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Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

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Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#241

Post by donatj »

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…

> because of unoptimized DB queries, and because of PHP

Don’t blame PHP. We use it to handle millions of concurrent users and it does it without breaking a sweat. It scales horizontally better than basically anything, Modern versions of PHP are remarkably fast, up to 3x faster than Python in recent benchmarks.

The real problem is Wordpress, it’s written like 20 years ago PHP to avoid breaking any plugins. The API is largely writing to global variables.

On top of that, the quality of the given plugins is usually dubious at best, and a lot of people just slather more and more of them on, and they often interfere with each other.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#242

Post by arcturus17 »

rk06 wrote: post #128
benatkin wrote: post #33

I predict they'll move to Jamstack soon. I've really been impressed by the things I've seen moved to Next.js in the last couple of years.

I am not sure. A major problem with Jamstack is that article writers need to learn git and markdown, to do the job. While wordpress gives you a GUI editor, and you are good to go

FWIW I’m seeing people conflating Jamstack and headless CMS (eg Contentful) a lot lately. The latter provides an infinitely better editing experience for non-tech users. But the non-free tier can start as high as $500 / mo (the amount of shit you could tack on a WP site for that money...) and as one of the top commenters has said I think that even for a best-in-class headless CMS, the non-techie UX starts crumbling as soon as you start adding typical features outside of content editing (forms, analytics, etc)

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#243

Post by onion2k »

kirstenbirgit wrote: post #212
onion2k wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's SO easy for anyone to stand up a quality, functional website And its also really easy for it to be left without updates or security patches, with an insecure admin account password, and with a set of plugins that open up more security problems. It might be a bit harder to get up and running with a static site generator but the fact that it's essentially unhackable (through the site itself; the host server has th…

WordPress has automatic updates, and you actually have to enter a hard to guess password when creating an account. The plugin issue is not specific to WordPress.

The plugin issue is not specific to WordPress.

The fact that other platforms and applications are insecure isn't relevant; we're comparing static sites to WordPress.

However, to answer the point, static sites are significantly more secure than every single dynamic platform that supports a plugin architecture because plugins can be, and often are, written without security in mind.

Unless you really need a dynamic website you should be deploying static assets to the enduser. Practically every business website would be better off being delivered as a static site, even if the admin still use WordPress to edit the content.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#244

Post by DigitalSea »

paulmd wrote: post #180
anoncow wrote: post #154

Is there a good alternative to WordPress?

the big alternative is static content - if you are just publishing a webpage, you can use something like Jekyll to manage your content and then it is "compiled to HTML". For simple static content there really is no need for a database or anything at all, people just want the convenience of writing content dynamically and the database is a necessary evil in wordpress to make that happen. If you need to handle a certai…

If you are a developer, a static site generator is the way to go. However, the point that so many developers seem to completely miss when they decide not to choose WordPress is the end user. There might be plenty of alternatives, but there are none (in my opinion) that even come close to WordPress' publishing experience. The admin panel is a refined UI, the publishing experience is really easy for people to grasp, it's the most user-friendly CMS around.

What so many developers get wrong is that a lot of average users are used to writing in WYSIWYG environments like Microsoft Word. And despite Markdown being easy, once again, you lose the visual publishing experience in a lot of these static options. Markdown is easy for developers, but average users will struggle (especially with complex markup like tables or even images).

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#245

Post by _the_inflator »

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…

There is some truth in here. However, CMS come and go and Wordpress is here to stay. Rules, rights, extensibility. It ain't perfect, however overall rating is still best in my opinion.

I pretty much enjoy headless CMS, but at the moment in my opinion nothing beats the ease and use of Wordpress overall, devs and authors.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#246

Post by neurostimulant »

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…

After a decade of dealing with a fleet of wordpress sites (most of our smaller clients has a wordpress site), our team has settled on a workflow when dealing with wordpress sites for our clients:

- a custom docker image suitable for use in docker/kubernetes environment. Vanilla wodpress docker image is not suitable for most of our needs, so we build our own images which includes everything we need an nothing more.

- security issues are rare if you follow basic security practice: strong password for administrative users, not installing plugin/themes from sketchy sources (pirated plugins/themes), and keep the number of installed plugins minimal.

- Sometimes a site was hacked by automated bots exploiting zero days in some popular plugins, but we have a clamav instance scanning the wordpress fleet's nfs volume regularly that flags them in timely manner. Containerization is a huge win here because it allows us to quickly redeploy the site with fresh install and prevent the bots from jumping between hosts (none of the bots we're dealing with are sophisticated enough to escape the container).

- Content was a major headache. Each site can use different themes with varying level of quality. We solved this by using Beaver Builder for all new sites with a custom, super minimal theme. This allow our content people to build the site layout visually while minimizing code bloats. This setup is also very cache friendly, unlike some of the themes I encountered in the past.

- Caching is very easy as everything is containerized. Just add a new memcache/redis container into the pod, which is just a few lines of yml or a checkbox in our internal tool. Same with daily backup and granting sftp access to external parties.

- When a client outgrows wordpress, we'll transition them away into a custom solution.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#247

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

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…

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

This is simply not true - modern PHP is very fast.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#248

Post by antihero »

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…

> different content/marketing teams, they hate it so much

A refreshing change from them making everyone else's life hell then? :)

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#249

Post by bartread »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #239
iamacyborg wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in which one wrong semicolon in functions.php brings down the entire website. Don’t immediately deploy code into prod until you’ve tested it?

How do you test wordpress without deploying it? \s

We do it with a secondary copy of our website.

Honestly though, there's a lot of talk about changes here without much talk of the most obvious class of changes that Wordpress is designed to support: adding content to your website or blog.

For all its faults it does make that very easy, and it's designed with the intent that you will do so by working directly on the live site (you can obviously preview and review content before making it live).

Changing layout and templates is trickier, likewise creating a new page layout, and that's where a staging or development site comes in handy.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#250

Post by xorcist »

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 had to run Wordpress against my will a number of times and while it's true that it a hacky mess it's also pretty well documented and as long as you use it as intended the end result is quite usable. It's PHP so pretty well tested deployments, metrics out of the box, individual interpreters for customers work well, it can be chrooted. Basic stuff like this has been built in with PHP for a decade.

> WP expect you to install it such that it can modify its install folder

Only if you want to have your users install plugins and modify the software with the web control panel. That may be the whole reason why you chose Wordpress, of course. Otherwise it runs well in a read only environment, apart from the attachments folder, and it is also documented.

> It will use incoming requests to trigger "cron" jobs

This is optional, for people who ran it on shared web hosts and didn't have access to crontab. It's all documented in the install instructions.

> It falls apart under any kind of load,

Well, yes. That's unfortunately true for all popular CMS software. It's a similar situation as with Gtk and Qt which are all flaming garbage under the hood. As an X11 user I accept that but I don't have to like it.

It's not noticeable for end users because as you realized in is intended to run with caching. That's the one big thing that should be better documented in the installation instructions. I had to evaluate half a dozen caching schemes just to choose one that seems to work well and is popular enough. There really should be one straightforward way to do it.

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