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Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

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Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever tried to customize or add functionality to Wordpress? Because if it’s anything like Drupal or other PHP based tech of a certain era, it’s hell

add_shortcode is incredible. It's probably my favorite part of wordpress, and writing a plugin is so easy, just a single file zipped up or scp'd. Especially with custom post types or adding a new table.

> just a single file zipped up or scp'd

And now your page displays a white page. Error in the log is an exception with no stacktrace/location. This was my experience in production a few times.

It's a fun system if it works, but without a testing pipeline and a staging environment it's a lottery with a possible mystery breakage on every update/change.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#52

> Political affiliations aside, I think we can all breathe a bit easier today knowing they didn’t choose Drupal. Strongly disagree. Drupal is a great CMS and there's a reason the government uses it so extensively.

I think that statement should be considered in the context that it's a blog from a company that specialises in and promotes Wordpress hosting.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE11 will soon be a security hazard and not worth the effort to code for.

Please stop spreading misinformation. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/internet-expl... "Internet Explorer 11 is the last major version of Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 11 will continue receiving security updates and technical support for the lifecycle of the version of Windows on which it is installed."

That gets you to 2025, which is "soon" under some definitions.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes because Wordpress includes frontend rendering (of both the actual pages and the backend admin) by default. This means you get working HTML powered by dynamic content out of the box, and it keeps working as content changes without needing constant builds for static sites. I see the benefits of modern component-driven frontend systems but I think the better opportunity would be to integrate this cleanly into existi…

Wordpress also has a really rich ecosystem of mature and widely used plugins that are quite easy to install. The podcast ones for instance, they'll allow you to schedule the publishing of a new episode, then upload the episode to all the major platforms, format the images, titles and descriptions automatically for the different platforms, cross post to the social media accounts announcing the new episode, allow you t…

Governments should moderately prefer self-hosted solutions to cloud services, especially when a president just got banned from all social media platforms.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#55
post #4

I hope we again see the value of using systems like Wordpress for it’s simplicity in getting a blog/website setup and easily modify content. Lately most of the modern marketing websites I see is built using gatsby and next.js. Having been talking to different content/marketing teams, they hate it so much because of the complexity it brings. Editing content? Sign in to this headless CRM app, want a form? Go sign in to…

A pretty standard stack I've done recently is Netlify, Gatsby (I'd lean next at this point) with Prismic, Hubspot and GTM. It's barely more investment to setup than WordPress but lets you build something visually sophisticated really easily and you get user friendly CMS, CRM and all the analytics and user engagement stuff. And running headless means there's almost zero attack surface.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#56
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not asking this to be snarky, but by what metric would you decide something was the best technical option?

There's no single metric, but in particular I believe that inherent inefficiency with WordPress design will incur more cost to scale, as an example. Not to mention things little security issues. I don't have an agenda against WordPress and very often when people ask me what they should use for simple projects I say "just use WordPress." My rule of thumb is that will probably be alright for a simple, small project, bu…

Why does it have to scale? Doesn’t a CDN solve most scaling issues for a content site.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#57
post #45
post #4

I hope we again see the value of using systems like Wordpress for it’s simplicity in getting a blog/website setup and easily modify content. Lately most of the modern marketing websites I see is built using gatsby and next.js. Having been talking to different content/marketing teams, they hate it so much because of the complexity it brings. Editing content? Sign in to this headless CRM app, want a form? Go sign in to…

From an operations perspective, gatsby and next.js are much simpler though. You are just deploying static content behind a webserver or even something like s3. Horizontal scaling is almost trivial. With wordpress though, you have to worry about a database as well, scaling is more complicated, you need to run php on your webservers (which has security implications), updates that include schema updates frequently requi…

Horizontal scaling for static content is just as trivial if not more trivial in WordPress with the plugins.

[Edit] downvotes are fine but let's open up discussion.

Further edit, WP has great static content manager plugins. It's not direct to S3 but a single server can handle a lot of traffic in that mode.

The part that becomes significantly easier is updating that content or adding new ones. You don't need devops to rebuild and redeploy.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#58

> Political affiliations aside, I think we can all breathe a bit easier today knowing they didn’t choose Drupal. Strongly disagree. Drupal is a great CMS and there's a reason the government uses it so extensively.

I haven't used Drupal since Drupal 7, but I really liked the Fields API. Drupal felt like it had more built in that WP should have built in but didn't. I believe Drupal 8 went with a templating language as well. That's something else I wish WordPress would adopt.

Drupal uses twig for templating now.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#59
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wordpress also has a really rich ecosystem of mature and widely used plugins that are quite easy to install. The podcast ones for instance, they'll allow you to schedule the publishing of a new episode, then upload the episode to all the major platforms, format the images, titles and descriptions automatically for the different platforms, cross post to the social media accounts announcing the new episode, allow you t…

Governments should moderately prefer self-hosted solutions to cloud services, especially when a president just got banned from all social media platforms.

The SolarWinds hack is another cautionary tale about not self-hosting.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#60
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not asking this to be snarky, but by what metric would you decide something was the best technical option?

There's no single metric, but in particular I believe that inherent inefficiency with WordPress design will incur more cost to scale, as an example. Not to mention things little security issues. I don't have an agenda against WordPress and very often when people ask me what they should use for simple projects I say "just use WordPress." My rule of thumb is that will probably be alright for a simple, small project, bu…

> but in particular I believe that inherent inefficiency with WordPress design will incur more cost to scale

WordPress essentially generates static pages and is trivially set-up to run behind a CDN like Cloudflare.

You can easily have WordPress sites in the Alexa top 50k that run on a $5 VPS - behind Cloudflare.

> My rule of thumb is that will probably be alright for a simple, small project,

Right. Simple, small projects. Like whitehouse.gov.

As long as you use Wordpress for what it was designed for, it really doesn't matter what scale you have.

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