So I know you can add Blade or Twig templates on top of WordPress to at least make your own code contribution a bit better (e.g. at least some automatic escaping, saner templates), but at what point is it a lost cause and it's time to move to something with a better foundation? I've seen people use WordPress as a headless CMS but I don't think the admin interface is particular good either.
> The problem is the knowledge and experience gap that is between a person, who can write a secure and useful plugin and a person, who starts writing plugins, because they are a WP user and got some motivation to start with plugin writing. PHP does nothing to reduce that gap.
That's my feeling. Anybody used to working with secure and well written codebases with CD/CI, tests and just basic Git versioning will want to run away when they see how typical WordPress sites work under the hood.
> So I know you can add Blade or Twig templates on top of WordPress to at least make your own code contribution a bit better (e.g. at least some automatic escaping, saner templates), but at what point is it a lost cause and it's time to move to something with a better foundation? I've seen people use WordPress as a headless CMS but I don't think the admin interface is particular good either.
I would say, if you have a choice in the matter (many do not have that on the job or when a friend asks them to help them with their blog or shop built on top of WP), that at the point, where you start using a proper template engine and switch from the WP-assumed concattenation way of building things to a style of using composition, you are well beyond the point, where you should switch to something more appropriate for the job.
If you use React, have a look at React Bricks. It has a great foundation for Devs based on React components, but with top visual editing experience for Content editors. To be clear, I am the founder :)
What do you think about it?
I fundamentally disagree with some of React's design decisions, like intermingling state, behavior and styling. I hope time will come, when people realize again, why these things were intentionally separated in the past.
React makes user stylesheets more difficult to write and in my experience often creates tons of overhead in the DOM tree. Often sites do not use SSR, so all they show me is a white screen (because why care about adding any note about the site only working with tons of JS?) and I close the tab. When React sites actually work somewhat, they are usually sluggish and break basic browser functionality like the back button, bookmarkability and others. It takes a lot of care to avoid these issues, when developing with React, so I am not a fan of React or things based on React.
For me personally React is somewhat of a plague of the "modern web". I am sorry to express it this harshly. React and its ilk create a lot of pain for me. Not everything has to be a SPA. Most things actually do not have to be a SPA.
> The problem is the knowledge and experience gap that is between a person, who can write a secure and useful plugin and a person, who starts writing plugins, because they are a WP user and got some motivation to start with plugin writing. PHP does nothing to reduce that gap.
That's my feeling. Anybody used to working with secure and well written codebases with CD/CI, tests and just basic Git versioning will want to run away when they see how typical WordPress sites work under the hood.