Comments on: The Trouble with WordPress Frameworks

By: Fred Meyer

Fred Meyer — Mon, 11 May 2020 23:51:49 +0000

Hi Steve, Sure – here are more thoughts: https://wpshout.com/wpbakery-page-builder-review/

By: Steve Bloemer

Steve Bloemer — Sat, 09 May 2020 17:02:38 +0000

I have been using WP Bakery for some time now and am curious about the cons you mentioned. So far, I’ve not encountered any issues while developing sites with it.

By: John-Pierre Cornelissen

John-Pierre Cornelissen — Sat, 02 Nov 2019 14:01:16 +0000

Nice read. I spotted a mistake about Divi though. You suggest that the Divi’s role editor replaces an actual role management plugin. That’s not the case. The role editor from Divi can only be used to specify what people can do WITHIN Divi itself. You can’t use it to create new roles and you can’t specify what certain roles can do outside Divi within WordPress.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Sun, 08 Sep 2019 11:42:52 +0000

Thanks for this:

“If I wanted to build a WordPress website in a weekend with no training—and didn’t really care how it worked or whether it’d be stable, usable, or extendable into the future—then Divi is probably close to the best decision I could make.”

Divi’s code makes my stomach churn and my blood boil: floats, Russian-doll-inside-of-another-Russian-doll nested divs, and virtually no use of grid or flex. It’s a framework alright, a tool to allow agencies to claim they “build custom WordPress Themes” when in reality they have one junior designer on staff who “knows a little CSS.”

I love (most) agencies and (all) designers, but using Divi is a slap in the face to anyone who cares about:

The openness of WordPress
The ease of use of WordPress
content belonging, fully, to the end-user

Basically, when I’m working with Divi, I lose all faith in humanity. I come back and read this to calm myself. Thanks for fighting the good fight.

By: Julius

Julius — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 00:04:28 +0000

In reply to Guy.

Your comment is spot on. Especially, ” I think if we as a community focused a bit on what value we’re delivering and helping each other out and less time on “I’ve got the best toolbox” we’d be all the better for it.”.

Truthfully, I feel like clients are interested in paying for full custom based websites any longer. Since frameworks/site-builders are so prominent now, I feel like it solves my client’s problems.

By: Lars Faye

Lars Faye — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 15:35:34 +0000

As everyone else said, this was a really fantastic article, and very necessary.

I echo what @Guy said above regarding ACF, although its a bit of a stretch to consider it a framework, as much as it’s a vehicle for a more streamlined custom development process via custom post types/templates/fields.

But Guy is right as well, that defining a framework does get muddy at a point. Yes, I re-use a lot of tried and tested blocks of code that I’ve written prior, from slideshows to mobile navigation implementations. But I wouldn’t be able to say what I do is a framework, but rather an increasingly more efficient custom development workflow.

By: Nigel

Nigel — Thu, 04 Jul 2019 23:22:15 +0000

When I realized the problem of being locked in with Divi, I turned it off for posts and generic page templates. I use Divi only for design-heavy tasks now. While Divi does add a mild amount of bloat to pages it’s mostly fixed by caching plugins and static site generators. While Divi helps get work done faster, ideally I shouldn’t be using it.

Moral of the story: Junk food is nice, just don’t make it your diet.

By: Fred Meyer

Fred Meyer — Wed, 03 Jul 2019 22:37:10 +0000

In reply to Anh Tran. Well said, Anh, thanks!