Brizy

Brizy is the ultimate cause of suffering and pain when used with Wordpress.

Origin

In 2025/02/19, VTLUUG was tasked with setting up a Wordpress site for the The Association for Women in Mathematics at Virginia Tech (AWM). With the power of 7 people, VTLUUG completed the task in 7 hours. The members of the setup operation included a NASA Software Engineer and a DevOps Engineer for the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge.

During the setup, the entire work-in-progress site was publicly accessible. Just before midnight, we received a quite concerning message in the Wordpress comments, "is this the final site?". Fortunately it was a prank and the AWM did not in fact see us struggling to use some of the simplest site creation software.

After struggling with Vanilla Wordpress, we decided to indulge ourselves with a few extensions, as a treat, to make up for the lack of skill, Brizy being one of them. Despite theoretically promising to lower the skill barrier, it in fact increased it to an impenetrable wall of bullshit. Brizy kept attempting to force itself into VTLUUG's empty wallet in exchange for features such as menus, headers, and interactive pages.

Fortunately, a forgotten bindmount in the docker configuration saved the tired and beaten team from Brizy after restarting the container and losing the data leading us to start from scratch, never touching Brizy ever again.