The WordPress drama has brought forward a bunch of nerds advocating different systems they think WordPress users should switch to, which mostly has illustrated how few nerds understand what makes WordPress appealing to its users in the first place

Jason Lefkowitz

Like, if your pitch for a system to replace WordPress starts with "first, learn Markdown and Git," I need you to understand that you are living in a completely different galaxy than the median WordPress user

Daryl White

@jalefkowit Oof, yeah. SSGs are a completely different animal than Wordpress.

Daryl White

@jalefkowit https://tina.io/ *might* help bridge that some. Maybe. But Git is a whole monstrosity that most WP users would have no concept of.

tante

@jalefkowit And people who think "dump a bunch of PHP files in a folder" can be replaced by a bunch of dockerized microservices and a textmode readme of 30 lines with 3 subtle mistakes really need to get out more.

Dustin Rue

@tante @jalefkowit well now I feel attacked, run WordPress in container images on Kubernetes

Jason Lefkowitz

@dustinrue @tante Hey, you can make your WordPress installation as complicated as you want to! Just don't expect many other WordPress users to follow suit

mafe en españa

@jalefkowit I never understood what people attracted to WordPress and I guess I will never understand.

Jason Lefkowitz

@mafe That's fine, nobody's saying you have to like it. It's just, if you want to sell people who use WordPress an alternative to WordPress, a good starting point would be to understand why they use WordPress.

Devourer

@jalefkowit honestly this, this a lot

The whole point of WordPress and similar services is to be able to run a site without ever needing to touch code, just type, embed pics, and find a theme

Not everyone is willing to learn how to code to run a website they don't even know if they'll stick with

vekkq

@djwfyi @jalefkowit Git can be easy, as Github Desktop demonstrates.

Jason Lefkowitz

@vekkq @djwfyi Try to teach a room full of marketing people how to use GitHub Desktop. I dare you

Shaula Evans

@jalefkowit See also: almost every tech drama.

It's exhausting and unhelpful.

Jason Lefkowitz

@ShaulaEvans Something about tech seems to attract people who cannot imagine anyone in the world is different than they are

berserk du soleil

@jalefkowit sorry if this is silly to ask, but what has happened to the competitor CMSes like Drupal? Is WP just more robust because of all its features? I guess it's accumulated things like a Katamari over many years

Eaton

@jalefkowit The Drupal world long lamented that "It's easy to build WordPress with Drupal, why don't more bloggers use Drupal?”

…Because they don't want to build WordPress?

Jason Lefkowitz

@aetataureate They're mostly all still out there. You can download Drupal and get started with it right now.

Drupal - Open Source CMS

Drupal is an open source platform for building amazing digital experiences. It's made by a dedicated community. Anyone can use it, and it will always be free.

Drupal.org (www.drupal.org)

WP just ate most of the market by hitting a few different sweet spots:

* Free, open source
* Easy to deploy (drag these PHP files over here)
* Easy to get started using (here's a page, fill it with text, click save)
* Lots of free themes and add-ons available

Circa 2010 WP and Drupal were in very close competition, with WP coming from the low end (easy but basic) and Drupal from the high (powerful but complex). Turns out it's easier to build up than it is to build down.

Jason Lefkowitz

@eaton My counter to the "It's easy to build WordPress with Drupal, why don't more bloggers use Drupal?" argument would be: most people don't want to build _anything_. They just want to publish stuff.

If the wide end of your funnel is "build the tool you actually want," you are never going to attract as many people as a pre-built tool that's close enough to what 80% want.

Jay

@jalefkowit It’s almost as though computer nerds have some shared characteristic that makes it difficult for them to understand other people’s mental states

tux0r :openbsd:

@jalefkowit @vekkq @djwfyi Luckily, most SSGs work just well without Git.

Rocketman

@jalefkowit 150% this.

I'm running my blog on Hugo (or trying to). I've just managed to build a git workflow that maybe works, and now the damn box is giving me garbled pages, and I'm finding myself reading about something called "taxonomy templates".

I'm blessed with great curiousity, but I swear that I never wanted to know about this stuff in my entire life.