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WP Engine is not WordPress

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Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#61

Post by snowwrestler »

np_tedious wrote: post #13
sgammon wrote: post #6

> WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system I'm not sure I see how the absence of a revision tracking system rises to a violation of sacred principles.

The revision system is not (not is it claimed to be) a sacred principle of life, morality, or society at large. It's a core tenet of WordPress.

According to whom? I’ve developed and run Wordpress sites for nearly 15 years and never enabled revisions on a single one.

This whole line of thinking—one person defining the “core tenet” or whatever—seems directly contrary to the ethos of open source. If Matt doesn’t think people should be able to turn off revisions, he should put that in the license. Otherwise, users can do what they want and open source leaders should celebrate that.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#62

Post by [deleted] »

bastawhiz wrote: post #33

Am I missing something? This feels like such a bizarre hill to die on. He's upset that a company offers hosting of his software with a default setting changed. I guess, don't have that setting then? There's no mention of the source code being changed or custom patches being applied. So the allegation that it's "something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress" is maximally overblown. Unless…

[deleted]

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#64

Post by bastawhiz »

fragmede wrote: post #51
bastawhiz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can. Then why isn't WordPress.com completely obliterating WP Engine in sales? Surely if the argument is that WP Engine is bad and cutting corners, and they have their own first party commercial offering, that first party offering is so good that nobody thinks…

Because the market is stupid. Worse is better, planned obsolescence, clickbait, fast fashion; the free market is full of failures. It's not good enough for a competitor to Google's search engine to be 30% better, it needs to be 10x better in order to compete.

Your argument is perhaps unintentionally implying that WP Engine's offering is 10x better. WP Engine is the competitor. It's ridiculous to suggest WordPress.com wouldn't be the default, obvious choice for hosted/managed WordPress.

Put in B2B terms, this is as if AWS only sold managed ElasticSearch and they did it well enough that it forced Elastic to change their licensing (as happened in real life). But of course, WordPress can't change their license because it's too ubiquitous and doing so would be an obvious, massive backfire.

If WordPress.com was truly competitive, this whole issue wouldn't even be a discussion. It's middling and expensive. And Mullenweg is upset that people are willing to pay for essentially Lightsail-but-it's-just-WordPress over his own offering.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#65

Post by tr3ntg »

A more accurate and even more confusing statement would be “Wordpress is not Wordpress” which is a reality that I’ve had to explain to clients (in a former life) countless times.

“But when I go to Wordpress.com…”

SORRY, forget everything you saw there, that’s not Wordpress. Same logo? Yes. Branding? Yes. Company? Yes. But it’s not Wordpress.

This one setting that WP Engine disables is a shame, but it’s nothing compared to the confusion that Automattic has brought upon themselves

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#66

Post by racked »

b0ner_t0ner wrote: post #52
bkyan wrote: post #39

In my experience, the revision system in WordPress is not performant. The more revisions there are for a given page, the longer it takes to publish that page, eventually leading page publish requests to time out. I usually have to limit the number of per-page revisions to keep, to prevent that from happening.

Most Wordpress sites can go static (like using WP2Static), so the HTML online is always fast.

Only if you avoid common plugins that need some server-side interaction, for instance Gravity Forms.

(Probably _unless_ you use some custom rewrite rules, but then you're walking on less-trodden paths)

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#67

Post by bkyan »

b0ner_t0ner wrote: post #52
bkyan wrote: post #39

In my experience, the revision system in WordPress is not performant. The more revisions there are for a given page, the longer it takes to publish that page, eventually leading page publish requests to time out. I usually have to limit the number of per-page revisions to keep, to prevent that from happening.

Most Wordpress sites can go static (like using WP2Static), so the HTML online is always fast.

The performance bottleneck with regards to revisions is on write, rather than on read.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#68

Post by blackoil »

addicted wrote: post #36
bastawhiz wrote: post #33

Am I missing something? This feels like such a bizarre hill to die on. He's upset that a company offers hosting of his software with a default setting changed. I guess, don't have that setting then? There's no mention of the source code being changed or custom patches being applied. So the allegation that it's "something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress" is maximally overblown. Unless…

Yes, you seem to have the argument backwards. The argument isn’t that “turning off saving revision data” is terrible. That’s not the problem or the argument. The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can. The “default setting” is an example of this behavior. Also, calling turning off all historical revi…

Why open source the software, if you don't want others to use it?

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#70

Post by donohoe »

Kye wrote: post #35
bastawhiz wrote: post #33

Am I missing something? This feels like such a bizarre hill to die on. He's upset that a company offers hosting of his software with a default setting changed. I guess, don't have that setting then? There's no mention of the source code being changed or custom patches being applied. So the allegation that it's "something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress" is maximally overblown. Unless…

Automattic's own managed WordPress platform severely restricts features all the way up to the top plan. I guess it's okay for them to do it. edit: I am referring to WordPress.com which is the offering comparable to WP Engine.

I think you need to give more context.

I’ve been a WP VIP customer at various points and I don’t think this is true as a general statement.

It really depends on context.

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