[HN Gopher] Show HN: An AI-Powered WordPress Site Builder That W...
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Show HN: An AI-Powered WordPress Site Builder That We Are Open-
Sourcing Today
Author : selul
Score : 144 points
Date : 2024-03-21 12:11 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (themeisle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (themeisle.com)
| pbowyer wrote:
| For those of us who haven't recently used WordPress it would be
| really helpful if you define what a FSE theme is.
|
| For others, it's "Full Site Editing" themes, which means... I
| guess you can edit anything in the theme customizer?
| selul wrote:
| Hi there,
|
| That's a very good question. In WordPress, Full Site Editing
| (FSE) allows you to design your entire site--including the
| header, footer, and everything in between--using blocks. Blocks
| are the components for adding content in the new WordPress
| block editor, enabling you to easily incorporate text, images,
| videos, and more.
|
| For this new approach, your site will require a Block theme,
| designed specifically for compatibility with this new editor.
| Also, one thing to note here is that the traditional theme
| customizer is no longer present in this environment. Instead,
| FSE allows direct manipulation of site elements within the
| WordPress Block Editor interface.
| interestica wrote:
| The full site editing thing really changes the wordpress
| paradigm. It's a different mental model. I've had people reach
| out for help because it ends up being a wall for them. The
| communication/education aspect of it needs work.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| Sounds interesting and promising, I just hope it doesn't fall
| into the WP pricing trap that I have seen becoming the norm
| lately. The extreme case was this theme I downloaded for free,
| but later found out that in order to make all functionality work
| as I've seen in the demo, I would have to subscribe to an X
| number of paid plugins, something around a thousand dollars per
| year. This has nothing to do with the WP mentality from years
| ago.
| josefresco wrote:
| Veteran of WordPress here: Pretty much every theme on Envato
| Marketplace comes bundled with plugins that at some point will
| create a licensing nightmare. It's been this way for years, and
| is not a recent development. The problem is in order to
| "bundle" these premium plugins (think Slider Revolution) the
| theme authors often devise their own propriety update mechanism
| that after a few years becomes...wonky at best. Separate
| licensing that relies on "native" update processes would
| actually be ideal.
|
| The process goes like this:
|
| 1. Login to update plugins.
|
| 2. Some plugins don't auto update because they require
| licenses.
|
| 3. Search for the theme's proprietary update process or plugin.
|
| 4. Discover that the Envato support license is expired.
|
| 5. Renew license (typically 6 months).
|
| 6. Update plugins again and... pray that it works because
| support is always a gamble.
|
| We stay away from Envato and the like if we can, but inevitably
| we acquire clients with themes purchased this way.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| Yes, I began to work with Envato back in 2008 and saw this
| licensing tsunami coming. I have canceled my subscription
| with them last November. I couldn't find a single theme
| without Elementor bundled up. I feel sorry for those many
| unadvised people who actually bought the theme to later had
| to open the wallet again to pay Elementor for a subscription.
| konfusinomicon wrote:
| hey now, when using terms like 'Slider Revolution' always
| remember to include a trigger warning to avoid sending all
| the salty wordpress webdevs into fits of insurmountable rage
| josefresco wrote:
| I hear you, just yesterday I was telling someone in my
| office how that plugin just gives me the sweats. I can
| stumble around sure but woah is that UI a beast. Very
| capable but not for the faint of heart.
| Beijinger wrote:
| What was the theme?
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I made a website for a small non profit I'm a member of
| recently, wordpress seemed like the natural fit but wading
| through the hive of scum and freemium that is wordpress plugins
| made me feel dirty.
|
| With all the awesome open source self hosted apps these days
| I'm surprised there's nothing better for generic websites.
| fhd2 wrote:
| I'm working on a WordPress site for a test campaign right
| now, and pretty much came to the conclusion that most
| themes/plugins send me down two rabbit holes: 1) Licensing /
| security issues 2) Getting them beyond 80% of what I need.
|
| Ended up using only a single third party plugin (Polylang),
| and doing the other stuff we need in a custom theme based on
| Automattic's (possibly a bit unmaintained) _s base theme.
|
| Feels like a good decision, only took me about a day more to
| fiddle with the CSS to make things look right and write a bit
| of PHP code for some functional requirements we had. Seems
| way more economical than dealing with a soup of plugins and
| some shady theme. Since you can nowadays just create custom
| blocks for all the site elements, it's a pretty OK
| development experience.
|
| But I also can't quite believe this is the state of the
| art... I use static site generators whenever I can, but for a
| bit more dynamic websites, it seems WordPress is one of the
| best out of what seems like only bad options.
|
| Also an interesting case: Automattic seems like a company
| that's set up to resist enshittification. But all those theme
| and plugin authors with profit motives are not, which has
| about the same effect as if Automattic was ruining the
| platform for short term profits.
| hnrodey wrote:
| Commenting w/o reading the article. WordPress triggered me.
|
| Last month I created a brand new site using WordPress. I followed
| a 90 minute video on YouTube where I was instructed step-by-step
| on what to do. The result is that I'm happy with the finished
| product and learned a lot about WordPress along the way.
|
| However, I would have NEVER got there on my own absent this
| remarkable YT video. WordPress is too complex, too bloated, too
| filled with messages from plugins, too reliant on magic, too
| reliant on plugins to do anything advanced beyond setup a post or
| page.
|
| I hate WordPress so much. I'll still use it because it's
| entrenched, and because it's less time that coding a Jekyll site
| to equivalent functionality.
|
| But I hate it. Thoroughly.
| quesera wrote:
| I'd love to share the link to that video with someone who will
| benefit as much as you have, so that I can continue to never
| think about WordPress myself.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| Folks here are commenting about this FSE feature that allows
| you to build a full site starting from a block theme. I did a
| quick search on YT for 'FSE full course' and found some. I
| think it's worth the time checking out.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Same. I tried many times in the last 10 years to see if it
| improved, but every time it got worse. Especially the plugins.
| Automattic should have killed many of them by integrating the
| functionality, but they have seem to have stagnated years ago.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Automattic are one of the worst offenders when it comes to
| plugins, a bunch of features that should be in core are in
| their jetpack plugin that integrates with their proprietary
| SaaS.
| hdlothia wrote:
| What's the video?
| tutfbhuf wrote:
| > I'll still use it because it's entrenched, and because it
| takes less time than coding a Jekyll site with equivalent
| functionality.
|
| I wouldn't count on that. It required a 90-minute video for you
| to get going with Wordpress. I would say, if you know some
| basic stuff (e.g., know how to install gem, how to write
| markdown/html), you can set up Jekyll in under 90 minutes:
|
| gem install jekyll bundler; jekyll new myblog; cd myblog;
| bundle exec jekyll serve
|
| Now, you have a server up and running. You can start creating a
| post by creating a markdown file in the _posts folder.
|
| For me personally, it would be faster to learn any easy-to-use
| static site generator than Wordpress.
| debesyla wrote:
| Only if you already know how to, well, do programming and
| writing commands to terminal.
|
| For a lot of people clicking pretty buttons is easier to
| understand.
| dageshi wrote:
| Are you mad at wordpress or the fact you had to build the site
| in the first place?
|
| Cause it seems like building any site with a tool you don't
| understand and don't particularly want to understand is going
| to be a bad experience?
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Once upon a time, you have to have a second installation of
| WordPress just to get an "About" page along with the main Blog.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| I reached a point where I had to install Bludit in ./blog in
| order to add a decent blog to a Wordpress website. I'm
| serious.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I first used WordPress in ~2008 and that wasn't the case
| then, you must have been a real early adopter for that to
| have been true, or have done something seriously wrong during
| the install.
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| > But I hate it. Thoroughly.
|
| I had this mindset for years. "It's not real programming. It's
| for people with no brain", I would tell myself. A lot of other
| developers share this idea, I think.
|
| However, I currently am in the plan of launching a series of
| blogs, somewhat related to each other. I figured I'd try out
| wordpress, just to see what it's like, and also because I plan
| on having other people working on these blogs.
|
| Whoah! Completely blown away by wordpress and how quickly I can
| set things up. PHP is quite simple, and the built-in functions
| are very helpful.
|
| If you plan on just launching some products, learn wordpress.
| If you want to _learn_ a programming language, go ahead and
| write the entirety of the code base yourself - that 's the only
| reason I can think of to not use wordpress (for myself).
| sgc wrote:
| I recently was forced to use WP for a site due to third party
| constraints. It simply wreaks of being a swiss cheese of
| security vulnerabilities once you start adding plugins - so
| that would be my main reason for staying away from it for a
| simpler site. For a more complex site you will wind up with
| so many plugins you are better off custom since something
| will definitely break from an update down the road.
|
| My favorite thing was how easy it was to create a simple
| plugin from where I could inject my own php / html / js/ css
| at just about any stage of the pipeline, and crazily enough,
| I tried too many cms that would not allow me to override and
| direct edit the html on a page. It does win in the "easy to
| deploy but fully customizable" category, just because of
| that.
|
| But my thought when using it was sometimes "they made this
| more complicated and difficult than doing it directly,
| because they managed to convince people the direct
| programming was out of reach". But that is how I feel about
| most frameworks, so I might not be objective on that one.
| Overall it was faster, but the tradeoff was massive opacity.
| I recently noticed a tracking pixel on my site and have to
| figure out which a**hole plugin dev is injecting it, then
| find a different plugin or write my own. I have always been
| vanilla for my other sites, so learning to combat other
| vendors and having an adversarial relationship with my own
| site really breaks the mental model for me.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| WordPress is best viewed as a framework for people who
| don't want to touch code. The reason it feels more
| difficult to 'do it directly' is because most WP users
| really aren't expected to do so; they'd be using plugins
| rather than writing their own code.
| sgc wrote:
| I completely understand that, but in the real world, you
| will need to get your hands dirty with a bit of code
| because no matter how complete, there will be an edge
| case where you need to jump outside the box.
| jurimasa wrote:
| WP is still popular as it is for two reasons:
|
| 1. You can install it in a toaster. The cheapest hosting
| service will offer PHP and MySQL. It will run slow, but it
| will run. It will be easy to install and start working
| right away.
|
| 2. You can train anyone to use it and put content on it in
| an hour.
| abhiyerra wrote:
| I've built my own websites running on NextJS, Django, Rails,
| Jekyll, and Hugo and it was great as a developer getting
| exactly what you want. Recently we brought on some marketing
| people and trying to get things out on a custom Django app
| was blocking them because of a lack of engineering resources.
| Their campaigns were delayed and they were getting
| frustrated. We moved to Wordpress and have setup a vetting
| process for plugins which they just need 2-3. Marketing can
| update the website as needed and don't need engineering time.
| Most of what they create are forms, blog posts, and pages. So
| nothing super complex anyways.
|
| As an entrepreneur I see why WordPress has such a large
| command. Plenty of people who can work on it. If you are
| nontechnical and use a hosted solution you can create a good
| enough MVP with all of these plugins. As an engineer
| everything about it is annoying but it commands 42% of the
| web so it must be doing something right.
| berkes wrote:
| > that coding a Jekyll site to equivalent functionality.
|
| With me it's the exact opposite. Jekyll, a GH actions, deploy
| to a static site hosting takes under an hour. I know Jekyll, so
| it's a bit cheating, but yesterday I did the same with hugo,
| that I never used before and within 1:30 I had a site running
| on Digital Ocean.
|
| And It's also not because I don't know WP. I've build and
| scaled a dedicated WP hosting company so I know quite a bit
| about setting it up :)
|
| In my case it's always because I know the primitives of the web
| very well: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (and the JS/HTML Web APIs).
|
| WP has layers upon layers upon layers between me and these
| primitives. Hugo or Jekyll don't: they are as close to these
| primitives as possible. I know the primitives, I never know
| these layers upon layers upon layers. They are shifting
| targets, poorly documented and often horribly executed. So
| instead of "just using flexbox for this thingy", In WP I need
| to learn yet another "site builder", or "theme framework", or,
| worse but rather common: all combinations of all options;
| infinite amount of permutations that interact, or conflict, or
| both.
|
| (And yes, I know I can build a WP theme from scratch, staying
| close to the primitives. But that's far, far more work than
| 1:30h)
|
| This is just the startup cost. Which is, in my experience,
| rather high with WP. The real cost comes at maintaining and
| future development and scaling.
| marc_io wrote:
| The problem is that right now the pathways to quickly
| bootstrap a WordPress site with a good enough, customized
| theme are hidden under SaaS providers, like hosting
| companies. Use InstaWP or ZipWP, for example, and you can
| start in just minutes.
| berkes wrote:
| > and you can start in just minutes.
|
| Like I said: I built and scaled such a hosting.
|
| But while you can _start_ in just minutes, you don 't have
| that publishable site that you have in your mind, in
| minutes. It takes hours to learn where to find what. To
| select a good theme. To find the right plugins. To remove
| the wrong plugins. To then fix some error that comes from
| removing the plugin. Or to fix an error from installing the
| wrong one. Experienced WP devs even ask hours for this:
| people who do this all day, for a living, will charge you
| hours to build this for you.
|
| Sure, you may be lucky and have some goal in mind that
| happens to be ridiculous easy with WP. Or you may not have
| something in mind and just go-with-the-flow to end
| somewhere that happens to be easy with WP (a good strategy
| really).
|
| But, in general, I have something in mind. A landing page
| for a startup. Or the outlines of a webshop, or a simple
| blog even, and it will take me hours or days banging
| against WP to get there, whereas with hugo or jekyll that's
| less than a few hours of banging.
| bevekspldnw wrote:
| I'm building pretty complex stuff with just Flask and Jinja,
| and as somebody who also has deep fundamentals it's so much
| easier than wading through layers of useless crap these
| frameworks de jour push in your face.
| 8338550bff96 wrote:
| Mind sharing that video? I have a friend that set himself up on
| a WordPress site because he wants to be able to have control
| over his very small private training business. I'm a full-stack
| dev, but don't know anything about how WordPress does things to
| be able to help him out.
| codegeek wrote:
| " followed a 90 minute video on YouTube where I was instructed
| step-by-step on what to do. The result is that I'm happy with
| the finished product"
|
| Now try doing that as a non technical person with anything else
| and report to us if you succeeded. You won't. This is why
| WordPress is popular. Liking or hating doesn't matter. No one
| has been able to build something that can replace WordPress.
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| Can you share the link with this tutorial?
| stevenicr wrote:
| Not OP - but I have found a few like this that are good - and
| I posted a few under 'wordpress stuff'
| https://steveiscritical.com/learn-websites-and-coding/ - to
| teach my teams more modern wordpress ways recently.
|
| I warn people that even though a good and easy to use
| tutorial like XYorZ may help teach, be wary that if they are
| teaching using elementor, bricks or similar page builder
| (added plugins), that it may be good knowledge, but that's
| not really wordpress per se.
|
| Anyhow, with the new FSE editing options, I will say that I
| finally feel we can put the separate page builders to pasture
| for the most part, and all the bloat that comes with them for
| most use cases.
|
| Super Appreciate the vids that Jamie Marsland has been
| releasing - many showing how to do nice designs with base WP,
| watching the process is helpful getting up to speed with
| current options - and shows how modern stuff can be crafted
| without tons of fancy addons these days.
|
| Navigating the new FSE stuff is very different than previous
| WP ways like the customizer or 'additional css' blocks, it's
| finally getting noob friendly again.
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| Thank you, Sir
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Background: I got my start dabbling in WP around 10 years ago,
| and still maintain a few WP sites.
|
| If you needed a 90-minute video -- I daresay you either did it
| wrong, bit off too much to chew, or were better off using a
| high-code framework instead.
|
| One of the reasons WordPress got popular is its at-the-time
| famed 'five-minute install'. [1] You just throw the files on a
| server with PHP, give it a MySQL database and that's it.
| (Nowadays, even this five-minute process is usually abstracted
| away behind a mouse click.)
|
| With that, you get the core WP functionality, i.e. a modern
| theme, the ability to create blog posts, pages, and have
| visitors leave comments. For many people who just want to get a
| relatively simple website, this is quite enough, and IMO there
| is still no comparable no-code site engine.
|
| Want a different look? Just search on the official theme
| directory (quality varies, but there are decent ones -- just
| try not to get forced into the old 'classic' editor), use one
| of the first-party themes, or write your own.
|
| Want to extend the core functionality? Just search on the
| official plugin directory (again, quality varies, so exercise
| judgment) or write your own.
|
| Now, is it possible to blindly throw a cocktail of plugins at
| the wall, resulting in an unmaintainable abomination? Yes, it
| is -- but as you've already discovered, you won't necessarily
| like the result.
|
| [1] https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-
| administration/befo...
| robtherobber wrote:
| Something similar I said in 2021, glad to see it still
| applies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540187
| bevekspldnw wrote:
| The problem with Wordpress is it doesn't follow MVC and mixes
| application logic with presentation which is a mess.
| imnotgpt wrote:
| Anyone know of any good multi site options other than Wordpress?
| Say you were running 300+ sites by your lonesome, what would you
| pick, Wordpress or something else?
|
| I'm asking because for this use-case Wordpress Multisite seems to
| be the only option, but I've also always despised its structure
| and inner-workings.
| selul wrote:
| I don't think there is any other option. If those are very
| simple websites, there are some wp plugins that allow you to
| map them to domains, i.e you can use a single instance of
| WordPress and map the content to different domains. One plugin
| for this use case is WP Landing Kit.
| rovr138 wrote:
| What's shared between these 300 sites?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Look at Craft CMS multi site for a better implementation. It's
| also multi-lingual, e.g. you can maintain Spanish and French
| translations for your global elements and then designate
| language for each of your sites and it'll translate any shared
| content.
|
| However, for 300 sites, anything but a custom web app will get
| out of hand because that's too many to manage in a UI that's
| primarily meant for a handful of sites.
| rroose wrote:
| Drupal has an excellent multi site solution with the domain
| access module with which you can share content between multiple
| domains/sites.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I'll never understand why Drupal never became as popular as
| WP.
| esquire_900 wrote:
| I'm using it for a 10.000+ multisite installation (quite simple
| personal blogs), and even though it has it quirks it works
| quite well. Almost nothing is best in class and a slight pain
| to get it working, but the sheer size of the ecosystem is still
| it's biggest plus. In general every problem or feature you can
| imagine already exists or is easy to bolt on.
| mickeyfrac wrote:
| We've got a hundred tenant multisite running on WP and have
| been looking at other options over the last couple of weeks. I
| am most interested by PayloadCMS
| https://payloadcms.com/blog/how-to-build-a-multi-tenant-app-...
| . However our CMS needs, for this product, are very simple, so
| Payload suits.
|
| We've also been looking at a multitenancy option for WordPress,
| in particular using Gridpave https://gridpane.com/kb/using-
| gridpane-multitenancy/ but you need the $5000 annual dev pro
| plan (annual for unlimited sites). We use Gridpane already on
| their lower cost plan and have found it excellent value for
| money.
|
| We will probably go with Payload. WP is getting messier by the
| day. With the AI coding tools getting better and better it
| feels like having as much flexibility as possible will have a
| huge benefit down the line.
| tbwriting wrote:
| No shade to the creators as I'm sure the tool is great but if I
| didn't know better I'd say this seems like an astroturfed effort
| by WordPress to stay relevant.
|
| Existing AI tools alongside other open-source builders (Puck for
| React, Primo for Svelte, etc.) equals all the good things about
| WordPress's "WYSIWYG-ness" minus all the unnecessary bloat that's
| piled up over the years.
| marc_io wrote:
| The power of WordPress lies in its community, branding, and
| marketplace. The options you mentioned simply don't compete in
| these areas.
| dmurko wrote:
| WP is still _by far_ the most popular CMS [1] and runs a large
| part of the internet. So I 'm pretty sure it's still relevant.
|
| [1] https://kinsta.com/wordpress-market-share/ or
| https://trends.builtwith.com/cms
| ckluis wrote:
| I wish they had a better demo video of it in action.
| nibab wrote:
| I commend you for plugging AI into a commonly used tool in this
| space vs creating your own platform for building websites with
| AI. It's refreshing to see someone working back from a great user
| experience and meeting the users where they are today. This
| requires focus in the face of constant integration challenges and
| lots of design restrictions/limitations. Best of luck going
| forward!
| nkko wrote:
| WordPress has become an unwieldy mess of plugins and licensing
| nightmares. Until Automattic addresses the core technical debt,
| WordPress will continue disappointing developers seeking a clean,
| modern CMS foundation.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| That is absolutely true. But if you're just blogging and only
| need the base install with Classic Editor and Akisment, it's
| actually quite nice and still better than most other platforms
| for self-hosting.
| j45 wrote:
| Wordpress has been plugin integration brick wall city for a
| long time.
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