I started making this website last year. I had a prototype, but I let my hosting lapse before I migrated the prototype. No biggie – it was just a version 1 anyway.
But of course come January I’m starting from a ground zero of sorts. I’m no stranger to WordPress, but I have friends with fancy things and they wanted me to use them. They were trying to do me favors by making it simpler, but ultimately it just overcomplicated things for me.
For example, Thrive caused a bug where I was locked out of the site for 3 months. The only solution was nuking Thrive. I didn’t want to do that because I would need to rebuild everything Thrive handled. And it handled a lot at the time.
Elementor became the heavy handler of many of those functions. I figured, it’s been a few years, maybe Elementor has cleaned up its game.
Nope. I’m working to eliminate Elementor as we speak because it’s making sections just randomly disappear on mobile view, isn’t correctly letting columned text flow beneath itself on mobile view, and is a giant pain in the ass to add a sidebar to.
That’s where I left off on Friday, last week.
Today, I deactivated everything I’m not using now, and really cut back on bloat as much as possible. I’ll consider adding each thing back in turn but for now – only everything that’s being used for the current build is enabled. I aim to use primarily native WP tools, unless there is a solution which truly extends its capabilities. For example, WP is not readily a shopping site – you’ll at least want to add taxonomies and custom post types to facilitate different handling of different site areas.
That’s what stuff like WooCommerce shortcuts for you, but that’s all it is – a shortcut. The real path to it, is to build the actual structure which supports the behavior in as direct and simple a manner possible. This means you have to understand WP architecture. This is why I don’t trust people who say they can develop on “any” platform.
It’s always more efficient to use native methods as much as possible.
Basically I’m cutting out Elementor, WooCommerce, Thrive, Sensei, and a bunch of other things in favor of effective simplicity. My goal is to make my most common tasks as time efficient as possible. I’ve always loathed visual builders because you have to click and select something on every single element, rather than just give the things handled one way the same name and handle everything from one central document. Yes you can dig into the CSS on each element, but again – I’m clicking around a million things rather than typing shift and down, cmd+v. And theoretically if you use the visual editor to edit the typography of a whole section it should carry over to all the things in it right? Let me just cut to the chase here – no.
I’m a big fan of the scientific basis for the Internet. It was meant to be a place for information. Simply input, simply found later. Yes I can make templates but that’s what fkn CSS is for ok… geez!
I’m building for a workflow.
Much as frontside editors are great for visualizing how things can look, they really fkn clunky when it comes to using any kind of webhook – like post by email, or uploading a database of posts. You’ll want the specific names of the controlling CSS for each special block, and that’s hard to discern when you’re reverse engineering how it even makes that fkn line next to the quote in the first place, let alone why it’s god-awful fkn orange.
But if you build from the most atomic piece – the things you will use and multiply most often – first, THEN everything else… you end up creating the simplest possible workflow.
This, however, requires trust in the process. Which of course means knowing the process. Which means knowing the architecture of the system you’re working in. And the architecture of the system you’re working in, is dependent on the language that builds it.
I say all this to express I’ve been doing this since the 90’s and the more I look at shortcuts, the more they look like long cuts to me.
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