Irritations and Expectations: seeking input

I need input from users. Please, write here what irritate you in WP? Not only Gutenberg, but all other issues. From user, developer, client, agency, etc. view. What you expect from CP? Please write everything, I need more input from various audience.

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In the last couple of years I’ve been seeing red flags over on WP–not everyone, of course, but certain people involved in WP development with a narcissistic attitude. The debacle over WP-Spamshield–the plugin author feeling bullied–and lo and behold, some of the same people he said bullied him, also bullied people who didn’t want to use Gutenberg. I hope that CP will be more open than WP to input from users and developers.

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My main concern with Wordpress is that it is becoming a victim of its own success. It has become this massive, money-generating enterprise that I now find overwhelming. There are over 54,000 plugins available and who knows how many themes. I find it irritating that whenever I look for an answer for some problem I get pages and pages of results of someone trying to sell me something or sign me up.

The fact that anyone can purchase an existing and popular plugin and “re-purpose” also worries me. Wordpress security is a constant and ongoing concern.

That’s why CP appeals to me. It’s a chance to get back to basics and work with a small and manageable venture.

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First thing (I’ve seen it before Gutenberg, and also disabled TinyMCE, in case it would be the cause for it, but I don’t think it is) is the number of

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You end up with “empty” lines at the bottom of posts. This leads one to pretty much always by default always checking the HTML editor before publishing or updating a posts to check so there’s nbsp; there.

The second issue has to do with the Gutenberg editor. I guess this falls under the accessibility category.

I have poor eyesight and use a Windows high contrast (black background / white text) theme. I have also set so that all pages have black background and white text in FireFox, and overriding whatever colors set by websites.

If I use these settings. There is no way for me to see the text I’ve selected in Gutenberg. Compared with the Classic Editor where it’s possible to.

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I am an end user.
My problem with WordPress is the loss of confidence. Gutenberg is simply a consequence of leadership policy.
I believe that WordPress already is targeting the page builders market.
The leading hosting companies, in the country they i live in now offer a combined service (page builder + hosting). They are, of course, delighted by the WordPress 5.0.
For WorPress leaders, we are simply “Collateral Damage”.

:slight_smile:

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Ah this topic is perfect.

When I started using Wordpress 9 for my blog years ago, it was a lightweight CMS. By the time version 4 came along in 2014 it was getting bloated. TinyMCE has become “heavy-handed” and insists on rewriting your code - I don’t understand why it can’t respect the code that it is given? WP is so bloated now that I had to remove the wp_head() function entirely.

With the switch to CP I’ve also decided to “white-label” the wp_login page. It still loads the original stylesheet, which means it can render with that first before the secondary style-sheet loads. But I shouldn’t need to use functions.php to edit the public-facing login page, there should be some easy simple options from the dashboard to at the very least white-label the login page, perhaps also it should be supported to use one supplied in the theme folder too. If CP is to be “business focused” this should be a logical option - even if the default page will be CP-branded.

What is mentioned by @LinasSimonis in the other thread is true:

I don’t understand the long-term goals and the name “ClassicPress” is misleading, or rather it doesn’t convey the CMS’s primary purpose. Which is OK because it will need time to find its own identity. However this page to me leaves out the meaty problems with Wordpress at present. Which leads me to my last annoyance (well last for this post anyway)…

Security.

The idea that people should use, or be directed to use, “security plugins” is utterly absurd to me. For some people in specific circumstances, perhaps there is a reason, but 99% of people do not need a security plugin if they know the basics of what they’re doing. Which means that Wordpress has been failing in delivering a simple step-by-step guide for setting up a secure Wordpress website. I’ll put this in greater detail separately as a suggestion so it can be properly discussed.

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My top two:

  • General combativeness of those in power to others in the community
  • Lack of willingness to add hooks when reasonably requested by the community
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This has been discussed previously:

If this is something you want to see in ClassicPress core, please leave your vote on the petition. Also a pull request for this change would be very welcome!

Sometimes we do have to push back on things that are not a good idea, or good ideas that are not ready to be implemented yet. However, it is easy to overdo that, and I’d like for ClassicPress to avoid forming “cliques” of people who aren’t open to ideas from people outside of the clique.

If you see this happening here, please tell anyone on the committee and we will make sure it is addressed.

Generally I’m happy to add new hooks to ClassicPress. The only caveats I can think of:

  • we may not want to open the floodgates here - if we add a lot of things all at once then it becomes a source of incompatibility with WordPress.
  • if there is a solid, non-annoying way to do the same thing with existing hooks (may be stating the obvious, but worth stating).
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So a LOT of what I think has already been said well by others in this thread, so I won’t repeat it here.

For me, the problem is that WP follows an opt-out approach to its core code (if you can call it that, because usually you need custom plugins or your own code to disable nightmare-inducing features!)

So, I would like ALL blogging related features to be opt-in only.
This includes stuff like RSS feeds, post via e-mail, XML-RPC, etc. etc.

I want to start with EVERYTHING being private and making things public from there, NOT the other way around like it is on WP.
NOTHING should be accessible to any user who is not logged in, unless I have been made aware of this and consented to it.

But mostly, I believe that what can really distinguish a platform like CP is a REAL user-education drive.
So, for example, I want a document that lists all of the APIs available in the core.
And I want them to be OFF by default.
If I install a plugin, I’d like that plugin to prompt me, saying “This plugin needs to use x API. Please grant permission for this.” (Preferably with a very short description of the implications.)
I want disclosure if a plugin calls a third party server for anything (this has been included in the plugin rules, but I’d like an automated, efficient “are you sure you want to do this?” mechanism for this).
I want disclosure of any actions by a plugin that are not admin-initiated / run in the background so that I can make an informed decision to determine if they are legitimate according to my own discretion and based on the best advice of those that I trust.

So, in short, I want control of my own site…

EDIT: Oh, and a MAJOR irritation that is becoming apparent in CP :blush:
Two of my posts have now been hidden as being flagged as potential spam, including this one!
This happened milliseconds after posting them, so it is absolutely impossible that my posts could have been “flagged” by “several” human users.
And if they have been flagged, it is clearly malicious flagging activity, because in both instances, I have just answered very clear questions / requests for input that were exactly on topic of what the OPs were asking.
I was NOT promoting myself. I did not even post any links.

EDIT 2: While I realize that this is probably a bot being over-zealous, it is likely to be a very scary and unpleasant experience for new users, to be told that the input they put significant thought / effort into is spammy. Please consider this as a priority for user experience. Thank you. :bouquet:

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I have unhidden your posts, sorry about that. Discourse wasn’t happy about what seemed to be a new user and existing user both posting at roughly the same time from the same IP (ie. a sockpuppet). All cleared up now though :slight_smile:

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I like it:

ClassicPress: nightmare-inducing features removed.

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As a user: Some of WP’s defaults don’t make sense, and it’s not as secure as it could be. There are not many tools built in to manage content across the site (bulk actions like search/replace or changing image sizes or renaming things). Even the Classic editor does not have much for content management, like search/replace or merging revisions. Reporting a bug that never gets fixed is super discouraging.

As a developer: The documentation has improved over the years, but is scattered and incomplete. The theme system forces all the front end display to be controlled by the theme, but unless done right, plugins can’t interact. It seems flexible, but at the same time backward. I just tried changing define('WP_USE_THEMES', true); to define('WP_USE_THEMES', false); and it made no difference. I also tried commenting it out and it made no difference. Perhaps the theme is the site.

As a contributor: The ones that have been around the longest make the decisions. New viewpoints are not often welcome. Slack is a hindrance to having each opinion having equal presentation. Having many teams is great, but when an idea affects several teams, you get shuffled among them and no one wants to make the first step. Having a build process is a deterrent to contribution. Having a testing setup that is huge is a deterrent to contribution. Having thousands of bugs unfixed while enhancements are pushed results in update burnout.

As a volunteer answering support questions: The guidelines for starting a topic are almost never followed! People assume that you can read their minds about what they are asking, and leave out all context and versions. The followup is important, but hard to do because of how the topics are displayed. I don’t want to subscribe to every topic I reply to, and I don’t always have the complete answer, so it’s important that others read and answer the rest, but there’s something wrong with the conflicting “start your own topic” and “search for your question first”. The organization of the forums has evolved, but is still unclear. Most people are not sure where to put their question, and a lot of plugin and theme questions are in the main forums, which doesn’t work well because volunteers don’t know that code.
And because of the traffic, there is so much spam and attempts at gaming the reviews. People often aren’t nice, even thought it’s free support for free software, and all volunteers. There is sometimes an assumption that it is a company, and we can see into their sites, and we should have better or more timely answers. The entire German support team quit due to lack of respect (some prompted by a Matt remark).

What I expect from CP is to see some of the problems brought about by years of growth, and address them while they are easier – at the beginning, while small.

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For me personally, it was gutenburg that gave me the push. I just couldn’t work with it, I am just use to doing things the way I always did. When i heard about the fork to Classicpress I immediately signed up for more information.

What I was hoping for, from what I read initially about the project is that it was going to strip the bloat out of wordpress which for me sounds great as we are always told to avoid bloat in our websites.

Now I am not a developer or coder, so I have to rely on certain plugins to help with certain things, SEO, Security, Share buttons etc. The problem is I don’t want to get bloated plugins as this defeats the object in the first place.

So my hope for this project would be a very secure lightweight core with many options turned off by default.

Then I would prefer lightweight well written plugins (of course this depends on the authors) that not only tells me what it is installing or has access to, but tells me what size it is. (As for the moment if I am searching for a plugin, I have to google and read several reviews to try and find the most functional and lightweight plugin for the job), and of course most of them are or have been updated to allow for gutenburg, which obviously isn’t needed in CP.

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@spanner44 I am happy to say that you are in the right place! We have been discussing this topic (lightweight plugins) a lot. For example: How many plugins are too many? The case for granular plugins

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Excellent! This exactly describes what I want as well. Good summary. :+1:

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I can hear it now:

“My plugins aren’t bloated, they’re just big-boned.”

:smiley:

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I’m aware this is an old comment but 1798 is the number of themes in the directory of anyone was interested in that :slight_smile:

Edit: I somehow pastes the wrong number. Correct number of live theme at .org directory is 7298.

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Off topic: 1798 is the year of the Irish Rebellion

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You would have though that someone who is 1 quarter Irish may have recognised that number. Sadly I did not recognise it as a year nor as a mistake until some time after I posted it haha

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I want to clarify what happened with this. I usually install into a folder but it controls the root. Doing this, you copy the index.php file to the root and make a minor change to load from the folder. But that index.php file is where the define is. So I had changed it in one of the two and saw no difference, not realizing it was still in the other one. When I do it correctly, I get a blank page, so the theme really is the site.

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