I work with a team of WordPress developers. We each get various sites to build, but then myself and one other person then do content/theme/plugin updates. Another person does SEO. Another one of the developers just completed a beautiful website. Our team lead mentioned she couldn't make content updates on the site.
I went in and all the pages and posts are blank. With some digging, I found all of the content hard coded into the php template files. This is a brochure website - just content. No ecommerce, no special functionality whatsoever, not even a blog. Any content changes have to be coded in the php template file for that page. So even just to change out an image - you have to go upload the file, grab the url, find it in the code, and swap out the URL. The only plugin on the site is a form builder for a simple name, email, comment form in the footer that is called in to the php file.
I went and looked at another site done by this person. Same thing. I went back to the team lead and let her know what I saw, and both of us were baffled. She talked to the developer, who feels that this is the better way to do it as plugins and themes slow down the site, and their custom themes are far superior, totally bespoke, etc. When asked about wordpress or php updates that might effect the theme, she says it won't because the theme is hooked directly into the Wordpress core (aren't all themes?). The design is great, but it's not anything that couldn't be done in Elementor, Divi, other themes/builders or even just Gutenberg with some tweaking.
She has not explained how clients are supposed to update anything or the slow down to the rest of us having to dig through and write code to make simple changes (most of us can...but...why?), or who fixes anything that breaks. SEO person doesn't know how to do the SEO and hasn't seen builds like this either. There is no documentation that has been provided at this time, and while the code looks mostly ok, there are a few things like mismatched tags (<h2>text</p>) that might not render correctly all the time.
I took another look at the second site which has a blog, and the end-user has a special form to submit a video url and the text, which then adds it in to the database and pulls it into the blog page. No blog posts are listed in the WordPress admin - I haven't spent the time to figure out yet how we'd do edits to those.
Now the tricky part. This developer talks loud, fast, and confidently with a lot of jargon, and has upper management totally sold on how amazing and bespoke this is, and this is the absolute best way to utilize WordPress. The CEO says they aren't a web developer, so they don't understand the concerns the rest of us have. From the front end, the site looks great and that's what management sees.
I've taken over a number of WordPress sites over many years, and I've never seen anything like this. A highly custom theme or plugin, custom pages, custom code for a specific functionality, sure. But I don't understand why you'd remove any ability to use any sort of visual interface, plugins, SEO, limit content updates to the template files, or why you would write a custom function for blogs rather than using ACF and custom post types as needed, etc. It's like a WordPress that isn't WordPress - no separation of content, theme, and code. Like working around WordPress instead of in it.
Am I in the wrong here and this old dog needs to learn new tricks? Or is my gut right that this effectively hobbles the strengths of WordPress, and we're eventually going to have some very unhappy clients with difficult to manage sites?
The project manager wants me to have a meeting with the other developer...which is super awkward because I don't want this to be a her vs. me situation, even if we both think the other is wrong. I'm trying to get a feel for how common her approach is, so I can know if I should continue expressing concerns, or if this is a valid alternative. If this is just something I haven't run into yet, I'll drop it and learn how to do the updates and changes faster in the template files.
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