionality that we do need. I probably should add the bit that doesn’t output errors on REST/AJAX calls, but I’ll worry about that when it becomes an issue. I don’t use either of those very often. (Of course the WP admin itself uses AJAX all the time.)

A few reasons why you should keep your old domain name indefinitely, even if you’ve changed your business name and never plan to go back

What follows is a slight reworking of an email I just sent to a client. I think it’s broadly useful enough that it deserves to be shared publicly.

Here’s the scenario: The client’s family business operated for many years under her father’s name, but when he retired and she took over, she changed the name. In the several years since, she has built a strong reputation for the new identity, and she was wondering if it was finally time to let the old domain name lapse.

Short answer: No!

Here’s the longer answer, which also addresses the natural follow-up question: Why?

First, “google” your old domain name. Just go to Google, type the old domain name in the search bar, and see what comes up. You may be surprised how many websites out there still have links to URLs with your old domain.

Assuming you kept the old domain configured as an alias when you built your new website, if you keep the domain, those old links will still work, and redirect to the current site. If you were to let the domain lapse, those links would stop working. (Whether or not anyone is actually clicking those links is another matter, of course. If you have Google Analytics or other site stats, check your referrers for some insight on that.)

The same goes for email. Some people may still have old business cards, or for other reasons might still try sending email to those old addresses. If you have them configured to forward (which, again, you should have done when you initially made the switch), then you’ll still get those messages.

Another thing to keep in mind: if you let the old domain lapse, someone else will be able to register it, and could put it to nefarious use — phishing, scams, or just generally sleazy content. I have seen it happen. Even the best case scenario — no one registering it — will result in it loading a “this domain is available” placeholder page with the domain registrar, which may give people the impression you’ve gone out of business.

Given the relatively low annual cost of a domain registration, my recommendation is that you should keep your old domains registered for as long as you’re in business.