Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PHP Sucks

evertpot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 297 posts

Re: PHP Sucks

#161

Post by porker »

tluyben2 wrote: post #65
treehau5 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the issues aren't with "new" PHP, it's with the mountains of "old" PHP code that invariably finds its way into your project. Also, having had to maintain a Wordpress site the past few months, may God have mercy on all daily Wordpress devs. I truly admire your stalwartness now in putting up with that.

The problem is that clients really want WP a lot. Bigger and bigger companies currently and for most of their departmental sites. This is WP shoe-horned in a full site CMS function. The thing is, users seem to love it. I would wager that if you just rip out the guts of PHP and leave only the frontend (the /wp-admin part that is), but leave it 100% as it is and write a solid backend in Django/Rails, you have a winner.…

What's your list of preferred WordPress plugins?

Re: PHP Sucks

#163

Post by porker »

tluyben2 wrote: post #65
treehau5 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the issues aren't with "new" PHP, it's with the mountains of "old" PHP code that invariably finds its way into your project. Also, having had to maintain a Wordpress site the past few months, may God have mercy on all daily Wordpress devs. I truly admire your stalwartness now in putting up with that.

The problem is that clients really want WP a lot. Bigger and bigger companies currently and for most of their departmental sites. This is WP shoe-horned in a full site CMS function. The thing is, users seem to love it. I would wager that if you just rip out the guts of PHP and leave only the frontend (the /wp-admin part that is), but leave it 100% as it is and write a solid backend in Django/Rails, you have a winner.…

> The problem is that clients really want WP a lot.

This. I can waste my breath talking about another CMS which is better suited for the task, has cleaner data representation (good for 5 years' time) etc, and try to get stakeholders to buy into it. Or I can mention WordPress and have brand recognition do the work for me.

> The thing is, users seem to love it.

In my experience, the users find the admin confusing. It's the managers and above who love it. They know what they're getting and it feels safe.

It used to be "You're never fired for buying IBM". Now it's "You're never fired for buying WordPress".

Re: PHP Sucks

#164

Post by FussyZeus »

PHP is an oddball child for sure but I get more done in it than anything else. Who gives a crap if other developers don't respect you? My bills are paid and I know I do good work, everything else is just bonus.

I'm kind of glad I'm very disconnected from the communities and the various groups that handle this stuff, I just write my code and go home. It sounds like thousands of bickering children.

Re: PHP Sucks

#166

Post by porker »

staticelf wrote: post #33
cdnsteve wrote: post #22

The thing that hurts PHP the most is lack of structure and patterns used in the most popular projects. These popular projects are usually where the bulk of work lies, where developers point to when they're considering PHP. When juniors start they're typically working on WordPress or Drupal. The problem is that WordPress and Drupal are terrible guides of how to write a web app and that knowledge is completely useless…

I used to like Laravel, but lately it feels so enterprisy. There is a lot of boilerplate in Laravel today and it was changing too fast for me to keep up with it.

> I used to like Laravel, but lately it feels so enterprisy.

You think that feels enterprisy? Try Symfony, and listen to the community, with its "way to do things" that change every 6 months depending what's in vogue - and each time are invariably more abstract and complicated.

Re: PHP Sucks

#167

Post by enobrev »

Im_a_throw_away wrote: post #111

Do you know any ressources that explains how to write "good" plain PHP?

http://www.phptherightway.com/

There’s a lot of outdated information on the Web that leads new PHP users astray, propagating bad practices and insecure code. PHP: The Right Way is an easy-to-read, quick reference for PHP popular coding standards, links to authoritative tutorials around the Web and what the contributors consider to be best practices at the present time.

There is no canonical way to use PHP. This website aims to introduce new PHP developers to some topics which they may not discover until it is too late, and aims to give seasoned pros some fresh ideas on those topics they’ve been doing for years without ever reconsidering. This website will also not tell you which tools to use, but instead offer suggestions for multiple options, when possible explaining the differences in approach and use-case.

Re: PHP Sucks

#169

Post by redmaverick »

trebor wrote: post #85

I started freelancing in my area doing Ruby on Rails, and found it far harder to maintain a project. I also found it harder to acquire clients in my area for new RoR development. More work was available locally with PHP. Clients were more willing to pay. I've done a ton of things in WordPress that shouldn't have been, "to save money". And I've done greenfield development with CodeIgniter, Laravel (v3 and v5), and a c…

Which area do you live in? How did you get your first 3 clients?
Post reply on HN