At this point, I’m planning to move away from Wordpress due to the instability and into a regular wiki based site. Unsure of which at the moment, maybe some suggestions? Prefer static file based rather than host a DB.
Instability and WordPress have been related for a long time.
Personally, I have found the last few years to be pretty good.
If what you need do is a great fit for a static site, then that
will be a much easier to deal with.
For a majority of Wordpress use I am involved in a static site would not
offer a majority of the features needed.
If you haven't yet: Now's the best time to migrate away. You should try out Kirby[0]. No affiliation, but this thing sparked my interest in web development again when I first heard about it.
right, let’s try again: Did he drink THAT psychoactive wine?
I'm clearly missing some key context here, judging by the other two comments seeming to know what you're talking about, but I'm none the wiser about what's the deal with him and… Ayahuasca? which I'd never heard of before this thread.
There is some chatter about trend among techies drinking Ayahuasca and suddenly becoming a different person. I was curious if it could be related to the events that unfolded unexpectedly.
WordPress is a very mature project with a long legacy but I'm surprised that there hasn't been a larger profile attempt to make a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage of being PHP and the long history of vulns that have come along with it. I'm imagining some very pluggable and template driven runtime that you can ship very declarative packages for. The spicy take would be to use a Scheme for the templ…
What would replace it? PHP is unique in that it makes sharing a server trivial and low-resource compared to almost every other solution. A simple example might be that you can run 100s of PHP forums on a single machine low memory machine but if you want to use discourse (not written in PHP), it requires 10x 20x the resources for a single forum. This is true about almost every other solution AFAICT.
What is it about PHP that makes this low-resource scenario possible?
I really think Matt is suffering from some sort of a mental breakdown. It’s a sad situation and there’s a lot to learn about open source projects with a huge user base and where the bottle necks exist. But I think people who know or are close to him should seriously consider an intervention. I can’t believe after two decades he’d just decide to throw it all out in a blazing fire and tarnish his reputation (and Wordpr…
> because of some valuation drop or being short on money. Why is that hard to believe? People have done much worse for much less money.
People would rather believe their leaders broke their brain than to accept that their power is wielded over us for selfish personal gain
I don't think it's a mental breakdown, I think this is a (poorly executed) long pivot into Matt's companies having tighter control over the ecosystem and keeping more of the profits from hosting, plugin and theme sales. He's burning down "the community" on purpose. In a couple years, it'll be run more like Shopify, where the theme store and app store only list products that run their billing through Shopify and give…
One reason that Reddit's API changes killing the best clients was so poisonous is that the resulting non-exodus showed other companies that they can take user-hostile actions with impunity. A big enough mass of passive and undiscerning users will stay no matter what. Hence there being more freedom to take a strategy like this.
I think Reddit's API changes and more did lead to an Exodus of a good chunk of power users that gave the site more of an identity. But what's worse is the official Reddit clients gamify using Reddit so much that, on the whole, content quality is down significantly, even in the smaller niche subreddits that usually had great stuff. The problem is high quality content isn't profitable, endless scrolling is.
WordPress is a very mature project with a long legacy but I'm surprised that there hasn't been a larger profile attempt to make a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage of being PHP and the long history of vulns that have come along with it. I'm imagining some very pluggable and template driven runtime that you can ship very declarative packages for. The spicy take would be to use a Scheme for the templ…
What would replace it? PHP is unique in that it makes sharing a server trivial and low-resource compared to almost every other solution. A simple example might be that you can run 100s of PHP forums on a single machine low memory machine but if you want to use discourse (not written in PHP), it requires 10x 20x the resources for a single forum. This is true about almost every other solution AFAICT.
That's just CGI. You could theoretically do the same with any other language, but PHP is just the most popular.
Consider a static site. They cannot be hacked, they are cheaper to host, and once the files are generated they are immutable
They can certainly be hacked, just like any static site. Web servers have vulnerabilities. And the files can certainly be edited as they aren’t immutable. They are less resource intensive and easier to maintain, but aren’t immune. (Running mostly static sites converted from Wordpress sites, but also running 10 year old+ word press sites that haven’t been changed in forever)
You're not wrong, but compromising a server that exposes nginx configured for static files, sshd, and nothing else is at least an order of mag or two harder. Probably no one is going to drop an nginx 0day on your blog.
I sort of get what you're trying to do here - an exercise in empathy - but the flip side of this is that he has been made enormously wealthy off the back of thousands and thousands of unpaid volunteer hours on an open source project. It's not only "others" who are getting the financial gains.
Good point and agreed. Do you think for him it is more an issue about how much money WP Engine is making compared to him or the relative influence they have?
I'm not really sure to be honest! He could well be thinking exactly what you said, I was just pointing out the flip side of that argument if that is what he believes, because it would be doing a real disservice to the open source community around WordPress without which he would be nothing.