How did it start?
Around the year 2010, this is the first touch on CMS framework, at that time Drupal & Joomla were the leaders of the CMS segment. Whenever I seek advice from someone senior, they always recommend Drupal or Joomla. The reason CMS is needed is that my client hopes to have CMS for the content update of their new site.
Here I started my journey on testing Drupal, Joomla, LightCMS, concrete5 &, etc, remember more than 5 CMS I review by setup, test the dashboard, install the plugin, customize the plugin, customize the theme file, understand the underlying thingy that makes the CMS works.
After days and weeks, I decided WordPress gonna be my to-go CMS for my new client and the coming years of my freelance career.
Below is why:
The Loves
Quick & simple setup
The initial setup I remember around 10 years ago, was dump zip file via FTP, unzip then access the URL from the browser, Ta-da! Got the setup wizardry screen as below:
Compared to other CMSs 10 years ago, this setup screen saved a lot of time. So we no need to sweat too much for the setup. Later on, there’s a Joomla senior of mine who claimed that am lazy to set up and learn Joomla 😆
Plenty of themes and plugin
Yeah, the ecosystem of WordPress’s theme & plugin is massive due to its adoption rate. You often see the tagline of 20% of the website powered by WordPress. From the newsletter, slider, point system, e-commerce, you can find any plugin that is required to make a site functional.
Extendibility and customization
Cannot find the plugin you want? build 1 for yourself, you can do it with PHP and the WordPress hook. Again compared to the Joomla plugin, it’s easier and having the flexibility of the plugin building.
The Hates
Performance optimization
In reality, a simple WordPress site has 10–20 plugins installed, ranging from security, newsletter, contact form, slider, testimonial, image optimizer, and it goes on. Imagine this, there’s a single line of code in the plugin causing the whole site to slow down without apparent error or warning, and as a maintainer, you have no idea which plugin and line, what are you gonna do?
Below is merely my personal approach, First, tries to disable the plugin 1 by 1 to identify which plugin causing the performance issue. Second, check the plugin version, plugin discussion thread, GitHub error tab, any online resources that pointing the same issue. Third, downgrade or replace the plugin then re-test its functionality again. Well, sometimes not only 1 plugin, but few plugins, repeat the same steps until the issue resolve.
Ok, let’s say the client insist want to use that buggy plugin without replacement, what are you gonna do again?
Personal approach, start to debug from frontend jQuery script, PHP script, SQL query, tearing layer by layer until we identify the layer that causing the performance issue. After the issue is found, better report to the plugin maintainer and wait for the fix & update, If we fix it on our own, we cannot upgrade the plugin later on as the new update will overwrite the custom fix.
Does anyone who reads this post come across any performance monitoring plugin of WordPress? Please leave a comment below.
Plugin & core compatibility
WordPress core and plugin automatic update is a better approach for security but not for stability, each update may contain breaking changes and need to monitor the WordPress site constantly.
Wrap up
WordPress has accompanied me for many years throughout my freelance career, the W logo certainly means something. Thanks to those contributors who make it happened. (Even seen a blog of a WordPress contributor who suffers Leukemia and passed away, https://alex.blog/2019/02/18/leukemia-has-won/)
Forward to 2020, we have plenty of choices for CMS from headless CMS, No-code CMS, the decision depends on the story and use-case. Of course, am still loving WordPress for its healthy theme marketplace, community, demand and ecosystem, but _________ . 😊
