Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WordPress Is in Trouble

anderegg.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 457 posts

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#221

Post by Dalewyn »

akho wrote: post #208
Dalewyn wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

It's certainly easier until you have to deal with different views of the same content. I do not trust myself to keep things consistent, and neither should you. Back in the day I'd have clobbered something together with SSIs to have, at least, a single copy of text to maintain, but that gets old quickly. A determined and focused person can probably make do with single-post pages and a titles-only styled rss. Hugo and…

>It's certainly easier until you have to deal with different views of the same content. I do not trust myself to keep things consistent, and neither should you.

I would argue that's not a "static" website, but even so that's still nothing some smart usage of PHP includes or the like can't easily solve.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#222

Post by jcranmer »

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…

WordPress is an open source project, and part of being an open source project is you don't really have a right to demand that people not mooch off of your work, at least as far as most open source licenses are concerned [1]. If you don't like that, well, then open source isn't for you.

The other major complication here is that Matt has thoroughly mixed his several roles together, so you have to spend time untangling what is Matt-personally, what is Matt-as-his-company, and what is WordPress-via-Matt. When you untangle that, the core demand appears to be that Matt (in who knows what role) demanded that WP Engine compensate Matt-the-company for its use of WordPress-via-Matt resources being provided by Matt-personally (that no one knew was being provided by Matt-personally as opposed to WordPress-via-Matt). Given the thoroughly tangled mess of that stuff, and the fact that--in the past--Matt made several steps to untangle the ownership of everything, I am not particularly persuaded by the logic of "I'm just trying to get them to pay their fair share," as they're not being asked to pay the people they should be paying.

> why is Matt / WP Foundation acting unfairly by asking for payment?

Because they're asking someone to pay, not the foundation whose resources they are allegedly using, but their largest competitor (a very distinct legal entity).

[1] There are licenses that do have clauses that let you take action, but generally having such a clause makes it not Open Source-compliant, and frequently the relicensing needed to bring the current licenses to that state involves a lot of drama.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#223

Post by joshstrange »

CrimsonRain wrote: post #211
daitangio wrote: post #142

Sorry I switched to hugo my https://gioorgi.com and it was easier than expected. Initially, I only followed the ‘drama’ tangentially, also because I have always considered myself a mere "end user" of Wordpress, even if long-time one (I used it for about 20 years). For me, the fact that Wordpress.com sold a service based on an "extended" version of Wordpress.org was never a particular problem, but I never thought it w…

What did you use to migrate posts? I'm going to move three WordPress sites (15yr+ running) off soon.

Also very interested in this. I ended up paying for 2-3 years of WordPress.com to host my tiny-traffic blog and I had to pay for a higher tier to handle video (sidenote: fuck wordpress for offering a shitty watered-down WP version on WP.com, you know, literally the thing they complain about WPEngine doing). I'd love nothing more than to migrate away but I've already done a mess WP -> Hugo (or was it Jekyll? not sure) -> Ghost -> WP and I'd like to automate the migration as much as possible. Every other time I spent a while copy/pasting and hand-fixing posts. I know I won't get away from doing that completely but I'd like it be easier.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#224

Post by pier25 »

prepend wrote: post #185
pier25 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Similar motivation as hacking a Wordpress site, putting seo spam out there. There’s less payoff, but people still do it.

yeah but the difficulty in hacking Nginx vs Wordpress must be orders of magnitude more difficult though

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#225

Post by [deleted] »

fancyswimtime wrote: post #210
65 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps he tried some Ayahuasca and now "doesn't care about anything" and it reinforced his narcissism. Ayahuasca (and DMT for that matter) tend to make people not care about anything, so I wonder if he did some and has been affected by it. Just a guess, though.

DMT makes people not care about anything? seems like a blanket statement without any basis

[deleted]

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#226

Post by dylan604 »

pessimizer wrote: post #68
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…

> a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage Plenty of people have made better CMSes, Wordpress is big because it got big, and a lot of people depend on it. And since an enormous number of people are involved with it, your upstart system will never have the capability of Wordpress. Whatever capability you come up with, somebody will have already made a horrible module to install on Wordpress to do it that…

meh, if you're gonna cheat with a time machine, then just bring a floppy disc with the various versions of wordpress. as PHP gets updated, just release the newer version of wordpress. it's open source, right?

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#227

Post by mfer »

wordofx wrote: post #212
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…

He has investors to answer to. He has an over evaluation that unless he grows the value of his company he’s screwed. He’s trying to pull in revenue and he’s destroying a competitor to take their customers.

According to crunchbase, Automattic has taken just shy of $1B in funding. Yes, that's a B as in billion.

I wonder where those investors are on returns on that investment and the kinds of changes they want to get them.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#229

Post by gunsle »

pants2 wrote: post #126
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very insightful, didn’t think about Reddit’s incentive to promote low effort garbage over quality content

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#230

Post by eltondegeneres »

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/

Kirby is only source-available, not open source, and requires a paid license for usage. I think that's a deal breaker for a lot of Wordpress users.
Post reply on HN