Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again • Hacker News Board

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#81

Post by winrid » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 2:56 AM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #61

westoque wrote: 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…

Simplicity? Perhaps in its use, but not the code. The code and hosting requirements are, frankly, Frankenstein's monster levels of frightening. ~~You have to~~ WP expect you to install it such that it can modify its install folders - all of them. Security-fucking-nightmare. It will use incoming requests to trigger "cron" jobs (which can include self-upgrades), via a non-loopback HTTP request. It falls apart under any…

I've been in the top 10 of HN and I think I saw at most 10-20RPS.

My $5/mo VPS running WordPress can handle about 50rps for an article page...

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#82

Post by irrational » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 2:56 AM UTC

thayne wrote: post #45

westoque wrote: 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…

Wait, what non-trivial site doesn’t require a database?

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#83

Post by Glyptodon » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 2:59 AM UTC

westoque wrote: 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…

Is there a CMS that has a Wordpress-like admin panel and content editing tools that builds and deploys the needed updates to a static site when you save an article, etc.?

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#84

Post by monoideism » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 3:02 AM UTC

irrational wrote: post #82

thayne wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wait, what non-trivial site doesn’t require a database?

Many, many informational web sites do not require a database, including many non-trivial sites I've done for clients. Hugo is particularly adept for non-trivial static sites (via it's ability to use built-time API json data, etc).

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#85

Post by falcolas » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 3:04 AM UTC

splatzone wrote: post #79

falcolas wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simplicity? Perhaps in its use, but not the code. The code and hosting requirements are, frankly, Frankenstein's monster levels of frightening. ~~You have to~~ WP expect you to install it such that it can modify its install folders - all of them. Security-fucking-nightmare. It will use incoming requests to trigger "cron" jobs (which can include self-upgrades), via a non-loopback HTTP request. It falls apart under any…

WordPress is not without its design flaws, some of which make sense from the point of view of helping non-techies run their own sites (such as making updates easy.) But as someone who has built 100s of sites with WordPress I feel the need to defend it on a few points here: > You have to let it modify its install. Security-fucking-nightmare. You don't have to do this, you can set up sane permissions and use the wp cli…

> You don't have to do this

I updated my original comment here.

> A good practice is to set up your own cron job on the server and disable the internal cron in your wp-config.php

Defaults matter. And when I was working on it, this wasn't well documented anywhere. If it is now, great. It shouldn't be the default.

> Just install a page caching plugin of your choice[1]

A bad idea, IMO. It's still going through the PHP server and all of the routing/plugin/DB code within WP. Much better to use Varnish (and its ilk) and avoid overloading the PHP service.

> Or use a managed WordPress hosting service

Back when I worked for an remote DBA company, we were tapped many times to help optimize DB access by Wordpress. It reminded me that it's remarkably easy to start a WP hosting company, and remarkably hard to do it right.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#86

Post by rchaud » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 3:05 AM UTC

boyesm wrote: post #64

Looking through the FAQ on the USDS website that is linked in the source, it seems a lot less bureaucratic than I would've ever anticipated. No job descriptions, no dress code. It seems more like a startup than I would've expected from a government org. https://www.usds.gov/faq

They're trying to hire people for a role where the industry custom is to dress less formally. It's possible they loosened up the rules after dumping the mega-IT project contractors behind the first healthcare.gov site and going with smaller, decentralized teams for the rebuild.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#87

Post by falcolas » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 3:06 AM UTC

winrid wrote: post #81

falcolas wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simplicity? Perhaps in its use, but not the code. The code and hosting requirements are, frankly, Frankenstein's monster levels of frightening. ~~You have to~~ WP expect you to install it such that it can modify its install folders - all of them. Security-fucking-nightmare. It will use incoming requests to trigger "cron" jobs (which can include self-upgrades), via a non-loopback HTTP request. It falls apart under any…

I've been in the top 10 of HN and I think I saw at most 10-20RPS. My $5/mo VPS running WordPress can handle about 50rps for an article page...

Huh. That's a lot lower than I expected for a high ranked HN post. I'll agree, WP didn't start having issues until the 50-100+ range.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#88

Post by jakelazaroff » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 3:12 AM UTC

OccamsMirror wrote: post #74

jakelazaroff wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not really. What guarantee do you have that your cloud hosting provider wasn't also running SolarWinds services behind their firewalls.

"Self-hosting" in this case means running your own data center as well.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#89

Post by monoideism » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 3:12 AM UTC

The one thing great about WordPress is the massive number of themes available (and plugins, if you're not a programmer).

I wish very much that there were 10% as many attractive themes available for static sites. Yes, you can port them, but it's a pain. And yes, you can design them, but it takes more time and most programmers don't have the design chops to pull it off.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#90

Post by viraptor » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 3:13 AM UTC

organsnyder wrote: post #70

viraptor wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. That describes every platform, programming language, layer of the stack, etc. that I've ever worked with.

There's a whole possible scale of responses and of encouraged workflow though.

Wordpress and a lot of php community does actually like the "drop in some code and it usually works" approach. This encourages continuing on that path.

On the other side, the failure can be handled in many ways. "This module could not be loaded and will be ignored." is one. Ensuring some preparation / validation is needed before upload is another.

Let's not go to extremes like "you're expected to have a staging environment for your personal blog because the framework cannot possibly help you".