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WordPress Is in Trouble

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Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#161

Post by ethbr1 »

gspencley wrote: post #140
beshrkayali wrote: post #64

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…

My personal take on this has to do entirely with how the decision to block WP Engine access to WordPress.org, unless they were willing to pay for it, was arrived at. And this is a critical detail that I'm fuzzy on. If anyone has context (even links with further info) I'd be very much appreciative. I have since read the WP Engine complaint. I understand what they are alleging. I'm just not 100% clear on the nitty and…

Differentiating IP/copyright/code rights and infrastructure hosting is definitely an important aspect of the feud.

In a perfect world, open source projects would never use private infrastructure (and would certainly not privilege any particular private infrastructure!).

That said, the ability to 'open source' infrastructure (read: have hosting provided by a non-profit or similar attached to the open source project) has always been more difficult (financially, legally, and practically) than simply commiting a license file.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#162

Post by daitangio »

internetter wrote: post #74
karaterobot wrote: post #17

I've had a Wordpress blog for about 25 years. This makes me want to turn off automatic updates, since I'm worried he might just go nuclear and flip some sort of kill switch that bricks every blog, or push some ridiculous anti-Wordpress Engine banner to every installation. Of course, not keeping WP up to date is very risky as well. I'm not even insensitive to his position, even though I don't know full details. But, h…

Consider a static site. They cannot be hacked, they are cheaper to host, and once the files are generated they are immutable

With isso for comments!

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#163

Post by addedlovely »

runxel wrote: post #122

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. [0] https://getkirby.com/

I too have switched to Kirby, should have done so years ago, it’s great to work with and fast out the box.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#164

Post by smarx007 »

greggman7 wrote: post #49
treyd wrote: post #32

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.

https://wagtail.org/who-uses-wagtail/ lists a few companies who would care about low resource use due to the sheer amount of traffic they see.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#165

Post by 9dev »

hu3 wrote: post #66
labster wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then we can develop systems that save user prompts, automatically and dynamically regenerating page content as the AI models are updated.

Add simple version control to keep history of changes. Slap some workflow/approval process. And you have a product!

Amazing. You just ruined the internet for everyone, making us all wade through heaps of meaningless bullshit, only generated to drive the ad revenue!

And do you know what’s the best part about that? You even made money off of that you can use to purchase the stuff you got ads for! Isn’t that exciting? Thank you for your service!

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#166

Post by arccy »

pier25 wrote: post #141
prepend wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Even if it's remotely possible to hack Nginx... what's the motivation to hack a static site? There's no DB with juicy data and no compute to abuse for mining crypto or running DDOS attacks.

trick users into clicking malicious links, host ads, seo link farm, host other questionable content, or some people just like to deface websites

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#167

Post by adolph »

greggman7 wrote: post #49
treyd wrote: post #32

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.

> [PHP] makes sharing a server trivial

Is that still a thing? Why would an application on a server share anything other than the kernel?

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#168

Post by chrismsimpson »

dangrossman wrote: post #86
beshrkayali wrote: post #64

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…

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…

Perhaps more indicative of late stage capitalism where rent seekers try to extract more and more value and consolidate more and more power.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#169

Post by xp84 »

disiplus wrote: post #99
huijzer wrote: post #19

Hopefully many sites will switch to a static site generator like Hugo or Zola. Way lower costs, lower risk of being hacked (almost impossible actually), and a reliable backup thanks to Git. I’m running multiple static sites for years already and am very happy with it. It has been very reliable.

The benefit of WP is the huge theme and plugin ecosystem. I know of people that started a business just on WP + theme + plugin without any dev expirience or money for a developer

This is basically true, though I'd point out that most of those themes and plugins are hot garbage minefields full of bugs and security vulns, and due to the fact that it's all just wild-west PHP here, a nontechnical WP admin actually making use of the whole wide world of plugins and themes out there is exactly as safe as downloading absolutely any .exe you want while running Windows XP as Administrator without any firewall or antivirus software.

Not disputing the usefulness of the platform, just that it's a risky thing to expose to the Internet.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#170

Post by addedlovely »

capitanazo77 wrote: post #128

I would love to do a one click transfer to a static site but it’s not easy. I’ve only seen Astro Wordpress kits but paid

If you’re comfortable with php writing an importer for Kirby is simple, checkout their cli YouTube video. Nice modern api and easy to import content. Being flat file if there’s a mistake, just delete the content folder and import again!
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