One of my fellow WP friends was part of the release squad which was an all-women team. Very proud of her and the entire Release Squad. Also, amazing work by the 600 individuals involved from start to finish on this release.

TOOLS! heh heh MORE TOOLS!

What's not to love? WP is advancing into a more rounded vehicle for publishing on the web.

WordPress has released V 5.6

Wordpress 5.6, already.

Sigh.

I would very much like to find WordPress easy. Or if not easy, then... at least a little more straightforward and intuitive.

Every time I have tried to get started with it, I have struggled.

I know there are hundreds of thousands (and quite possibly millions) around the world who are entirely happy with WordPress, so I understand the problem is me, not the software.

But it's very difficult to put my finger on why I struggle with it quite so much.

Where there are blog posts which address themselves to those who find WordPress hard, they often turn out to be veiled promotions for Wix or Squarespace.

But my issue is not so much that I find WordPress technically difficult, but that I find the way it builds webpages perplexing unintuitive, incomprehensible, byzantine.

For me, Wordpress is both weird and hard.

To start with, I don't understand why I am supposed to need a database for every website.

Then, often, when searching for information on how to do something like:

- I want to apply the attribute

lang="de"

to the root element

Or:

- I want to remove one of two script references before

</body>

but only from pages in Section B of the site

Or:

- After

main.css

, I want to use a different section-specific stylesheet in Section C from the one used in Sections A and B

I am told: "Oh, you can use third-party plugin xyz."

But I don't wish to use any third-party plugins. I simply wish to know how I can do these (fairly elementary?) things in Wordpress.

Despite how it may sound, I am not a complete neophyte.

I can get my head around HTML5 APIs like WebComponents, Service Workers and IndexedDB (just about).

I can handle CSS3 @keyframes, Flexbox, Grid and Custom Properties.

I know Fetch API, Custom Events, async/await syntax, ESModules and the Proxy object in EcmaScript.

But Wordpress is still - and this is frustrating beyond words - beyond me.

@ronin - I can understand your frustration, WP does a lot of things the hard way. It is made for people who just want a site right away and are not as particular about its efficiency. They can have a website online in a day that has all the basics without needing any understanding of the parts that make it work and how to make it work better. Why learn those skills if the front is 'good enough'?

I work on about a dozen WP sites and they have some backwards ways of doing things, but it is largely up to the framework's skin, the theme, as to how easy or difficult it is to manage and customize the details. They are not all created equally.

I have not taken a closer look at this new WP version, but this new Nina is the backend which I expect offers even simpler ways to do front facing things without fixing the clunky parts inside. There was a companion update to the default WP 2020 theme that may offer some improvements based on Nina.

Generally speaking, for people who can build their own they are better off in the long term imho. I find it maddening that the defaults are not easier to customize without having them overwritten by the next (required) update. I cry when I look at the bloated, clumsy source code.