Seriously? The most powerful tech country in the world choses bloated system, created for 'regular folks'. What can go wrong?
Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again
311–320 of 371 posts
Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again
#312Once upon a time my team built The Players’ Tribune with headless Wordpress + Nextjs + CDN , which I believe is a fairly common choice these days, on that it strikes a nice middle-ground between a refined editing experience for the end-user and a not overly-complex experience for the dev team. For a static content-heavy site, it worked fine. But the real issue at stake here is more subtle than the question of the exp…
Dynamic headlines or articles sound terrifying. Look at where the content surfacing algorithms of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have gotten us in terms of divisiveness. Changing the article actual content based on the desires of the reader just seems wrong. Different people end up with different analyses on the same story. This happens already naturally. I fear doing so artificially will lead to no good.
Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 po…
I'm not referring to single meta_key look ups but was referring to non-indexed key + value queries on large wp_postmeta tables. Eventually a developer will need to do a meta_key + meta_value look up in some query which will tank performance on large table sizes. With plugins like Advanced Custom Fields, the wp_postmeta table can drastically increase in size and a developer can quickly fire off dozens of non-indexed key + value queries in one request. Given JSON support in MySQL, Postgresql, et al, there is no need to not migrate away from such a poor schema. Source: also work in the media world and have large WP installations in my charge. WP is a resource burden.
Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
I excluded plugins because additive functionality and ecosystem are independent of the core product, but yes Wordpress (and server-side apps) can be extended to do much more than a plugin in a static build process.
Evaluating WordPress without its plugin ecosystem is like evaluating Linux or github or node.js without its developer ecosystem. Of course the bare platform will be worth a lot less without the social networking effect and the diverse applications it supports.
The comparison is the simplicity of Wordpress/server-based vs Gatsby/frontend frameworks to get a working site. The ecosystem is a separate concern.
Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again
#315Nice overview by Matt from WordPress: https://ma.tt/2021/01/new-whitehouse-gov/
Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Right. I have a shared hosting site I used to host some projects on and now I keep it solely for a single wordpress site for a relative.
My thinking was a wordpress-specific provider might be cheaper so I went out looking for one with disappointing results. `
Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again
#317Earlier 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
Have a dev site, which is easy with modern tools.
Even can do a CI/CD system.
Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again
#318Earlier 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.
There are plenty of ways of doing it without NFS.
Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again
#319Earlier 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, you can set up sane permissions and use the wp cli[0] tool to install updates manually. I prefer to version sites with git and install updates locally, then git pull down on to the live server.
Yup this is exactly how I do that.
I also have a cron that checks "git status" and emails me if anything changes.
Re: Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wordpress makes sense if the goals are: - Big upfront design - Leverage existing plugins to minimize new development - Use managed hosting - Hand off to non-technical or semi-technical people and spin down development to just occasional contract work If you actually have a FTE developer, it doesn’t fit as well at all. Among other problems, it does not work with a git centric development flow, which any modern dev wil…
> it does not work with a git centric development flow, which any modern dev will insist on. Yes, it does. Just use Trellis and Bedrock.
I am not familiar with them, but a quick Google seems to suggest they won’t work with WPEngine, Wordpress.com, etc. In any event, they’re bolt on solutions, but the core of Wordpress is still a mess of configuration split between files on disk and the database. There is nothing so valuable about Wordpress that you couldn’t just get a more reliable solution from scratch than by bolting more stuff onto WP. I’ve heard people say “oh, our users are already trained on WP, so it’s a good CMS” but I don’t buy that at all. I’ve had users praise my homegrown CMSes before. There’s not much difficulty in pairing a WYSIWYG text editor and some form fields with modern web stacks these days.