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WordPress has left the building

kevinjohngallagher.com

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Re: WordPress has left the building

#121

Post by sliverstorm »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #64
crikli wrote: post #57

WordPress wasn't ever in the building. Or at least it wasn't in the building the author wanted it to be. Lots of folks have tried to force Wordpress to be more than a blog platform. I've always seen these efforts in the same light as when guys dumps tons of money and time squeezing horsepower of a Honda Civic: end of the day, it's still a Civic that get its lunch eaten by a stock 'Vette. Look, you just don't get powe…

as I've viewed when guys dumps tons of money and time squeezing horsepower of a Honda Civic Exactly. It's still a fucking Honda, and for the time/money spent on it you should have bought a Lexus. Similarly you can tweak wordpress all day long, in the end it's a blogging software.

Even in the best case- dropping an imported B18 into a stripped CRX HF- even though you'll beat many corvettes it's STILL a Honda. A stripped Honda at that.

Now on the other hand, if you started with a British Mini...

Re: WordPress has left the building

#123

Post by keithpeter »

FraaJad wrote: post #90
keithpeter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WordPress can be installed on hosted Web server space under a user account with no admin access. Plone needs admin rights and runs a daemon. Note: I'm not suggesting that the author's organisation did use WP that way. I agree with others above that the author could have mentioned alternatives.

If you want a CMS and know what a full fledged CMS does, you wouldn't even mention wordpress in the same sentence. Ease of install and being able to run on a $3/mo hosting plan is not the game CMSes play.

True, but WordPress can play that managed server game, and we know little of what kinds of installation the author was talking about.

PS: I was thinking more £30 to £100/month with someone else handling the platform...

Re: WordPress has left the building

#124

Post by jessedhillon »

Apple-Guy wrote: post #105
danso wrote: post #39

This piece is not particularly constructive. While it's not required for an opinion piece to present the perfect alternative in order to rant against the status quo...to say "Wordpress sucks" and say nothing about the alternatives...? What good does that do? I can think of lots of alternatives for the OP but all of them have certain costs/tradeoffs that are prohibitive in many scenarios. The OP goes into great detail…

Exactly. The author does not understand that if a theme is designed properly, an admin can mark comment as spam without editing the post. In addition, just about every single thing he thinks core Wordpress lacks can be added easily with a plug-in.

Consider this: in defense of WP, you're suggesting that the OP work around broken ACLs by installing a theme which allows users to circumvent the security model.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#125

Post by kevinjohn »

Hello everyone,

I'm Kevinjohn Gallagher, the author of the post.

While I really appreciate all the comments, quite a few folks here have made presumptions that are really wide of the mark.

I love WordPress. I use it for my personal site, and thats not going to change. WordPress is very good at what it does, and Im in no way down on it for that; its just that the needs of my small company is now very different that the options WordPress gives us. There's no real drama there.

What has driven this decision though, is that sites that could/should/have-already been running nicely on WordPress have really been let down by a number of changes in the 3 releases in the last year. We deal with a lot of smaller government and charity websites - which don't pay well - and they simply can't handle the AdminUI changing every 16 weeks. To us techies thats a long time, to your average "Joe Public", thats quite a lot. Given that most of these people have really strict usage requirements (colour blind, no use of mouse, etc) the new WordPress 3.3 AdminUI is shockingly inaccessible.

So much of the change involved in the WordPress product is horribly unmanaged. And thats ok, it's free software. For our small company, this doesn't work for us anymore, so we move on. I wrote the post on my personal website, simply as a marker, to give myself closure more than anything. I'm not really sure how or why thats offended so many of you, but I'm more than happy to talk it through over e-mail ;)

Thanks, Kevinjohn =========

We're a 5 person company, with 2-4 freelancers as needed. We're definitely not some $750k a website agency as someone mentioned. Heck thats more than double our turnover for the year!

Re: WordPress has left the building

#126

Post by kevinjohn »

Apple-Guy wrote: post #105
danso wrote: post #39

This piece is not particularly constructive. While it's not required for an opinion piece to present the perfect alternative in order to rant against the status quo...to say "Wordpress sucks" and say nothing about the alternatives...? What good does that do? I can think of lots of alternatives for the OP but all of them have certain costs/tradeoffs that are prohibitive in many scenarios. The OP goes into great detail…

Exactly. The author does not understand that if a theme is designed properly, an admin can mark comment as spam without editing the post. In addition, just about every single thing he thinks core Wordpress lacks can be added easily with a plug-in.

Sir, you have missed the point.

You need the CAPABILITY to be able to edit posts to be able to mark comments as spam. Many of my clients want to be able to delegate SPAM marking, but not have that person be able to edit any content on the website.

WordPress has hardcoded these two CAPABILITIES together for the last 13 releases.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#127

Post by kevinjohn »

kels wrote: post #60
calloc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Just because he is no longer using it for business purposes doesn't mean it isn't still perfect for what it was designed to do, blogging.

I think he means if you are going to hate, hate on it all the way.

"I love WordPress. With it, I have felt a genuine affinity for a product the likes of which is matched only by my Commodore64."

Who's hating?

Re: WordPress has left the building

#128

Post by mortenjorck »

rquantz wrote: post #110
mortenjorck wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the author's problem, and the problem of nearly every frustrated WordPress user, is that the alternatives aren't nearly as enjoyable to work with as WordPress. It has a nice, understandable, and flexible API, and even though its greatest strengths are really only in blogging, the friendliness of the environment naturally invites stretching its use. For these people, I would strongly recommend a look at Proces…

This is the first I've heard of it, but a quick glance at its website suggests that ProcessWire may be very promising. Do you have any additional thoughts on it, having worked with it before?

What took a little while to click with me, and really hit it home for me once it did, is how simple ProcessWire's approach to content and data actually is. Its primary admin UI looks like it's for editing a straightforward site hierarchy, and it certainly can be, but the key is that its "pages" don't have to be web pages. A combination of some simple PHP and some quick setup in the admin lets you build all sorts of things.

At its core, ProcessWire just gives you an extensible, hierarchical (and relational when you need it) model to build upon, and then gives you a really slick jQuery-style syntax by which to access it. You build templates in PHP, but the selector syntax is so easy to work with, it brings to mind WordPress theming.

One of its founding principles is that it is markup-agnostic. I'm using it right now for an XML source that feeds a site (and possibly later a mobile site, an app, or anything), with the XML being a ProcessWire template.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#129

Post by alwillis »

I guess someone should tell TechCrunch, BoingBoing, GigaOM and the rest of the large sites on WordPress to stop using WordPress, because it's not a CMS, or so we're being told.

What people don't seem to get that WordPress has been morphing from "just" a blogging platform to a CMS ever since 3.0 shipped. It'll just be a matter of time before most of the legacy stuff is gone and we'll have a CMS that can do blogging instead of the other way around.

Re: WordPress has left the building

#130

Post by crikli »

photomatt wrote: post #108
rokhayakebe wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as I've viewed when guys dumps tons of money and time squeezing horsepower of a Honda Civic Exactly. It's still a fucking Honda, and for the time/money spent on it you should have bought a Lexus. Similarly you can tweak wordpress all day long, in the end it's a blogging software.

FWIW, 92% of WordPress users we surveyed are using it as a CMS. People seem to like to say "it's just blogging software" to put us in a box, but people are using it for so much more, and most much happier than the OP.

How did you define CMS? I've learned (the hard way) that the acronym does not have a uniform definition.

Wordpress is the PHP of web publishing platforms. The barrier to entry is low, you can get decent results quickly, and it provides a great deal of power to the unskilled user. There are lots of things that it's good for; I'd say, in fact that in most cases it's all a company needs.

But it's really easy for it to become the only tool in the box, and pretty soon someone is in over his head trying to brute force it into being the solution to a problem that it was never designed to solve.

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