Building Laravel CMS alternative to Wordpress

1. Building something that would be as full featured and competitive as WordPress could take months/years of hard work, have you thought about starting smaller to see if you can get any market share? Perhaps target people who don't need a full blown CMS to start with.

2. Have you thought about instead of Larave 5.2 perhaps use 5.1 LTS and later when next LTS comes, upgrade to that?

3. What can you offer that is better than WordPress? Why would anyone choose your CMS over WordPress and all the other CMS out there?

You're also running up against things like pyrocms that's built on laravel. Not to try and put you off - but it might be worth spending your time contributing to an existing project or re-using one to do your SaaS version? Have a look at statamic for instance that is another laravel based CMS but generates flat files rather than relying on a db - it's not free, but shows a different take vs. wordpress and traditional CMS's :-)

You've got your SaaS idea - but to compete with wordpress you'll have to win over a lot of mindshare for designer & developers. Maybe I've just seen too many people decide to do "wordpress, but better!" and I'm getting cynical though ;-)

The reason people like WordPress is that there's a massive plugin community, it's easy to run/install (no composer, special PHP requirements etc) and it's got the idea/services locked down pretty good.

If you want to make a similar thing to WordPress in Laravel, you will have to make it easy to install and run it. Laravel itself requires deploy scripts and CLI knowledge to get it going (Forge/envoyer of course does a lot of this but not everyone will want to lock themselves to that service).

Wow statamic new version seems cool. Let's give it a try.

Update - oh shit it is not free.

@pmall cheap-skate ;-p

Completely agree with @SaeedPrez and @ohffs, they just put it more politely than I would have done!

I guess the crux of it is this: any developer who's worked with WordPress and an even halfway-decent PHP framework knows that WordPress architecture / code is a steaming pile of shit, and hates to go near it.

But it's got where it is today in spite of that, meaning that:

1. you can code a shitty app and no one who counts will care and
2. it's not the code that determines whether an app is successful or not

Simply: writing a better-coded WordPress will not make people want to use your app. WordPress has got where it is today by iterating on feedback, and you need generations of software to get to the same point.

As a learning / experience exercise, go for it!

As a commercial venture, don't waste your time :P

Why not look at building something else the world needs?

Maybe I've just seen too many people decide to do "wordpress, but better!" and I'm getting cynical though ;-)

@ohffs yeah but someone has to do it someday. I almost hang myself the last three time (I demonstrated some goodwill) I put my nose in wordpress template code. How could people tolerate such an amount of bullshit it is incredible and it amaze me.

@pmall yeah - it's a world of awfulness :-/ But wildly successful :-/ Then again, people say that about PHP itself ;-) I keep seeing people trying to do a 'craigslist, but better!' too - and they all too fail :-/

@ohffs yeah but craiglist is kind of minimalistically cool. Not wordpress.

Also, if you want a more modern WordPress development experience, there are projects to do just that:

• Timber
• Roots
• Themosis
• WordPress API

@davestewart I tried root and even if this is already pretty cool it is still the same bullshit with templates. Never noticed timber I'll give it a try someday, thank you.

@pmall I wrote my own WordPress OO framework a good few years ago now called Double-O (those are slides from a WordPress London talk I gave) which I never got round to releasing (pre-GitHub) with its own Twig-like template engine. It worked a treat!

But as with many, many projects, it's now just taking up kilobytes on my hard drive :P

@pmall "retro-chic" ;-) Maybe my next project will just be plain html4 with no css and I'll use that as a design guide ;-)

Hi everyone, I am so happy that my idea is heating up :)

I am Sorry for being late to response. I want to thank you all for the comments and feedback. Well, I believe it depends how you look at it, and from which angle. Most of us might or still think that what made wordpress a famous CMS platform is just the wordpress core itself, however, that core is just part of the ecosystem.

I invite you to reinstall wordpress one more time and look at it without plugins or extra themes. From expert or customer point of view, Wordpress out of the box is really plain, very simple design, and easy to use compared to other Blog or CMS platforms out there, which is totally 100% fine. As a matter of fact, that's how it should be – simple, light, easy to install and use.

To make my point clear and to understand where I am going, let’s dig little bit deep inside the wordpress philosophy. I believe, you should fall in Love with Wordpress to understand its concept. Wordpress is simple plain and simple to use out of the box to allow freedom of choice, yet it gives an ample space for people to extend wordpress and be creative in their choice.

Developers can be creative by making plugins, themes to extend wordpress from just regular blog/CMS to full blown Website based on CMS platform. Users/customers on the other end can be creative by putting all these add-ons together to suit their needs. Therefore, this harmonized and almost unique combination, made wordpress move from a simple blog to a famous choice when it comes to either complex blog or CMS. And, it was not the Wordpress Core by itself which made wordpress famous. Add on top of that the fact it’s based on GNU license and Open Source philosophy as well.

So, the catch where I see customers and developers fall into as they don’t separate between Wordpress as core, and all the Plugins/themes that are being provided by the community to be used by wordpress core. That’s where most people I believe misunderstand the philosophy sometimes and think that wordpress core provided all this as one entity, rather, wordpress as a core represents only one part of the Wordpress ecosystem.

So, what make wordpress a Wordpress CMS are the themes and the plugins provided by its community on top of its core. For instance, I’m building a wordpress Blog/CMS which would be published hopefully soon; it’s going to have 115 active plugins! There is nothing wrong with that, and I believe that’s how it should be, since no one can create a Blog or CMS fit everyone style and needs. So, these plugins made wordpress goes beyond a Blog, CMS, and anything you can imagine as customer. With that being said, who said that Laravel community (which growing so rapid than any other php development community out there) can’t replicate the same ecosystem. I believe, Laravel community can do it, and all of us should help to do it.

Having said this, I invite all of you to raise your hand on this Laravel forum and vote to join the laravelpress.org idea or ecosystem :) until we have the laravelpress.org platform ready for developers. If you are willing to be part of it, please let me know so I can add your name to the list.

The plan: 1) to create the beta version of laravelpress.org core which would be free my friends under GNU license, similar to wordpress.org. 2) prepare the foundation of laravelpress.org website to invite all Laravel developers around the world to contribute to the core of laravelpress.org. In fact, we should invite wordpress developers as well, trust me, this would be a great opportunity for them to branch out and make more profit. 3) once version one of laravelpress.org is stable and ready for public, we are going to open the door of fortune for all Plugins and Themes developers around the world to start creating free and premium themes/plugins using laravelpress.org market place. This way, customers can tweak laravelpress look and functionality as they wish based on their needs using either free or premium packages.

Again, thank you so much for your comments and feedback.

@SaeedPrez I totally agree with you, however, that was not exactly my point :) When you say “Wordpress take months/years of hard work” Are you referring to Wordpress Core or the ecosystem? Because if you referring to the core, that actually the easiest part. If you are referring to the ecosystem of wordpress, then that absolutely can’t be done with one person and not even with group of developers. Wordpress run by its community/people around the world and that’s what I want one day to see happening using laravelpress.org

Thank you for bringing this up, I believe 5.2 is LTS as well, if not we’ll go with LTS Laravel.

I believe wordpress in terms of scalability, security, reliability, performance, and expandability has peaked or almost going to very soon in the future. As developer’s point of view, laravelpress will take wordpress concept to different dimension using Laravel framework, the most reliable plugins and themes can be done using Laravel framework. From the customer point of view, laravelpress.org would be faster, reliable, more secure, plenty of features/options provided by the greatest php developers (Laravel developers), and expandability where ever Laravel framework can reach.

@ohfss Trust me, no competition in here. I hate rat race. I rather be creative and offer something people will eventually appreciate and love to use as developers and customers, rather, than try to prove myself using the same platform. Laravel framework and its community talk itself, and nothing so far can beat wordpress concept and Laravel framework if combined. Combine the 2 together, and you will get a perfect ecosystem to build awesomeness world!

@bashy I assure you that this would be packaged nicely using web application installer. It will be more than easy to install. No Laravel or composer would be needed on customer’s hosting account. However, I can imagine that only the developers which need to manage laravelpress from Cli would need Laravel environment.

@davestewart That’s why I believe wordpress has peaked in its core and not community, or it will in the near future. Unless they reformed the whole thing using a framework like Laravel, or use Laravel to rebuild it :) Again, combining the concept of wordpress idea/ecosystem (Which is almost unique in blogging and simple use CMS) with Laravel capabilities, we simply have another secure, reliable, faster choice where it’s limit is Laravel framework limits.

Too many people might argue with me to use drupal, Joomla, and the list can go on and on. Why wordpress won over the others? Well, I believe because of its simple and easy to use backend, that’s all, and not because wordpress might be using better way of programming.

Any more comments and feedback will be highly appreciated. Thank you!

There's two projects that definitely need to check out:

• OctoberCMS, which is a CMS built using Laravel
• WordPlate, which leverages WordPress with Composer and offers options to pull in WordPress plugins via Composer as well.

I was once a core developer for what became one of the leading open-source CMSes out there. There were literally millions of lines of code. A CMS with all the associated templates, plugins, modules, etc is an immensely complicated animal. And then you throw in upgrades, bug squashing, security headaches, distribution, the community, etc. And if the popularity really explodes you'll need a lot more than just github and a few developers. Foundations, directors, teams. It can become a real monster. Especially when the politics get hot and heavy. Expect to eventually pay a lawyer or two. It's not for the faint of heart.

@awarren Like WP do and take down sites that use the wordpress name. So many stories.

@bashy When I said lawyers I wasn't talking about trademarks even though that can become a part of it. Mostly I was thinking about incorporation papers, contracts, paying someone to legally represent the corporation and/or the brand, paying bills, etc. Depending on where you live, the legal mumbo jumbo can be a pretty big challenge.

@awarren That's a given for any company :P destroying people's domains and websites is not, which is why I mentioned it.

@davestewart You're shitting me, I expected maybe a 10-paged document, I ended up seeing a bible haha. (Double-O).

Thank you guys for your comments . I am working on the legal part. I just had a message with Jan at wordpress, and it seems we good to use the word "Press" inside laravelpress domains :) Here is the link for my Legal Question discussion https://wordpress.org/support/topic/legal-question-2

LaravelPress, LLC. which will take care of all the stuff that @awarren mentioned. In New York, $1500 and you will have LLC. up and running in no time including publishing as well.

@Jaytee - ha ha, yes, it was fun / cathartic writing the talk!I hope you enjoyed it :P