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Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

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Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#141

Post by Newkd »

e2le wrote: post #15

I'm disappointed by their choice in site design and I'm sure it'll be infuriating to interact with for those with disabilities. It's a real wasted opportunity to use this instead of something more battle tested and fit for purpose such as the design used by the gov.uk site. https://www.gov.uk/ https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles/

I don't think that's a direct comparison. gov.uk looks closer to something like https://www.usa.gov/, which is similarly functional. The Whitehouse website is more political and maybe would be closer to to Downing Street's page https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/prime-ministers-... which has more photos.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#142

Post by kortilla »

thayne wrote: post #109
irjustin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think we are talking about different things. I'm not talking about static assets that you use in your site. I mean the entire site is static, and thus doesn't require any database or any server-side page generation. Which means not only that it is easier to scale since you don't even have any state in the database, but each node can also handle more traffic, because it is doing less. (And if you something like s3 o…

> I think we are talking about different things.

No, you aren’t. Wordpress has plugins to generate static html for all of the posts so visitors can be served without database hits.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#144

Post by mmgutz »

Let's not forget this is the government. You can't simply just build stuff. There are many levels of red tape. Software has to be approved, etc. It's far easier to stay with the status quo and use what's already been approved then try to convince management there are simpler, more secure ways of building sites.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#145

Post by rapind »

falcolas wrote: post #99
rapind wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I'm not a big WP fan, but this statement is false in most cases. Page caching in WordPress is usually (always?) serving up the pre-rendered HTML direct from disk (or CDN) without hitting PHP. Pagely (the post we're discussing) even…

> Page caching in WordPress is usually (always?) serving up the pre-rendered HTML direct from disk I'd be very curious how a WP plugin is managing this. Third party hosting building in caching, normal in-line caches (like Varnish), nginx/apache caching, sure - I get those, and they behave how you say. But a WP plugin? I'm curious how that would bypass PHP & WP entirely.

So I don't normally setup WP sites, but I have as a favour. A caching plugin just generates the HTML files and you configure NGinX / Apache to the appropriate directory. Historically I think most did it via .htaccess w/ Apache for shared hosts, but I've only configured it w/ NGinX. E.g. https://www.nginx.com/blog/9-tips-for-improving-wordpress-pe...

I think a lot of third-party hosts provide this out of the box, maybe even using their own CDN. WP is so popular that it's be difficult not to find a service that handled it all for you so long as you have room in the budget.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#146

Post by hluska »

earthboundkid wrote: post #131
kijin wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully the White House has access to someone who knows how to set up WordPress without shooting themselves in the foot. The fact that WordPress.com doens't get hacked all the time means that there are definitely people who know how to do it.

Yes, but there are also a lot of people who don’t. I still use an RSS reader and basically every six months, a blog that I followed 5 years back and went dark will get taken over by spammers because no one was paying attention to it anymore.

I can’t imagine what this has to do with the White House’s website.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#147

Post by hluska »

falcolas wrote: post #80
ceejayoz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is if your users expect to be able to add plugins themselves, or you want it to do automatic version upgrades. I'm fairly certain for the White House's sort of use case this is not an issue. > Using a filesystem reset is a nice way around WP's requirements. I'd personally hesitate to rely on it for a popular site, since it still leaves a site vulnerable to code injection for those 24 hours. We did not permit it…

> I'm fairly certain for the White House's sort of use case this is not an issue. One can only hope. > We did not permit it to have write access to its own filesystem, at all. It worked fine. Cool beans - you installed it sanely. But contrary to how WP expects to be installed. I've corrected the original statement.

With all due respect, you have demonstrated a shocking lack of knowledge about Wordpress. It’s been a long time since I’ve read so many falsehoods spoken with such certainty. That’s not a good thing.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#148

Post by hluska »

viraptor wrote: post #51
Something1234 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If your log only shows an exception without any kind of stack trace or location, I’m sorry but Wordpress is not the problem.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#149

Post by mr_toad »

perardi wrote: post #42
julianlam wrote: post #2

In this age where the trend is JAM stack, it is refreshing to see that something battle-tested like WordPress was chosen. There's a reason WP has withstood the test of time. (WordPress developers being a dime a dozen also help make the case)

Are we at the point that creating and editing a page in a JAM stack site is as easy as WordPress for non-technical users? Not a snarky or leading question, I honestly don’t know. I use Hugo for my own internal design things, because I want partials and such, but I have no idea where the ecosystem is at for the “we need a poli-sci intern to copyedit this” use case.

Does a user need to create a page entire?

Used be that we had writers, editors, type setters, printers and book-binders, and I think the output was more professional.

I think there’s still a case for the non-technical users just writing the words, and keeping away from the presentation and delivery.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#150

Post by coldtea »

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…

>Simplicity? Perhaps in its use, but not the code.

Nobody but other devs cares about the simplicity of the code if the code works.

>The code and hosting requirements are, frankly, Frankenstein's monster levels of frightening.

Huh? Wordpress/PHP hosting requirements are the easiest to meet in the industry. Not to mention the most widely available...

>~~You have to~~ WP expect you to install it such that it can modify its install folders - all of them. Security-fucking-nightmare.

Yeah, so? It's self-updatable. Use a dedicated user/group.

>It falls apart under any kind of load, both because of unoptimized DB queries, and because of PHP.

Absolutely not "because of PHP". If anything PHP is faster than both Ruby and Python, two other common choices.

>You have to put a cache in front of it to be able to handle getting on HN, let alone Reddit.*

That's the case with most CMS, PHP or not.

>Arbitrary plugin installation, in a non-sandboxed environment (see prior point about an application-writable install).

It only happens if you chose to do it. Plugins don't magically install by themselves.

So it's not much different than any environment where you can download a jar, a python package, a ruby gem, etc and have them add functionality into the CMS.

>Need more be said?

More, no. Better, yes.

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