Live data from Hacker News

Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

pagely.com

301–310 of 371 posts

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there’s a market for high quality paid themes for static site generators like Hugo?

I think there's a small market. I've gone looking for high quality hugo themes before. I was willing to pay for one.

I agree. There's a small market. But currently, even though there's probably a dozen or two paid Jekyll or Hugo themes, only a couple are actually attractive, well-designed theme.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#302
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

50RPS must be tuned or cached in some way, as the memory load for 50 requests to the full app should overwhelm the 1GB server and ~50-100ms is typical and the $5 instance has one core.

No tuning. I just installed WP, nginx, and MariaDB.

Here are the numbers from when I was testing how much comment threads impacts load time:

http://imgur.com/gallery/IQk2kun

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#303
post #241

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…

> 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…

> We use it to handle millions of concurrent users and it does it without breaking a sweat.

Have you tried doing the same with other technologies?

> It scales horizontally better than basically anything

How does it horizontally scale better than projects written in Golang/C#/Ruby/Python/whatever?

> up to 3x faster than Python in recent benchmarks.

Computational speed rarely matters. If it does, you would usually fallback to C/C++/Rust library doing the heavy lifting, when using 'slow' languages, or just move the workload to async processes.

Web applications spend most of the time doing I/O operations, where async programming makes a lot of sense. Async with PHP is still in its infancy, compared to Python, which has native support for it.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#304
There are a lot of other complex sites and business running Wordpress. Why is it a big deal when there's a new one???

Wordpress makes it very easy for users to manage website content for the end users. But for developers, simplicity depends upon personal preference.

I like the the whole project to follow a same set coding standards irrespective of whether it's a procedural paradigm or OOP or any other. But, if you look into the wordpress core, you will several sets of standards which makes it harder to follow through whenever you try to understand the core. For simpler plugins, one might not need to dive into the core but I have had a fare share of projects and plugin development where I had to go through the core. And, it still takes me some time to understand whenever I have to do so. Maybe, I might be using Wordpress for wrong reasons and wrong project (because that particular task can be easily achieved using other technologies or even if I start coding from scratch without wordpress), but clients are always right and I have to use the technologies they prefer.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#305

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…

The pricing alone of wordpress hosting supports the counter argument that it is indeed too complicated.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#306
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 love Wordpress but don't use it for 90% of the things I do. I grew up with Wordpress and I love that the code is simple for someone new to PHP. Wordpress for me, with no programming background at the time, was so much easier than Zend for example, which was very popular at the time.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The pricing alone of wordpress hosting supports the counter argument that it is indeed too complicated.

Pretty much any shared hosting can support Wordpress. Kinsta was a suggestion where you pay for someone to manage and install things for you which is a lot more than hosting.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#308

The whitehouse probably needs a fast way to publish. this is why they used wordpress. They are fully cached behind Akamai CDN. So u can hit this website with any load u want. The performance of wordpress is excellent if you dont have many plugins. It is super-easy to design. you can see the results before you publish and You dont need a developer to publish. So if u have a static wordpress website, just add a CDN in…

> performance of wordpress is excellent if you dont have many plugins Even without plugins, WP performance will start to degrade due to how it handles post "meta" data. As the wp_postmeta table grows larger in size, it will generate longer running queries as it tries to query against non-indexed key + values. At a certain point, your only option is to start modifying WP core code and the DB tables for your specific n…

This is not really true. I help run and launch professional news organizations on WordPress, some of which have tremendous archives of 100s of thousands of posts.

The post meta table can scale fine to hundreds of thousands of post objects without needing special infra or handling. The WordPress core has a caching layer for metadata, and either way it's not like "SELECT * FROM wp_postmeta WHERE meta_key = 'foo' AND post_id = 1234" is going to be a performance bottleneck regardless of the size of the meta table.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 modi…

The NFS requirement for multiple Wordpress hosts are an instant deal breaker for me when discussing CMS on the cloud. Wordpress made sense when the web was a collection of independent servers. However in today’s cloud-orientated hosting landscape there are a thousand better ways to provide said content. Both at the beginner level and at the enterprise.

> The NFS requirement for multiple Wordpress hosts are an instant deal breaker for me when discussing CMS on the cloud.

Unless you have a very dynamic site (posts hourly, multi-daily), would making it static-y be a solution?

* https://wp2static.com

Do a post via web GUI, it gets written out to disk, and then you rsync (or auto-git or whatever) to distribute it.

Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

#310
post #269

When I read there are over 55,000 plugins available, someone on reddit manage to find 16,000+ plugins, the rest could be outdated?

The rest are probably on the various marketplaces and websites around the internet, not the official plugin directory.
Post reply on HN