Live data from Hacker News

WordPress Is in Trouble

anderegg.ca

311–320 of 457 posts

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#311
post #69

Hmm, crazy narcissist Matt Mullenweg does something for attention at the detriment of everyone else, again? The problem is that there's a bit of a black hole in CMSs right now where you need developers who want to work on the CMS and ordinary users who can host/create content on the CMS. Strapi was almost there, but alas, headless is not going to cut it for your average business trying to make a website. Static site…

(Disclaimer—I work for Strapi). I would love to know why you think Headless will not cut it or what Strapi could improve. We're seeing many SMBs succeed with it.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#312
post #218

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…

He's doing it in a way that feels suspiciously like a breakdown to me. The latest "we're restricting our contributions to 45 hours a week to match WPEngine" is the the reaction of a college student who is mad at their lab partner, not of an establish business that helped build the internet as we know it.

it's somewhat valid though, why continue providing free code for wp engine to resell when wp engine doesn't contribute to open source themselves?

wp engine has also bought out multiple competing hosts, so they're a direct competitor with deep pockets

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every ecommerce requirement is better served by iframes than by WordPress plugins.

Sorry, how would shopping cart (list of products to be soon bought) in an iframe is "better" than outputting it straight to the page HTML? Wouldn't it make it hard to design it?

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#314

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,…

I'm reminded of Tony Hsieh whose "eccentricity" lead directly to his early death.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#315
post #71
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…

Every time I read a comment like this about replacing WP and PHP with a successor it just sounds so incredibly out of touch. I mean no offense OP but it's obvious you have no clue at all about who actually uses WP and why they do it.

Yes, I always see people post comments like "why not just use (some crazy stack of CLI tools, markdown, source control, and CDNs) it's way better for XYZ reason" not realizing that the people behind most WP sites--which constitute something like 25% of the internet--are in general extremely nontechnical people who are posting recipes, sharing knitting patterns, writing travel blogs, archiving family photos, etc., and who have ZERO interest in anything that looks like source code.

And I don't blame them! I run wordpress sites and I sigh with frustration any time I have to insert a custom HTML block, and I am technical. When I'm writing on WP I want it simple and easy.

WP is also not just a CMS where you can drop in something else. It's a colossal ecosystem of plugins, themes, and so on. Some sites run on entire mini-ecosystems within the WP ecosystem, e.g. generatepress/generateblocks/generatecloud.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#316
post #261
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may have a point about what will happen, but that can happen at the same time as a mental breakdown. How do you justify something like this https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/17/pineapple-on-pizza-is-deli... if you only believe in the power play? How does this fit in?

Here is an alternate possibility 1. They introduced a checkbox for "users to confirm that they are not affiliated with WP Engine" 2. A court ordered Automattic to reverse course 3. Developer thought it was easy to quickly just change the text rather than make code changes. Let us not say people are crazy when there are alternate narratives

You can easily verify this wasn't the case by checking archive.is and seeing that the checkbox was removed for a day before the new one was added or checking stories and comments on what happened or looking at the commit history since the repository is open source.

If there were no facts in evidence, it your alternate possibility would still not be plausible since there's no reason the person wouldn't hide the checkbox if they didn't want to delete it but there's also no reason not to just delete it since removing it from the client is as much of a code change as changing the text.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#317
post #277
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The average user... stopped getting automatically banned for joining the wrong subreddits. Still happens, you're just not allowed to talk about it. /r/bannedforbeingjewish (which collated this) is banned,[1] but to give an example, /r/interestingasfuck (13 million subscribers) bans users that are members of /r/Israel.[2] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/bannedforbeingjewish/ [2] https://archive.is/OkfOY

Let’s be super clear, [2] does not ban the user for being Jewish as per [1] claims. There is no way for the mod/bot to know this rather. It is clearly spelt out in the terms. “You have been banned for participating in a bad-faith subreddit (specifically Israel) which brigades other subreddits and spreads propaganda/disinformation/racism/sexism.” Personally I don’t use Reddit that much, so I can speak to if this state…

There's no other nationality in the world where commenting in the subreddit devoted to that country results in being automatically banned from other subreddits.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#318

I don't understand how (if?) WordPress has popularity among serious professionals. Extending it without plugins, many of which are paid, is a nightmare. Adding custom fields is laborious, configuring post type display modes is a slog as well. HN seems to grumble about Drupal but even if your only requirement is a PHP server with a MySQL database connect, Drupal (8+) is just as simple to set up as WordPress and infini…

Drupal even supports the Gutenberg block editor:

https://www.drupal.org/project/gutenberg

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#319
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.

Ive got Jekyll sites from over a decade ago still buildable and kicking! Hard to beat the stability of simple software that outputs static web assets.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#320
post #82
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did he drink that psychoactive wine?

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.

Couldn't comment on Ayahuasca, but I've been around plenty of people with varying degrees of enthusiasm for DMT (n-n that is, 5-MEO is a different beast) and I've never heard anything along those lines.

Generally the critique is that it leaves one too unchanged. It's all sparkle and no lasting insight. Fun, but otherwise kind of pointless. Like it's missing its other half.

Post reply on HN