Without wishing to be too snarky, this could be rewritten as "Running this software is a nightmare if you know nothing about the technologies it is built on." And being slightly more snarky, my response would be: well, duh.
I don't think so. The author actually gave themselves a weird goal - to use Wordpress as the text editor, and export/copy the static content to github. I'm not sure why they would do that, but OK! In the end, their problem wasn't with the workflow but with setting up local version of Wordpress (why? why not use a hosted version of Wordpress????), PHP, Apache, MySQL and FTP(!!).
WordPress isn't actually that hard to setup. It's a little harder on Windows, because setting up PHP on Windows just isn't as natural as on Linux but XAMPP makes it as easy as possible.
>Should 'blog writing' software really have such a greater barrier of entry?
But it doesn't. You have a plethora of (free) hosted blogging solutions. You could also get private hosting with the LAMP stack already pre-installed and configured.
You can accomplish this by using a CDN that caches everything, or use plugins that export static files like WP2Static, or use integrations with static site frameworks like Gatsby that treat WP as a CMS.
But yes, doing it all from scratch yourself is probably not worth it, especially if you're unfamiliar with the tech.
Sure - why not. The question, why do you need to host it locally? You can just create a free account on wordpress.com, or get a private hosted solution for peanuts and with the LAMP stack already configured.
For context my wife uses wordpress to build various sites. I got lumped with the task of moving this online. It was super painful, as WP encodes the URL name (i.e. localhost) flipping everywhere.
I eventually resolved this by editing the tables which stored the URLS (fortunately, as a DS I know SQL) and doing some sed on various files that cached the URL.
I now refuse to do this, and set her up online with a website before she does any work, because moving it is so painful.
I did try the obvious things first, to be fair.
Another way is to perform the find and replace with PhpMyAdmin.
It appeared to work a few times (or at least my wife/her customers didn't complain).
offline editing?
It doesn't.
You can open an account on Wordpress.org and be writing your blog in 1 minute.
You can use your virtual hosting's manager to install Wordpress and be running in 10 minutes.
You can download MAMP or WAMP (packaged Wordpress + MySQL + Apache + PHP) and be running locally in 15 minutes.
This guy wanted to do an install locally manually, patch it to produce static pages (which is not what it was made for0, hook it up with GitHub pages, and so on. And all that without bothering to know how.
The people who want a "writing first" experience _with Wordpress specifically_ have many paid hosting providers to choose from, but that would defeat the purpose of the article.
Making a one-click installation process would also take a significant amount of dev resources to handle all the different platforms and require expertise that isn't required for the main product, given that it is a PHP project which is almost entirely cross platform by default.
In fact, myself and a few others have spent some time improving the local environment situation with a tool called wp-env [1]. So long as you have docker & node installed, you can install wp-env with npm. Then you can just use “wp-env start” to get a local WordPress instance running. It’s fairly straightforward to configure for basic needs too! No need to understand Apache, SQL, FTP, or even PHP to get it running.
All this to say: there are open source solutions to the local dev environment problem even being developed and supported by core WordPress teams. :)
1: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2020/03/03/wp-env-simple-loc...
Well, Wordpress can know auto-update the plugins...
Wordpress plugins are notoriously bad at input sanitization. Even many large, commercially supported plugins get abandoned or simply aren’t secure.
And your site (Or some parts of your site) could break at any point in time without your knowledge and remain broken for a long time until you find that it’s broken. There is no platform that doesn’t require “babysitting” with maintenance and testing.
You still need to check on them, sure.
>and remain broken for a long time until you find that it’s broken
Well, if you don't find out that it's broken fast enough, perhaps you don't need it anyway!
Running WordPress on macOS is slightly different from running WordPress on Ubuntu, which is different from running it on CentOS.
I maintain WordPress sites on all three. None of them are inferior to the other for this purpose. They just have different conventions.
In fact, I've had far fewer problems running multiple WordPress installations on macOS than I have on CentOS. But that's because I understand Apache better than the author of this article. Pretty much the only problem comes during a major OS upgrade when the installed backs up some of your configuration files and replaces them with the default. But once you deal with it one or two times, you know what to do.
I don't feel like that I understand the underlying tech, but as long as you know how to install WordPress, you can install WordPress.
For my purposes (set up a simple blog and get it running), I truly don't think that I need, or should, have to learn the ins and outs of the tech stack. In fact I chose WordPress specifically _because_ I wanted it to abstract most of the implementation details away from me.
I don't think this is true for development generally.
Well ... if you want a simple blog, then you can setup an account with the 10million hosted blogging services that are out there. And if you want a wordpress blog, then you can set up an account with wordpress.com, or get a hosted solution with Wordpress/LAMP already preinstalled, or get a VM with Wordpress pre-configured (e.g. Vagrant Box with Wordpress: https://themeisle.com/blog/vagrant-wordpress/).
What you wanted however, was a locally hosted Wordpress (why?) that you installed and configured (on Windows no less). That's fine, but Wordpress requires PHP, and requires a web-server, and requires a database - so you'll have to be able to understand what all those pieces are in order to install and configure them together.
>In fact I chose WordPress specifically _because_ I wanted it to abstract most of the implementation details away from me.
Which it does. There is a difference between being a user of Wordpress and installing and administrating Wordpress. For the former, understanding the tech stack is not required. The UI is meant to be used by non-tech savvy people. For the latter, yeah, you need to be familiar with the tech stack. That you're not, and you had some trouble installing it, that's not the fault of Wordpress.
The fact that each moving part wp needds is tricky in its own way doesn't make the experience better if you are encountering them for the first time :)
The author was probably not aware how complicated set of dependencies (moving parts) wordpress needs compared to jekyll. Which is fair if from the outside the two seem to be products in the same category.