Chris WiegmanI’ve been thinking a lot, lately, on what I think my perfect WordPress site would be. While I’ve talked about leaving WordPress altogether the fact is that it is still the most capable software available for what I want it to do: get me online and, more importantly, manage my content. Given all it can do, there are still things I wish were better. I’ve been thinking a lot on how I would like to improve it, at least for my use case and here’s what I’ve come up with as a wish list:
- I wish WordPress focused more on structured content than design. I want to write, not change the homepage layout all the time. Gutenberg is only a “usable” editor for that. I have a few extra content types via the Pods Framework and, anymore, that and all content in WordPress feels like it is just secondary to design. I stick with WordPress because, unlike a static site generator, it is a true content management system and I wish the focus of the core product would reflect that more.
- I wish WordPress worked better with modern PHP. I would love to keep on PHP 8.2, or whatever is newest when you read this, but that doesn’t work with most WordPress plugins and that is a shame.
- I wish I could write on WordPress locally and deploy to something like Netlify or another static host. My content is static. I don’t need all the bells and whistles that running the PHP on the front-end allows and I would love to separate the two completely as a result. This is something I’m actually working on but I’m still a long way from completion.
- I wish the editor was more performant. I’m writing this on a beefy i7, 32GB laptop and the editor is still slow. It constantly glitches, freezes and generally drives me crazy. Like in the first point I wish the performance of Gutenberg was more of a priority than enabling design.
While that might be a short list I all-too-often feel like they are also impossible asks. That said, for all my commentary and cynicism, I’m still on WordPress and don’t plan on going anywhere so… I’ll keep wishing.