lokl VS gutenberg

I've used GeneratePress and their blocks. I might give SimplyStatic another shot this weekend, this time with full site editing and a fse theme I'm making. I also want to try another alternative. SimplyStatic was forked from an earlier version of wp2static included in the bundle.

Timely plug for Lokl, which I just put out a new release for over weekend :) Allows creating/managing a bunch of WP sites locally, optimized for deploying statically.

I've switched from the Jamstack/static site generators to nocode WordPress for content sites, to focus my coding more on app UIs in the long term.

Jamstack is nice, but it's either for personal developer blogs or larger teams. Outsourcing is too expensive with coders being in high demand.

Everything WP can be easily outsourced when needed, and there really isn't much of a speed benefit with Jamstack sites if you cache your WP site on the edge (e.g. with Cloudflare APO). Security of the origin server isn't a problem with a good host or going static.

You can generate static sites from a local WP install if you find secure hosting too expensive, here's a nice docker based tool for this: https://lokl.dev/

WP is really as hard, ugly fast or slow as you make it, you have to find the right theme and plugin ecosystem within WP.

I don't have to and don't need touch the code building sites with it, so all those weird WP code conventions don't really bother me.

There’s also lokl.dev from the wp2static dev

It might be worth mentioning that Lokl [0] seems to be from the same author [1] as the "wp2static" plugin [2], my and many others go to for static site generation of WordPress.

I find Lokl and interesting take, although the usual self-serve script is kind of annoying for power users (what I mean is that this bash scripts tried to do everything for you and it's less transparent), I recommend the repo [4] as the source of the actual Dockerfiles, that you could just reference in something like a docker-compose setup.

The Dockerfiles are kind of surprising since they read more like a an ansible-playbook than like a Dockerfile. This one image has it all - php, nginx, mariadb, phpmyadmin and who knows what else [4]. It's an interesting approach to Docker images, certainly against the recommendation but might have some good reasoning for something as special as WordPress.

[0]: https://github.com/leonstafford/lokl-cli

[1]: https://github.com/leonstafford

[2]: https://github.com/leonstafford/wp2static

[3]: https://github.com/leonstafford/lokl

[4]: https://github.com/leonstafford/lokl/blob/master/php8/Docker...

For Automation, I've got full end to end tests using it in the main https://github.com/leonstafford/lokl repo. Just 1 E2E test in there so far, but that's what I'm planning to use to generate living documentation for the project itself and my SSGs included with it (I suck at maintaining docs otherwise!).

I thought the reddit discussion did a better job explaining it, but here are the direct links:

https://lokl.dev/

https://github.com/leonstafford/lokl

The developer, Leon Stafford, is also working hard on WP plugins that convert to static sites and even upload directly to popular services such as Cloudflare, Netlify, Amazon, etc.

(I am not associated with this project.)

For anyone wondering, this is not gutenberg.org, Gutenberg is the name of the Block Editor from WordPress

> The Block Editor project for WordPress and beyond. Plugin is available from the official repository.

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg

In this last and specific case I was working with a Laravel application that needs to interact with a WordPress site, and as both works from different Compose projects, I need to add a custom configuration to allow internal requests between them, what get easy to do with Laravel Sail, simply adding a extra_hosts configuration to the docker-compose.yml file but was impossible to do with wp-env and probably will not be implemented as we can see from this Github issue.

The meteoric rise of plugins like Advanced Custom Fields (which is still an excellent plugin and serves it’s purpose very well), and page builder Themes like Divi, was a result of a gap in WordPress’s page editing abilities. And while these things may have been absolutely necessary in the past, with the introduction and integration of Gutenberg into WordPress core, that is no longer the case.

If you are using Gutenberg editor on your WordPress website, simply select the block you would like to create a pattern for, then click the three dots at the top-right corner of the block editor and click "Create reusable block".

Gutenberg is attempting to be a Frontend / UI style site editor (example here: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg ). An amazing example of this type of editor is Webflow. Lesser examples include Square Space and Wix which is what these other plugins, Divi/Elem/Avada/Salient do is provide professional templates that allow users to build from. These push WP from simple blog to an actual website experience. You can think of them, and Webflow imo, kinda like photoshop for websites, or maybe Figma for web development. They allow designers to learn a tool instead of CSS / JS. What I think the WP theme builders really excel at is getting something that looks modern and fast really really quickly. I'm happy to talk about the market and who builds licenses for the WP theme builders but this post would be a book! haha.

Vanilla WP is excellent for beginners who aren't trying to do anything fancy, in fact I think its one of the best things to ever happen to the web. Yes there are exploits etc but that comes with all software. But most other software doesn't run something like 30-40% of the web though so their bugs are really magnified. Same goes for the WP plugin theme builders I mentioned above.

You can also add your support and follow of the status of this ticket on Github.

WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy”, the first major release in 2023, includes more than 900 enhancements and bug fixes. But WordPress/gutenberg still had 4842 open and 18128 closed issues at the time of writing, including 1051 open issues labeled as bugs.

WordPress bundles Gutenberg - https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ and it comes fully featured with full site editing - https://fullsiteediting.com/.