This past weekend, I took a quick overnight trip to NYC to attend Code Montage’s, Coder Day of Service in Manhattan. It’s a great event where people donate their technical skills and time to help others who don’t have technical skills but have needs in the nonprofit realm. I worked with a woman who wanted to build a website to bring awareness to a cause she was passionate about.
She wanted the website to include posts with links to resources around the issue and testimonials from others involved with the same issue to build a community. It was great working with her and helping her address her needs.
What I found the most interesting from a technical standpoint was some of the previous advice she received about how to go about building such a website. Someone else at the hackathon had previously recommended that she look into Victory-Kit, a static-based website generation project which hasn’t seen any pull requests or other activity for over four months. It’s generally a bad idea to build any kind of website for end-users based on a dormant project: abandoned code means numerous unpatched bugs, undeveloped features. These sites are also really hard to support once the hackathon is over and the end user has to go to someone else for code maintenance.
Another person at the table recommended we do it using Jekyll with Chef. Chef’s a really great option for programmers because it allows maximum flexibility and control, but it’s only great for people who really know what they’re doing and have the time to devote to development. This was not a great idea for a non-technical user working on non-profit projects with tons of other things on her plate.
Interestingly enough, although it was the obvious solution nobody thought to use Wordpress. It just works, it’s a mature technology, it has a vibrant community around it, tons of plugins, many free themes and many more premium themes that end-users can customize fairly easily without any programming knowledge.
There is a distaste for any PHP based technology in the web development community and I suspect I know why. A lot of blogs and comment boards disparage PHP recommending to use Ruby, Python, NodeJS or anything else, as long as it’s not PHP. I wonder if most of these haters formed their opinion of PHP a decade ago and haven’t looked at it since.
I bet most critics have no idea what modern PHP or PHP frameworks look like. I am glad the PHP community largely ignores the hate and continues to produce excellent code that just works.