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WP Engine is not WordPress

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Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#21

Post by toxican »

I've been out of the WP community/scene for a number of years now, but this post is kinda weird. Revisions definitely aren't the hill I'd die on when choosing a hosting provider at all. Especially considering WPEngine does a lot of things very well:

1. Dead-simple staging environments

2. Support for Local, which makes WP development an absolute breeze because I don't need to maintain docker, vagrant, or a LAMP stack, etc. And it makes deployments quick/easy.

3. Dead-simple backup/restore features

4. Simplified cache-management

And yeah, I've got the technical know-how to handle all of that myself directly on a proper server and all that devops-y goodness. And yes, $5/mo shared hosting cPanel provider would be comparable (and let's be real, it's good enough for most people using WP)....But man is it nice to just charge/pay a little more for a host that just does that crap for me with a nice interface.

I like revisions as a feature. Hell, I made reference to them a lot in the training material and sessions I put together for clients way-back-when as a way to give clients the confidence to tweak copy without fear of completely ruining their site. But this blog post seems to pretend it's the heart of WP and without it, it's an entirely different piece of software all together, which is absurd.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#22

Post by graeme »

This feels like a private which has reached the public shorn of the context that would be necessary to understand it.

I use Wpengine and have enjoyed it. They have some aggressive upsells and you learn you can ignore them. Actually had no idea about revisions, hadn't used them before I hosted with Wpengine.

I very much like using Wordpress and Wpengine has helped make it easy to do so. I'm sure they have some things to work put between them but I feel this needs more info. At a certain level it's open source software and if it isn't a trademark violation and is allowed by the license terms then Wordpress has only moral suasion to work with.

Very happy with the work Wordpress has done to make an amazing ecosystem. If they need something from WPEngine to keep things going I think it's fair to ask and perhaps they did but we're a bit in the dark here.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#24

Post by racked »

It might not be WordPress, but then WordPress is often an inefficient, error-prone piece of dung anyway. WP Engine is the only painless WordPress hosting solution I've seen. It's fast and has a great backend panel for debugging. Hard to do all that yourself for that price, unless you're hosting WP in bulk.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#25

Post by bdcravens »

We settled on Wordpress and WP Engine for the marketing side of my employer's website. Strictly speaking, I'm in charge of all of our technology choices, but my time and attention is better spent on our product, and WP Engine and its deployable artifacts is good enough for leadership. (We are a very small company)

My boss (ie the owner) has never asked me about per post versioning. When we need to roll back, WP Engine's custom snapshotting fits the need.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#26

Post by shortformblog »

I personally dislike WP Engine after years of having used them. Earlier this year there was a story about how Cloudflare had bizdev representatives reach out about a technical issue under the guise of customer support. I saw the very same thing with a client on WP Engine a few years back, and it was over something that they likely could have done something about given their position in the ecosystem: Too many spiders hitting old URLs.

Instead of recommending strategies to help fix it, they jacked up our prices. It was a huge pain for everyone involved.

But I think the challenge is, at an agency level, it’s hard to move to another CMS host because it’s seen as difficult to move up the food chain. Providers like WP Engine exploit this misunderstanding by targeting non-technical customers with promises that they’ll help you out. That was clearly an opportunity for them to step in, and they used it to put on the squeeze.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#27

Post by mattl »

tomphoolery wrote: post #9
pluc wrote: post #7

I mean, yeah. Isn't that what they're supposed to be doing? Because an option exists to store every revision doesn't mean you necessarily have to do it for free. It is a costly feature. They're free to chop up WordPress as much as they like and monetize features that elsewhere are default. They're not hiding it and users can choose to go elsewhere. Otherwise every WordPress host would be the same, just hosting vanill…

> while the WordPress people may not like it hmm i wonder why... https://wordpress.com/wordpress-hosting/ always great to see devs sh1t on other devs under the premise of "this isn't right!!!" when in reality it's just affecting their bottom line. money makes the world go round!

And this post is on WordPress.org

See: https://wordpress.org/hosting/

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#28

Post by coliveira »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable. But setting that aside, I learned of WP Engine when they launched here, on hacker news. At the time their value proposition was "bullet proof and secure wordpress for people who just want to publish and not learn devops". Over the years, I've watched them through a progression of mana…

> rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable

Yes, I came to realize the same thing about open source, it was created with lofty ideals, but the practice is just the opposite. Of course, most people will not agree with this conclusion since the whole industry will tell them otherwise.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#29

Post by blendergeek »

tonymet wrote: post #20

You can’t license software as open source, with a liberal license, and then get angry when someone profits off of it. That is one of the many valid uses. If you don’t want commercial use, license your property with a limited license that meets your expectations.

Not everything that is immoral will necessarily be illegal. We can't legislate morality. The WordPress.org folks seem to be taking a position that WP Engine's behavior is immoral. That doesn't mean that WordPress.org has some duty to attempt to use every governmental remedy at their disposal to prevent WP Engine from taking these (allegedly) immoral actions. Instead, the folks at WordPress.org are attempting to use public shaming and boycott to bring WP Engine in line.

Do you believe that governmental mandates are the only acceptable solution to (this class of) immoral acts with software?

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#30

Post by bsder »

Sorry, but for all intents and purposes, WPEngine IS WordPress.

Running WordPress is such a pile of security and customer support suck that nobody wants to deal with it. Consequently, if you are being made to run WordPress, you also want to pay somebody to make the pain go away. If I pay WPEngine, I can tell my marketing and design teams "Customer support is over there. Talk to WPEngine and leave me alone."

If WordPress made their software such that hosting administration wasn't such a fiasco, WPEngine would have viable competitors and wouldn't be able to extract the ecosystem.

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