Exploring CMS Options Beyond WordPress ft. Maciek Palmowski

Brian (00:01)
So today I’m here with Maciek from PatchStack who is really somebody who’s been around WordPress for a long time and we’ve probably all learned from you over the past, but in case anyone doesn’t know, maybe you could give kind of a quick bio of what you’re doing these days in WordPress.
Maciek Palmowski (00:17)
Okay, so right now my official title is security community manager at PatchStack. like I mostly deal with the whole hacker community around PatchStack. So the people who are trying to discover vulnerabilities in plugins, in themes. Yeah, I’m trying to kind of put them together, motivate them and stuff like this. for example, I’m running the Discord channel for PatchStack.
and a lot of weird stuff around it’s like sometimes sending coffee to a researcher that did something really amazing and going to conferences right because this is also my thing
Brian (00:50)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. And I probably have seen you around from speaking at conferences and watching a lot of conference recordings online and stuff, but you’ve been around in WordPress. I don’t know for a long time, right? I mean, I think you’ve been a contributor and, sort of an always.
Maciek Palmowski (01:09)
since always since always
like i even remember the very very old admin panel i remember when Kubrick was the default the default theme so i can say yes i am i i am that old
Brian (01:17)
Mm-hmm.
And I think one of the reasons we wanted to talk to you is cause you do have like a unique perspective where you have a lot of knowledge on other CMSs. And, you know, think it’s such an important thing for WordPress to look at these other CMSs and learn from them and not get too caught up in like a WordPress bubble. what, like what motivates you to go look at some of these to the point where you can do presentations on them, which means you’re not just experimenting, like you’re, learning them pretty deeply.
What’s kind of motivating you to try all these other CMSs out?
Maciek Palmowski (01:50)
So this is kind of because that, well, for most of my career, I was a developer. At some point I switched to being a dev role. And my first dev role job was at Bari. It’s a CI CD platform that I worked at. And I started working there as a…
title was, if I remember, WordPress Ambassador. So I was kind of trying to teach WordPress community about continuous integration and continuous delivery. And at some point we learned that WordPress community is not the best target because very often we just hit the wall like, do you use Git? No. Okay. So yeah, so the rest of the plan was already, yeah, at some point we…
really quickly learned that it won’t work that well. mean over time it turned out that people more and more people started using automations and things like this but yeah at that point I stopped working there so it was quite funny that the things that I done there I saw that they started working inside of the for example Polish community like a year after I stopped working there so yeah sometimes it takes time to introduce some things but
Brian (02:55)
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (03:00)
At some point I started looking into other other bubbles, right? Because, we are we are closing in the WordPress bubble. We even very often say that, yeah, let’s do it the WordPress way. Right. And very often we think that’s always a good thing, right? Because we are using the same way. But the truth is that while we are doing it the same way inside of our bubble.
Brian (03:12)
Yeah, the WordPress way.
Maciek Palmowski (03:25)
We very often love to do things the opposite how the rest of the world does. For example, we very often see it in PHP, right? Where the world kind of is doing many things in some ways. And we decided to stick to this more, let’s call it legacy approach, right? With without a lot of things that now the PHP ecosystems offer.
Brian (03:31)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (03:51)
But yeah, that was kind of the moment when I started looking into those other bubbles, into other communities. And I remember that like two things that really got me so interested were first of all Astro and second of all it was Static. So those were the things that…
Brian (04:09)
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (04:12)
got really interested in. I even contributed a bit, especially to astro documentation, because for example the integration guide for for Stedemic is kind of my work. Yeah, and this started to show me that, yeah, really there are other communities
very often they do some things better, sometimes worse because WordPress did really an amazing job when it comes to especially the community. And when I compare it with others, I don’t think there is any other community that is so diverse, right? Because if we look, for example, at Larval community,
Brian (04:37)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (04:59)
Those are mostly developers. They are sometimes front-end developers. Some of those front-end developers also have a bit of kind of design skill set, but still, in general, those are some type of developers. And when we look at our community, there are a lot of people who never wrote a line of code. And from some people perspective, that’s weird.
Brian (05:02)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (05:26)
Right? Because, hey, you’re building a CMS. Everyone should be technical, right? And… But not. It’s not the thing in our community where we have a lot of bloggers, marketers, designers, accessibility experts, everyone. And everyone is connected. And that’s both great.
Brian (05:26)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (05:52)
because we can hear a lot of voices at the same time. But also it sometimes makes some decision making slower because every time when we try to introduce something new it’s discussed from all perspectives. And in the end it very often takes much more time. So yeah, and…
Brian (05:55)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (06:13)
But still, what WordPress did for many, years in terms of community, and let’s not talk what happened lately because let’s for a moment pretend that it didn’t happen, right? Let’s this part. It’s amazing to the level that no one else was able to reach. mean, also no one else has such an enormous community out there. So WordPress is kind of having…
Brian (06:21)
Yeah, yeah,
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (06:39)
a totally different type of problems, of challenges than everyone else, right? Because if someone would say that, hey, Astro is amazing when it comes to managing, let’s say pull requests and how you can easily contribute and you think, yeah, that’s true because if Astro will make a mistake, few thousand of websites will crash at most, right?
Brian (07:00)
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (07:03)
If WordPress makes a mistake, well, we are talking about this 40 % of websites. So it’s like something totally different and it’s so much impossible to compare. WordPress, and yeah, when, when, when, always when we look at this market share, it’s, it’s, so kind of impossible to see that there is this one CMS
that has this 40 % of the market and the rest is having such a small piece of this cake. It’s really remarkable.
Brian (07:28)
Mm-hmm.
And, and
also, you know, when you like, there’s a big gap from a developer framework to a CMS, like WordPress, like you said, that’s not, most people don’t use version control. They’re not developers. They’re not, you know, there’s the huge no code or low code aspects WordPress that makes it really possible and user friendly. And like, if they make a change to something in some other framework, often that doesn’t even get pushed out to existing sites. Right? I mean, that’s like, you know,
Well, we’ll get to that when we migrate to the next version manually, which is how like everything other than WordPress works. And we’re just updating live sites, you know, on the fly consistently and stuff. Do you feel like there’s, there, there is a big difference because we are the one sort of that has a no code experience. Like none of these other ones really seem to have like a fully no code out of the box onboarding the way WordPress does.
Maciek Palmowski (08:32)
That’s true. mean WordPress, especially when comes to open source CMSs, because yeah, if you look at products like Wix, Squarespace or similar, they are very user friendly. maybe I didn’t get headphones from Wix at some point, which is still quite sad.
Brian (08:42)
Mm-hmm.
Yes, yeah.
You
Maciek Palmowski (08:56)
But still, I was playing around with Wix some time ago when they announced some new headless features and for me it was also an opportunity to kind of play a bit more with it and I was quite amazed really. It is user-friendly. I mean when someone says that
Brian (09:04)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (09:16)
Yeah, but I know it’s… You have to pay for it. It’s expensive or rather expensive. It kind of depends on where you live. But it’s easy to do. in the… When we kind of start putting all the costs and time we need to spend to make something working, it may turn out that Webflow or Wix in the end is cheaper because…
Brian (09:21)
Yeah, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (09:42)
Yeah, you just can click here, there and it will just work. So yeah, when it comes to those SaaS products, we can see that they are putting a lot of effort when it comes to the user experience part. And on the other hand, open source product, and this is very often a big problem because yeah, like this, in most cases, the open source movement is in general for…
for developers, right? Developers love open source. Designers, not so much because very often they don’t get it. It kind of changed lately when we see with the kind of the rise of JavaScript in general that a lot of front-end developers also have some experience with UX, with UI, with design. So we can kind of see that
Brian (10:05)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (10:30)
that a lot of those websites built based on some JS frameworks look a bit better because people behind it are a bit more experienced when it comes to design and let’s be honest like the typical engineer style of design is yeah we can see it very often like for example
Brian (10:37)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (10:54)
Let’s look at the game or something like this. It’s like a masterpiece of engineering design, right? Yeah.
Brian (10:59)
Yeah. And
I was saying the, the ones, the two ways you looked at it were like, you mentioned Astro and Stata make and one’s JavaScript and one’s PHP. And that’s like the split we have in WordPress right now, where there’s so many people kind of looking and so, so did you intentionally end up narrowing down your focus that way? Or is that just by accident?
Maciek Palmowski (11:23)
It was kind of by accident because I remember that with Astro my story was like I was constantly trying to find this JavaScript framework because everyone was saying yeah go headless it’s so amazing it’s your website would be better and everything and I never felt it right I tried Gatsby I tried Next, Nukes, and I just didn’t didn’t felt it especially that
I very often said that lot of people were very happy about going headless because their website becomes so much faster. But it doesn’t become faster because of headless. It’s very often because you just converted your website into HTML and you know there are plugins for WordPress that will do it for you and it will be quicker, simpler without having to learn a new template language or something like this.
And at some point I remember that Astro happened, it was so version 0.16 pre-alpha, do not use on production, something like this, right there. And I remember that they promised two things that got me really interested. First of all, the components that are so easy that you can just kind of put plain HTML inside of it and it will work.
without this extra syntax. that was one thing because I kind of felt like, you know, using include in PHP, right? You can put anything in the file and include it and it works. And that was kind of this vibe. And another thing was that you will have, if you don’t want to, zero JavaScript on the frontend. So I was like, okay, that’s something different, right? Because Next.js always will push you quite a lot of JavaScript if you want it or not.
Brian (12:55)
Okay.
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (13:05)
So yeah, that was kind of the reasoning when I kind of fall in love with Astro and then I saw how it is changing, how the whole documentation team works because like the documentation of Astro is so amazing and because every time when you submit something, Sarah or Elian will always ask a lot of questions, they will try to make this
Brian (13:19)
Hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (13:29)
this new article so much better. And yeah, this is how it kind of should work, right? This is how working on documentation should always look like. So like those were the things. like really, Astro is really cool because you kind of can feel the vibe of kind of writing this old PHP websites when you remember it.
Brian (13:39)
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (13:50)
first put all the variables on top, right? Then the content on bottom, something like this. So it’s kind of, it kind of has this small vibe of this old PHP, but in modern, using modern techniques and stuff. yeah, that’s the amazing thing about Astral. And with Statemic, I remember that I just gave it a try and I liked it so much, especially the admin panel. I mean,
Brian (13:53)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (14:18)
It is kind of similar to WarpRib, because on some top level every CMS, right, is quite similar, right, because you just put content in it and you have a way to show it on the front. But it was really so nice and the thing that I liked so much was the fact that, for example, Statmink comes with a few things already in core, like having custom field management.
Brian (14:23)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (14:44)
forms and when we look at WordPress and for example ACF I think that ACF is really one of the most important plugins in WordPress history I mean it really enabled so many people to to build websites to build kind of unified interfaces and the problem is that ACF when you use it you feel that
Brian (14:54)
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (15:08)
You feel that ACF is an add-on for WordPress. It differs. You feel that there is this something that doesn’t entirely fit. You see, it’s a plugin. And when you see the custom fields in Steremik, you see that it’s part of Core and everything just fits perfectly together. It’s a small thing because they both work the same. You can create a custom field and you can fill it with data. So it’s…
Brian (15:10)
Yeah, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (15:36)
It’s no magic there, But the general experience when you feel that, yeah, this is the CMS, this is the core. And when I look at most CMSs, most of them have custom field management. WordPress doesn’t. And I don’t understand why that’s one thing. And another thing, why for so many years, instead of doing this,
Brian (15:38)
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (16:04)
We are just at some point starting trying to kind of cover it up with blocks with everything. mean, blocks are cool, but it’s not the same. Blocks are blocks. Having custom fields so you can put some data, it’s something totally different. And for some reason we decided to go this way.
Brian (16:09)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
And that-
Well, that was going be my next question because I, I really do. I feel like I’ve really gotten used to using like a block based editor for content for writing long blog posts and stuff. I really like it. wouldn’t want to go back to it, but obviously for sites where you need structured data and post types and fields and stuff, it’s not going to do it. But for like Astro, for example, is there a CMS component to Astro or where does content live? Cause I know StataMake is very similar to like a WordPress, you know, you can have
Maciek Palmowski (16:35)
That’s true.
Yeah, exactly.
Brian (16:54)
Flat
files or you can have a database or whatever, but how does, how, what is Astro’s CMS?
Maciek Palmowski (17:00)
So you can either go with Markdown or Markdown.x files, which is kind of baked in inside. And it’s done in a really cool way because they have this whole, now it’s called the Content Layer API, but before it was collections because it kind of evolved from one to another. so when you have a Markdown file, it consists…
out of two parts. The front matter part when you put all the data like title, enter the title, publish date, tags, whatever. So here you have the variables, right? And underneath you have the content. So thanks to the content, the ContentLayer API, you can always define a schema. For example, that title has to be a string and it’s required.
date has to be a date right because it should be a date. The image is required and should have more than let’s say 500 pixel width and you can like define the types of your content every time and every time when you make a mistake you get a beautiful error saying that hey you should you should remember that this image is too small or you forgot about adding something so it’s a really great thing.
And the Content Layer, because collections, so this was like the first version of it, was only for Markdown and MarkdownX. The Content Layer API decided to, okay, so let’s make a next step forward. And you can connect everything to it. So you can either use, again, Markdown and MarkdownX files, like we used to, but you can also connect an API. For example,
Brian (18:34)
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (18:38)
WordPress REST API, because why not? And you can define a schema to make sure that all the data that you need is there. So it’s like a really great mechanism that grabs all your data, it stores it. So it’s also kind of like a cache. So you don’t have to constantly ping the API for data, especially if you are using not the static site generator, but the server site rendering.
Brian (18:40)
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Maciek Palmowski (19:06)
So yeah, you can connect anything that has an API or you can get like Markdown or Markdown X files from it with Astro, right? Because it’s like the frontend layer. Although, like I said, using Markdown files, can kind of use it as a CMS. And there is also this quite cool tool. I don’t know if you heard about it. The Front Matter CMS. It’s done by Elio.
Brian (19:13)
Okay.
Mm-mm.
Maciek Palmowski (19:32)
and he built a CMS inside of Visual Studio Code.
Brian (19:35)
Okay.
Maciek Palmowski (19:36)
And it’s a mark and it’s a very universal editor for every markdown based framework or so for example, for Astro, it’s great for Hugo for Gatsby for next, whatever, whatever just uses next, you can just use it with this front-end or CMS and that also has a media management, things like this. There are also are quite
Brian (19:51)
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (20:04)
You can also connect some automation tools. So really a really cool product. I mean product. It’s for free. It’s another open source project. And what’s interesting, will just, just a small anecdote. It was built because of workers frustration because Elio had some problems on the hosting workers on Azure. And at some point he decided, yeah, I’m moving everything what I can to Markdown, but yeah, editing Markdown was quite problematic sometimes. So he built.
Brian (20:19)
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Maciek Palmowski (20:31)
another CMS around it. yeah, WordPress was kind of the father of the reason why it was created.
Brian (20:37)
Yeah, there’s a lot of projects
that came from WordPress frustration, a lot of other CMSs for sure.
Maciek Palmowski (20:42)
Yes, it’s
really surprising how many people I learned that they are very grateful WordPress for kind of enabling them to make the first steps. But like right now, it’s like, God, never again.
Brian (20:57)
Mm-hmm.
And so there’s a lot of people I think right now are just in general are looking at different CMSs. They want to try to know what’s out there and learn different options. If you’re somebody who works like an agency, you have clients or something, probably you’re going to want to stick to WordPress in lot of situations because it’s a very safe, know, a lot of clients, they don’t want to hear about some new crazy thing. They just want something that’s been around for 20 years and is reliable and that’s WordPress and that’s.
That’s it’s power, but or Drupal. Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (21:29)
or Drupal or Drupal or
Drupal yeah because the Drupal CMS that showed up lately I did I did it’s like I even published a short article on my blog with kind of of how I feel about it and when I see the stats it’s right right now it’s my one of the top it’s it’s a top-readed article right now and overall
Brian (21:35)
Yeah, have you played with it?
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (21:55)
I was very surprised. it still has a lot of those problems that I mentioned before, like, you know, that you can feel that Drupal is kind of designed by engineers. WordPress is really simpler. It’s simpler. But on the other hand, compared to previous release, because kind of right now, if someone…
Brian (21:57)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (22:17)
know the Drupal history because Drupal right now is Drupal CMS. It’s not the same as Drupal Core. That’s why we have Drupal CMS 1.0 and I was kind of surprised what happened with the versioning of Drupal. I I remember that we had some bigger numbers and why we are back to version 1. yeah, Drupal CMS is kind of this opinionated version of Drupal Core with some add-ons, with some…
Brian (22:25)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (22:48)
default sets and things like this. it should enable you to build websites easier. And definitely, especially if you’re not familiar with Drupal, it’s much simpler if starting from the core, from scratch. But they also promise that it should even enable marketing things to build websites.
Brian (22:48)
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (23:10)
And I do not agree with this part of their promise. I think that Drupal is still a bit too difficult. But on the other hand, I would be really interested in how Drupal CMS 2.0 will look like because it was already a huge step forward. They do have some interesting things there.
Brian (23:17)
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (23:34)
For example, they have this really amazing AI helper. This was something really incredible because…
Brian (23:40)
Hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (23:41)
While you can have some problems with, especially when you come from other CMS, right? You just don’t know sometimes where to click to find something, especially that really Drupal has a gazillion of options. And, okay, I don’t know. So I could either start looking at, go to Google, but I can have this AI helper enabled and just ask it, hey, where can I find some?
Brian (23:47)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Maciek Palmowski (24:10)
and it will help me go here and here. But there’s also another thing you can do. Imagine that you want to create a new post type. either you can read the docs to learn where to click or ask it to learn where to click, but you can ask it, hey, dear AI, please build me a new content type called something something.
Brian (24:10)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (24:32)
that will have this, this and this field and this field should be a type of something and after a few minutes, bang, you have it. And honestly, this was… this was kind of incredible. I mean, I know that AI can build amazing things, but I didn’t saw it connected like this inside of a CMS, so it was quite remarkable. On the other hand, I also kind of felt that…
Brian (24:35)
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (24:56)
While it’s amazing, it’s also kind of a workaround for kind of this UI that might be too complicated for many people. yeah, we don’t need to polish it as fast as we should because we have the AI helper. yeah. And with more and more people kind of getting used to that,
Brian (25:01)
Mm-hmm.
to AI.
Maciek Palmowski (25:15)
you go to some sort of chat and ask for questions. Yeah, it might work. while from my perspective, it still feels weird because I first tried to do something on my own, then I asked for help. I really can imagine that many people might take a bit different approach and for them, it will turn out that Drupal has it.
Brian (25:25)
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (25:35)
overall amazing user experience. Even if the experience itself isn’t that amazing, but the workaround is so great, it enables to do so many things. And like I said, you can ask to do things for you. So, great.
Brian (25:45)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I see a lot more of that AI generation in WordPress, I think that, I think it’s, some of it is great, but some of it, makes me a little sad because you have all these people having AI build little tiny things for them and that code never goes anywhere. It just stays on their website and there’s no structure to it. Whereas if there was a good like custom fields, custom post types, structure in WordPress core that was more like, you know, like
agreed on and it was easier to build these things, then it would be so much easier to let an AI do it because we would know that it would be making it, configuring it the same way.
Maciek Palmowski (26:30)
Exactly. Exactly.
And like, imagine right now, probably when you would ask in WordPress, hey, I need some custom fields and everything. Step one, install this, this, this or this.
Brian (26:39)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (26:41)
then tell me which one you choose and then I will try to do it but this is this one additional step and it shouldn’t be there I mean Drupal also has a field management inside I guess I really feel that almost everyone has it
Brian (26:54)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah,
it’s, it’s a pretty, I was looking at a demo of, think it was like Wix studio somebody was building. Was it Wix? And it was, yeah, it actually, they, I think they called it collections too. That’s kind of a common thing, but it was very, yeah, adding fields, editing it in a table. And it, you know, it was kind of what you expect from all of these.
Maciek Palmowski (27:05)
yeah.
Yeah,
exactly, exactly. And for me it’s like a constant surprise that for so many years WordPress doesn’t have it in core.
Brian (27:27)
Yeah. So for people that are in WordPress and then they are considering looking around, what advice do you have for people where they should consider looking or how to evaluate different tools if they want to try a different CMS or even just get inspiration? Do you have like kind of general advice?
Maciek Palmowski (27:46)
So first of all, it really depends on their background, on their background and on what they want to achieve. Because one of the things that I very often feel that WordPress is used in many situations when it shouldn’t. Because…
Brian (28:04)
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (28:05)
And I feel that we are kind of again in this when when the history kind of goes the circular way. So many years ago, right, we building everything with HTML. Then at some point, dynamic sites started happening, PHP, right? So everyone was building dynamics. And it was great because you have this admin panel and update everything so easily. On the other hand, yeah, security issues, you have to pay for the server.
Brian (28:12)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (28:31)
you might have problems with the server if your site gets too much traffic, things like this. So yeah, we started to add different workarounds of it, like caching system, better hosting, a lot of this, right? But I say those are workarounds because while they do work, very often we just don’t…
Brian (28:31)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (28:55)
need to have a dynamic website. So when the whole Jamstack movement happened at the beginning it was kind of going back before this dynamic era but in a modern way. Sadly at some point Jamstack also became very complicated like because they at this part of those people started to kind of let’s start doing everything we could do in
Brian (28:58)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (29:20)
from this dynamic world, but in a bit different way, right? So this was the moment when this movement kind of split, because there is still part of it that kind of is more for making the web simpler. But there is also a part of it that kind of would like to match everything that when we look at Laravel, for example, but in a different way, plus adding…
Brian (29:22)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (29:44)
some of the new features that are possible thanks to JavaScript. But when we look at WordPress, we see that a lot of people build, I don’t know, simple blogs on it. I call them reading websites, that you don’t interact with them too much, you just read them. And do they need a CMS that is placed somewhere?
Brian (30:03)
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (30:12)
I don’t think so, in most cases, because we have so many cool solutions. Because, yeah, very often when I say, yeah, you should convert it into a static website. But what about the contact form? What about the comments? There are workarounds, are third party tools that you can use to solve this problem. Or for example, when it comes to forms and Netlify, Netlify has its own set of…
Brian (30:13)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (30:38)
Functions that you can use to just kind of add a specific name and everything and it will work out of the box, right? so I really think that 50 % of the websites out there could be converted into static and it wouldn’t be a problem. So the fact that right now people are using WordPress is very often because they are used to it and that’s okay. I understand And it’s kind of a shame that Stratik
Brian (30:40)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (31:06)
didn’t become much popular or other didn’t start to kind of mimic their idea because I did like their approach because you had the WordPress that was powered off but when you logged in first you saw that yeah the server has to go up and start so for most of the time the WordPress wasn’t even an attack vector because it wasn’t working and it was cool and this was like
Brian (31:18)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (31:34)
the best approach for people who would like to have the best of two worlds, right? So to have, to still have WordPress working and on the other hand, to have a static website. But if we look at it, for example, because like right now I’m using Stataemic for my blog locally. So I just write everything using the CMS on my local machine.
Brian (31:47)
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (31:59)
just then push it to Git. I have an automation prepared that kind of push everything into server and it works. And I do think that more companies should think about building such an approach but in an easier way, right? Because I wouldn’t recommend building CI, CD pipelines for people who are in developers. And because enabling this would…
Brian (32:06)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (32:25)
let anyone use whatever they want, right? Because it wouldn’t be a problem. It’s just kind of install, I don’t know, static, craft, rubble on your local machine, convert it into static and push it. And when you ask how to evaluate, mean, yeah, first of all, you need to think what you need, right? Because if you need really a simple blog or a simple website that you want, update that much. Really.
Brian (32:35)
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (32:50)
Astro without even connecting a CMS because there’s a huge chance you don’t need it or Nukes or something like this. There are also a lot of themes or add-ons that will kind of make it simpler. When you really want a CMS, first of all, while yeah, we know that owning your data is very important and so on and so on and I do agree, but
Brian (32:53)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm
Maciek Palmowski (33:13)
very often it’s not the most important thing at the beginning because like I said it is important it’s really good to know that you can explore the data whenever you want but on the other hand if you need a website you need the website right so first you should concentrate on having a working website and this is also a great place to look at those SaaS products Wakes, Webflow check them out maybe they are perfect for you
Brian (33:18)
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (33:44)
because the maintenance isn’t a problem. You kind of pay for it. Of course, you have to be prepared that at some point out of the blue, your bill will just skyrocket. We heard a lot of stories like this, and this is kind of a downside, but we already know about it. So every time when you kind of go into SaaS, you need to kind of have it like at the back of your head that this might happen. So it would be good to kind of learn
Brian (33:53)
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (34:11)
at beginning how to export data and how to migrate quickly but yeah use it until it works because if it’s a good fit for you why not and when we look also at the CMS market we have like great thing like directus directus is a very cool tool if you are more on the engineering side and you want because directus is kind of an interesting mix of a CMS and the database management tool like both of
Brian (34:15)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (34:40)
and it works really great. If you also want to with this more headless vibe, Strapi is also very interesting. And it’s a really cool tool if you want to use the same data in different places, right? Stata Mechanic Craft would be really great replacements of WordPress. Because they are quite similar in the way. mean, out of the box they offer a lot more because
Brian (34:48)
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (35:04)
WordPress doesn’t offer too much out of the box. There is always a plugin for something. So in most cases the whole evaluation should be around first of all checking how long is it on the market? Is it actively developed? And just trying it out because you might just like it or the opposite. You might just hate it because…
Brian (35:07)
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
huh. Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (35:30)
because Celtic, right? Because like I said, with me and StataMake, it was like kind of this love from first sight. just, it just clicked. It just clicked. I felt that I like it. And yeah, my blog is running on StataMake for two or three years.
Brian (35:37)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. And I really like, I’ve been really thinking about that for my blog of I really like writing in WordPress, but I don’t have a need for it to be running on like word. don’t need WordPress in the production environment. It’s really, I just need the HTML, but I, I’m afraid to take the amount of time it would take me to like build a front end design in something like, Astro. then I think I’d have
Like I have to think more about the design and in WordPress I can be lazy and I can pick the Olli theme and it looks great and I don’t have to put any effort into it at all. But it does make me a little sad that it can’t just be a bunch of HTML files because it would be a lot easier. There’s no need for all this server running.
Maciek Palmowski (36:17)
that is true, yeah.
Right? Yeah.
And also one thing that also kind of made me a bit sad about what happened with WordPress themes. If we go back to the times of Kubrick and those old themes, it was very easy, for example, if you decided, hey, I would like to use some other CMS.
Brian (36:41)
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (36:47)
It was quite easy to migrate the look, right? Because you just kind of, you had the CSS, you had to get the PHP and okay, find the workers functions and replace them. Did you try to migrate one of the block themes from workers to another CMS?
Brian (36:59)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (37:08)
kind of very difficult to say it least of course it’s not impossible but it’s not that portable as it was and it was because I remember I found some really great minimalistic theme I really loved it but I didn’t want to use it with WordPress I wanted to kind of play around with with Astro and then I was okay so I will copy the CSS I’m looking but okay where is the CSS
Brian (37:09)
yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (37:35)
there is the theme JSON and it’s come… And there’s a lot of those inline CSSes right now happening and I was like, okay. So it’s not working like it used to. And it kind of makes me sad.
Brian (37:38)
Yeah.
Yeah, I can get why they did that.
You know, they can pull in just the CSS you need. They can pull in the chunks of if this block isn’t there, don’t bring that. But there’s also probably like 50 % of the CSS that’s on every page. That’s just the style, you know, the main theme of it, the style, the header and stuff that you, yeah, you can’t just grab that somewhere.
Maciek Palmowski (38:11)
Yeah, like I said, it’s I mean, I also get why it happens, but it kind of made me a bit sad, right? Because I it stopped being portable. And I remember when at some point I moved some old ghost theme to WordPress because I also like it and it was very easy. just had to
Brian (38:19)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (38:33)
kind of rebuild their templates, template parts and everything into into PHP but the whole CSS and everything was was very easily transferable and and then we are missing this part it’s sad
Brian (38:42)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah,
it’s definitely a different era. Um, well, I want to thank you for taking the time to go through all this. find it really fascinating. I’m really, uh, just like, want to spend time with all of these other CMSs. Cause I feel like I’ve been so deep in WordPress that I forget sometimes how simple it is to just spin something up. Um, you know, without saying, Hey, I’m going to put 150 megabytes of PHP on a server real quick.
Maciek Palmowski (39:10)
It is.
Brian (39:14)
when you kind of don’t need it.
Maciek Palmowski (39:15)
No, you don’t need it. You can
just write a few markdown files and voila, here it is. It works. I mean, really, you should give Astro a try, because for those simple things that you want to spin very quickly, it works really good. And I also like the fact that suddenly your website kind of becomes…
Brian (39:21)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (39:38)
almost automatically an open source project that if someone finds a typo they can report it and they can create a pull request. This was one of the things that I, when I joined PatchStack, I really, really wanted to try out Astro Starlight. It’s like this documentation theme for Astro. And yeah, right now we have two.
Brian (39:43)
Mmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Maciek Palmowski (40:01)
two pages built on Starlight and we’re really happy about the whole flow. Sander, who is editing our documentation, liked this Markdown and MarkdownX approach very much. He’s like handling it without any problems. Very often there are even months when…
when he doesn’t ask me about anything and sometimes I’m like worried, hey, something stopped working or something. No, no, everything is fine. I’m constantly updating it. just don’t need your help. Okay, So yeah, and it works and people can create pull requests. We can either accept them or not. It’s really cool. It totally changes the approach and I kind of like it.
Brian (40:29)
Uh-huh.
And you can start pointing WordPress Playground at repos that have markdown files and it’ll, I’ve seen people do that and you can open your markdown in a nice block editor for people like me who love writing in a, I just like seeing my words more visually than I do in VS Code, but you know.
Maciek Palmowski (40:51)
yeah, I saw it.
I get
it, yeah. But I think from this perspective you should give StataMic a try because they have their editor called Bard. And it’s a really cool mix of kind of the more, let’s call it old school editing approach that we have with, like imagine tiny MCA but with blocks.
Brian (41:13)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Okay, okay.
Maciek Palmowski (41:26)
So you
can create additional blocks that you can put inside of the text, but you didn’t have to. It can be still like this whole text file and everything. But if you need something, yeah, you can add a block. I mean, those are called sets. It’s that I mean, but it works like exactly the same. And it does, because like in WordPress, we’ve…
Brian (41:29)
huh.
Maciek Palmowski (41:53)
very much see that everything is a block approach. We also see the notion and why I do like writing in WordPress because I think that when it comes to content writing, the block editor is really good. It’s really good. It really feels great. Although when it comes to those, the fact that the paragraph is also a block and you kind of always see that it’s a block, kind of, sometimes it’s kind of weird because I kind of see that
Brian (41:56)
Yes. Yes.
Maciek Palmowski (42:20)
text should be at like the, the paragraphs should be like a default state. You don’t entirely have to remind me that it’s a block. And in BART you kind of see that you have like this, this text file with those islands, let’s call it dynamic islands where you can put whatever you want. You can create whatever you want, right? It’s up to you.
Brian (42:28)
Yeah.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, you don’t get trapped inside your list block and you can’t get back out of it to get back to the paragraph block, none of that. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Maciek Palmowski (42:48)
now it’s not a problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s so, it’s
really much simpler, at least from my perspective. Of course, on the downside, right? Because I think that Gutenberg or the blog editor did really amazingly is kind of having this perfect balance between making this real time visual preview of what you are writing.
Brian (43:18)
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (43:18)
without being entirely what you see is what you get. It was like a very, it’s like a really hard thing to do. And I think that Gutenberg really, really nailed it. It was like, it’s like a perfect balance. Of course the problem starts when many blocks, especially when you install them, that are in the part of core, have a bit different interface, a bit different things.
Brian (43:43)
Yeah,
Maciek Palmowski (43:45)
And this was, for example, very often the thing for which I liked ACF blocks so much because they do give you like every custom field made in ACF has a similar experience, A similar UI. It always will work the same. And when I at some point was trying a lot of those blocks and I remember that
Brian (43:57)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (44:09)
I was so surprised in the amount of ways that blocks are handling images. Sometimes you had to click a button, sometimes you had to move it, sometimes it was in a sidebar and I was like, no, I don’t like it. And even if kind of ACF broke this experience, right? Because you always had to… It was a form, right? But it was always the same form. So you always…
Brian (44:14)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Maciek Palmowski (44:35)
the behaviour was always the same and this is the thing that I like so much about ACF, for kind of giving this… this always similar experience.
Brian (44:47)
Yeah, yeah, although the components feel consistent. Yeah. Well, anyway, thank you. I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but thank you for kind of giving me this breakdown. Where can people go? Because they should definitely be following your blog and newsletter. So maybe you could just let people know where to go to find that.
Maciek Palmowski (44:54)
the board.
So, if you see my first name and second name, it’s maciekpalmowski.dev or newsletter.macekpalmowski.dev and there you will find everything.
Brian (45:14)
Awesome.
Maciek Palmowski (45:15)
Yeah, I try to write a lot about those CMSs so you will find a bit about, for example, how WordPress and Stata make compares to each other. So if you are interested in this topic, yeah, you will find quite a lot about it.
Brian (45:25)
Yeah.
Definitely. Well, thank you. Thank you again for chatting today.
Maciek Palmowski (45:34)
Thank you so much for having me. It was really amazing to share this knowledge in the, especially in our WordPress bubble, right? To talk about not WordPress.
Brian (45:41)
Yes. Yeah,
definitely. Thank you.
Maciek Palmowski (45:46)
Thank you.