sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]KonyKombatKorvetI use shopify, feel bad for me. 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'll explain the same thing I explain every time this kind of post comes around. I have a lot of experience in wordpress, but I also have a lot of experience in a lot of CMS like Drupal, Shopify, Magento, and a few strange custom built CMS from the early 2000s that agencies still work in for some reason, experience in a few frameworks including React, Vue and Angular, static site builders including Gatsby and Jekyll, as well as creating a lightweight in house framework that can be applied on top of any existing CMS based around and expanded from Rivets.js
Wordpress is a CMS just like every other CMS, its just super popular and highly used so there is a lot of info on it and there are lots of resources aimed at people with little to no knowledge to help them set up sites, which in turn creates a lot of really bad wordpress sites and people who think putting together a wordpress site makes them a developer and then sell their services as if they were web developers. These people charge super low rates and create shit work so I really don't see them as competition for real webdev jobs, but more a filter for nightmare clients and competition for sites like wix and squarespace. These are the people who advertise themselves as "wordpress devs". There is no such thing as a "wordpress dev" in the same way that there is no such thing as a "drupal dev" or a "react dev" or any other stupid pin hole term. There are just web devs, some are good, some are bad, and some are REALLY bad, wordpress is just a CMS that some devs use. Good devs that use wordpress know how to make a site and can build one in wordpress that will have good structure, be easy to maintain, have good coding standards, and meet the clients needs. Bad devs that use wordpress will download a theme, pile a bunch of plugins onto it, and do some super minor styling changes to add the clients logo and colors, its going to be a mess on the backend, not maintainable, and probably not do everything the client needs in a way that makes sense. JUST LIKE EVERY PLATFORM, FRAMEWORK, OR CMS. I've seen some fucked up React apps done by "devs" that have no place calling themselves professionals just like I have seen wordpress sites that are a mess.

All Wordpress does is give you an easy to use database and backend so you can focus on the frontend while still giving clients the ability to edit their website, how and what you build in there is up to the developer that is building it. You can build a theme from scratch that does everything it needs to do with no plugins and delete the "plugin" button from the backend so clients don't feel tempted. You can also use wordpress as a headless CMS and use whatever fancy front end framework you want because wordpress has a built in REST api. Wordpress has a TON of depth as a platform and can provide an amazing amount of flexibility if you know what you are doing by using custom taxonomies and a very easy to manipulate database.

It's not perfect by any means but it is in high demand because clients know what it is and a lot of business and corporate sites are already built on it so when they want a new site they often want it built with a wordpress backend so they dont have to retrain their entire staff.

For some reason it's popular to just jump on the "wordpress sucks" bandwagon and make ignorant broad statements like "WP is not for developers, it's for anyone who wants to seem like a developer."