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WordPress Is in Trouble

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Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#171

Post by bsimpson »

pwillia7 wrote: post #54
Spunkie wrote: post #24

Crazy how hosting wordpress, between 2003-2024, your main concern was Chinese/Russian hackers. And in 2025 you main concern should be if Mullenweg will hijack your website for his pissing match. Also he didn't shut down the sustainability team because he "didn't know about it". He shut it down because their stated goals are a threat to Mullenwegs dictatorship hold over wordpress.

Almost to the letter -- https://www.dalmomendonca.com/rules-for-rulers

I wonder if he knows that his personal blog seems to be hosted in the template for a yoga studio in South Lake.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#172

Post by BeetleB »

pryelluw wrote: post #5

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.

Instead of a wiki, why not a static site generator.

I have used Pelican[1] for over a decade. Strongly recommend if you know Python. You don't need to know Python, but in the off chance that one day in the future you want to write your own plugin...

[1] https://getpelican.com/

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#173

Post by NKosmatos »

I feel sorry for Matt, someone close to him (family, friend, partner) should help him. It’s not good for him, not good for his company and for Wordpress. I’ve never used Wordpress and I prefer static sites where I have full control, but this doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize the usefulness end ease of it. Like many situation, this whole issue would be solved if a couple of the people involved sat down for a coffee, left their ego’s outside, had open minds, and having the willingness to compromise and being sincere ;-)

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#174

Post by addedlovely »

pryelluw wrote: post #5

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.

Kirby has ticked the boxes for me, total control of the admin interface.

Block fields like ACF flexible layouts. Modern and fast with total control of the frontend.

Has been fun to switch and fast.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#175

Post by Dalewyn »

akho wrote: post #94
Dalewyn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>switch to a static site generator like Hugo or Zola At that point just write your own HTML and never be beholden to some abstraction framework toolkit corporation cooperative ever again.

Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written HTML? You need, at the least, single post pages (for permalinks), an index page, and an RSS feed — all slightly different views of the same content. It gets messy, and at some point you write your own SSG, which somehow becomes worse. This is without going into how you ideally want an image pipeline, sitemaps, cards for twitter and stuff, maybe category pages,…

>Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written HTML?

Yes.

It's all a lot simpler than dealing with some abstraction framework toolkit, at least for me.

Maybe it's because I learned to write websites in the early 2000s where writing your own HTML and CSS was par for the course. You'd also write PHP or Ruby or ASP or something if you wanted to get fancy.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#176

Post by greenthrow »

frereubu wrote: post #151
hn8726 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > Automattic announced that it would restrict its contributions to the open source version of WordPress. The company would now only put in about 45 hours a week total — down from nearly 4,000 a week — so as to match the estimated hourly contributions of WP Engine. source: https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-spons...

Ah I see, I thought you were talking about him personally.

Are you under the impression he himself has been a meaningful contributor in the last decade?

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#177

Post by hobs »

daitangio wrote: post #155
dangrossman wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I fear you are right. Remember they ask $25/monthly for 1 website on pressable, I can run Wordpress open source for 5x month on Linode, and there are ready made installation on docker, digital ocean and so on…

That implies you need to dedicate the 5 bucks a month per instance, when you look at how much things are write once and cacheable as heck, you could easily get customers down to pennies per instance per month.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#178

Post by mfkp »

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.

Usually SEO spam link insertion and generic Viagra spam redirects...

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#179

Post by xp84 »

claudiulodro wrote: post #89
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.

Sure, some of the web is read-only, but what about commenting, contact forms, forums, eCommerce or anything else that requires a proper server? That's a big advantage WP and other full CMS have over static site generators.

A lot of corpsites are wordpress, and are modified once a quarter or so, those should not be running wordpress internet-facing due to its terrible performance and constant susceptibility to vulnerabilities (or that of its themes/plugins landscape due to it being all pure PHP that can do anything). Wordpress is a useful tool to generate static sites though, I've done that before and it's glorious. Use all the friendly authoring tools of WP and then click a button to write out an updated blob of HTML files to be served by Cloudflare or whatever.

As for forums, those almost don't exist anymore, and contact forms and ecommerce are better off being handled by software designed to do that rather than some plugin shoehorned into an early-2000s PHP blogging platform.

For example, contact forms in Hubspot or Salesforce, and ecommerce with Shopify.

Edit to add: If someone's technical enough to be self-hosting Wordpress the open-source project, I would trust them to do a fine job at selecting a more focused alternative OSS project for those "actual server" needs.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#180

Post by hoofhearted »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #77
hoofhearted wrote: post #75

I’ve been working on a side hobby project for a year in an attempt to solve these problems. It keeps growing in interest, and the demand has become more than I can handle currently. If anyone is interested in helping to build an open and secure platform that is an alternative to WordPress, please reach out or comment.

Blog about it and get it on HN?

Yes, this is a really great start.

One of my current clients recently had his WP install taken over, and SiteGround took it down for offensive content.

It’s just a basic informational website for his consulting business, and he never logs into it or makes changes to it. He has no idea how anyone hacked it.

It really baffles me that this is still a thing in 2025, and that people can’t get a basic Shopify type of experience for creating informational websites and blogs where they can set it and forget, and focus on running their business. They should be concerned about how their content website is growing their business and overall bottomline; not if they have been taken over with offensive content or not based off of basic security best practices.

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