The Drama
Over the past several weeks, there has been a lot of drama around WordPress and it's use. This has made developers very wary of WordPress and its longevity.
If you're unaware of what has been happening, in short:
- Matt Mullenweg (who heads up WordPress.com, Automattic, and owns the WordPress.org project) took to battle WP Engine (a third-party hosting service for WordPress sites) over their right to use WordPress and it’s platforms services.
- In a recent interview with The Verge, Mullenweg doubled down and went on to say how he thinks that WordPress.org belongs to him, even though for years it has been an open-source project that has had hundreds of contributors from all over the world.
- WP Engine, and any sites hosted on it, have been cut off from accessing core and plugin updates, leaving them to be potentially vulnerable if no issues are resolved fast.
- This whole debacle has been public and is destroying the integrity of the WordPress brand/name.
So why were WP Engine cut off? Well, they didn’t give any monetary funding to WordPress (WordPress uses an open-source licence and is free to use, with no mandate to give back). Because of this, Mullenweg goes on to mention in a WordPress.org article that WP Engine are a “cancer” and “if unchecked, cancer will spread”.
The whole thing gets a bit messy when you get into the finer details, but Mullenweg offers a competing, paid, hosting platform and seems to be using his “power over WordPress” as a method to push this and go nuclear on competitors.
This is a real strong stance to take, with very strong words. However, getting past all the nitty-gritty details, the people who are suffering here are the end users.
WP Engine seems to be the only company Mullenweg has gone nuclear on at the moment, but there are hundreds of sites who offer similar services to WP Engine. Will they be affected too?
Should you care?
Well yes, even when following the open-source licence, you can still be cut off from use of the extended platform features due to one person’s approach.
Even as an innocent bystander, if you host your site with a third party it can be left dead in the water with no access to core updates.
What if you wrote a competing commerce plugin and that did better than WooCommerce? Would they cut you off or ban you from the store?
The open-source licence is there, so people can contribute, provide updates, and funded through donations. If they wanted people to pay for WordPress licensing, then they should change their licence and ensure this. This is what many other companies do, and provide a stellar service this way.
If you are a developer or if your site is built on WordPress, this whole situation should make you very wary about the future and who you deal with.
What can we do about it?
Now’s the time to move away.
The easiest solution is to speak with your money, time, and services, by moving to another platform.
On the web, there are plenty of services that provide a solid CMS offering (in-fact, arguably better) than WordPress. So depending on your needs, I wanted to outline a few below that may fit your needs.
Most of the solutions outline below will have some form of paid tier, and this is because paying for the service provides development and support and funds the longevity of it.
Craft CMS
Craft CMS started from being an add-on for Expression Engine and has been around for many years. It provides a solid infrastructure with tools and add-ons for if you need the extra bells and whistles you may be used to on WordPress.
- SEO? SEOMatic is my favourite choice and provides a stellar experience to replace Yoast.
- Commerce? First-party extensions for commerce or integration of Shopify work flawlessly.
- Forms? Lean on Formie, and you can have as many forms as you want with advanced rulesets, or a simple contact form.
For everything else, it’s already basically out of the box and included in your site price.
Languages: PHP & Twig, or Headless (GraphQL)
Pricing:
- Free for solo developers.
- From $279 for teams. ($99 a year after)
- From $399 for organisations. ($99 a year after)
Statamic
Offering a similar infrastructure to Craft CMS (built with entries and blocks) and built on top of Laravel, Statamic can be an excellent decision for your website. They even wrote an honest article on why you should consider it over WordPress.
Languages: PHP & Antlers, Laravel.
Pricing:
- Free for solo developers/projects.
- From $275 for pro ($65 a year after that)
Storyblok
Storyblok is my favourite Headless CMS. I’m truly a believer in decoupling your services and using the tools that are right for the job. By using a Headless CMS you can let the CMS do the job it’s good at and keep your front-end separate, cached, and distributed over CDNs with minimal requests.
When it comes to Headless CMS’s there are a multitude of offerings (even Craft CMS can be headless) but Storyblok has always stood out to me and been a pleasure to both use from a development side and for clients.
Pricing:
- Free for small business/freelancers (€9.00+ for each user past the first)
- From €99.00 for their business offerings (including 5 members)
Shopify (For Commerce)
When it comes to commerce, I find nothing really does the job better than Shopify. Whether you use its platform and theme editor, or use it headless with a different solution. They provide all the tools you need to successfully run a commerce store and make the developer experience a breeze alongside it.
Over the last few years they’ve also pushed out many quality of life improvements which aid development and making sure your site is the best it can be.
Pricing:
- From $29 a month
Languages: Liquid/JavaScript or Headless
Others
- Strapi can provide a very solid infrastructure and can be hosted almost anywhere with a bit of knowledge. It allows you to scaffold out your own entries/blocks and provides a solid interface for itself. Although I haven’t used this one much, I’ve had fun dabbling with it.
- Kirby (From £85 for individuals, from £299 for pro/organisations). Kirby is another I hear about often as an alternative for PHP CMS. It looks swish from the little I’ve played with it and can be extended easily, but I prefer the familiarity of the other solutions for client projects.
- BigCommerce: Pretty much a direct competitor to Shopify, aimed at enterprise solutions, it offers a very similar set up. I’d love to use this more, but my years working with Shopify have kept me away, really.
If you're in need of help moving away from WordPress, or just want to talk, feel free to reach out to me.
Further reading
If you want to ready further on the issues outlined here,
- The Verge tends to cover it pretty well in “The messy WordPress drama, explained”.
- DHH covers why it's bad for open-source in "Automattic is doing open source dirty"