I love building static (or statically generated) websites, but all too often, customers want dynamic content. And what's worse, they don't tell you up-front, because they don't really understand the difference.
"I need a website for my bakery". "What's supposed to be on it?" "Our address, opening times, a few pictures". I build them a static website.
"Now I need a contact form". Ok, that doesn't really fit into a static website, but I can hack something together. "Now I need to show inventory, and allow customers to pre-order". A static website won't cut it anymore.
When you develop for clients, especially those that you don't know very well, it's a bad idea to back yourself into a corner that's not very extensible. So from that perspective, I really get why they give plugins such a central spot.
This is the main reason why WordPress is so popular still to this day. You can cache the crap out of the frontend to the point that it’s basically a static site at that point but then it’s still all running on top of a dynamic platform if you need that flexibility in the future.
I got my start in webdev slinging WordPress sites like a lot of self taught devs and I definitely see the pain points now that I’ve moved on to more “engineering” focused development paradigms but the value proposition of WP has always been clear and present.
Given how WP leadership is all over the place at the moment, I can see how Cloudflare sees this as an opportunity to come in and peel away some market share when they can convince these current WP devs to adopt a little AI help and write applications for their platform instead.
I've managed a couple of WordPress installs for friends and family and my experience has largely been the opposite in that there's very little truly dynamic content. Of the dynamic content, the vast majority could just be an API (either home-grown or paid 3rd party SaaS).
The flip side of the dynamic content is that every Wordpress I've ever worked on is a horrifying mountain of plugins managed by the world's worst package manager. Plugin A needs to be updated because it has a vulnerability, which requires plugin B to be updated, but the theme hasn't gotten updates in 6 years and plugin B is using new stuff the theme doesn't support, so either the site has to be re-built with a new theme or plugin A just needs to be left at a vulnerable version.
Static sites get around some of that because vulnerable plugins only exist at build-time. I'm not worried about using an old version of Hugo or Jekyll, but I'm very worried about using old Wordpress plugins.
I've done so, so little work with Wordpress, but that experience was enough to convince me that I'd rather spend my days looking for dropped coins on the sidewalk than work with Wordpress again.
Is EmDash built with static sites as a focus? I haven't found too much about it yet, I was assuming it does (or will) focus on server rendering with cloudflare caching when possible.
Are you referring to static vs SSR, or caching? I'd expect static vs SSR to be an Astro concern rather than an EmDash concern. If they didn't integrate at all with Cloudflare for caching out of the box that seems like a miss, though I could see it needing to be a separate plugin if they want to expose all the configurability possible.
My wife's wordpress blog has at least 5 different plug-ins for publishing an article without a header. Every time I fix it for her by removing all but 1 plug-in, she'll install a million others because that's what ChatGPT told her to do.
I have no hope nor expectations of non-technical people performing technical tasks no matter how advanced AI becomes. The only solution is a platform/CMS that already has the all bells and whistles included.
a friend of mine owns a very popular psych/stoner label
until 3 days ago the website was a bunch of static pages, updated by the "webmaster", no shopping cart, no search, no contact form, just the email on the website
he and his employers have been living out of selling records and band merchandising for more than a decade, before he even created a real company
wanna buy a record?
press a button that sends you to the paypal cart
wanna pre order?
there is a preorder product on paypal, were you can put your shipping address and when it's ready, it'll be shipped to you
he's been selling in Europe and overseas in the US since the day he started
Now it got to the point where he needed to put different currencies for different regions, taxes, tariffs (UK, USA) so he built a new website that (automatically I guess) show the prices in the local currencies and stuff like that
I don't think they disagree? They said that okay, that doesn't perfectly fit into the static site philosophy but he can hack something together. Which is correct.
Your comment is basically agreeing with the parent comment. The free WYSIWYG version of WP was more accessible for laypersons to build their own site and add plugins as they went along. Developers noticed that and started building for WP over other platforms, betting that those layperson-made sites would eventually need features beyond a contact form (appointment scheduling, ecommerce storefronts, sandboxed customer account creation, etc.)
Ecosystem was a huge driver. But even before that, so so easy to get going. 5 minute guided install, if you're doing it yourself. Many web hosting providers auto-installed for you. No one could touch that ease to just get going.
I once did a review of CMSs to see "is there anything better out there?" Literally scores of options. At one point seemed like everyone had tried their hand at building a CMS. Installed maybe a dozen of the most promising. It was all very meh. Some had this nice feature or that (e.g. WYSIWYG editing, back when that wasn't table stacks). But overall, none seemed substantially better that WP, Drupal and Joomla among them. Most of them seemed blighted by comparison. Drupal and Joomla included. Nothing else out there seemed worthy of investing time and energy into.
"I need a website for my bakery". "What's supposed to be on it?" "Our address, opening times, a few pictures". I build them a static website.
"Now I need a contact form". Ok, that doesn't really fit into a static website, but I can hack something together. "Now I need to show inventory, and allow customers to pre-order". A static website won't cut it anymore.
When you develop for clients, especially those that you don't know very well, it's a bad idea to back yourself into a corner that's not very extensible. So from that perspective, I really get why they give plugins such a central spot.