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WordPress Is in Trouble

anderegg.ca

371–380 of 457 posts

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#371
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wp engine doesn't contribute to open source themselves At minimum they contribute Advanced Custom Fields, one of the most heavily used plugins. I make no judgement on if they contribute enough, but it's not like they give zero back to the ecosystem.

it's not for you to decide, but for Automattic to decide how much contribution is needed for them to allow you to use their services. the code of WP is free software. free-as-in-freedom. the services are not, and never were... they were free-as-in-beer. RMS taught us about this, and it comes in handy again.

I don't recall voicing an opinion either way. In fact I specifically said I don't know if it's enough, but saying they contribute nothing is factually incorrect. And no lack of contribution would justify taking over ACF in what is essentially a supply chain attack like they did.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WP engine is pretty obviously the “rent seekers” in this situation. hard to be a rent seeker if you actually built the software

No, pretty easy actually. You can sit and seek rent on something you built.

That's not what "rent seeking" means. Rent seeking is the term for manipulating institutions, customs or laws for the purpose of extracting money without creating anything.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#373
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.

WordPress is to creating website what Excel is to generic business calculations.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#375
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.

This. If Symfony or Ruby on Rails or Django or Quarkus or NextJS could replace Wordpress, then they would. I myself wrote Symphony for many years (2008 to 2014) and I was certain it could kill Wordpress, but it failed.

The combination of Wordpress's defaults, its ease of use by designers, and the ability for one server to handle hundreds of installments, means that almost nothing can replace it.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#376
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Many graphic designers don't know how to work with the template systems of CMSs that attempt to serve multiple websites from a single app instance. Wordpress is kept alive, in part, by designers who feel it is easier to hack than any other system.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#377
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you've observed, quite accurately, is that our bar for emotional intelligence when it comes to corporate executives is the same that we expect from ten-year olds.

Respectfully, it's not. Serious businesses take EQ seriously.

At best, "serious" businesses (which I take to mean large, successful ones) pretend to take EQ seriously.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Pressable includes support, global caching, and a bunch of other things you won't get on a $5/month VPS. Also not everyone wants to play system administrator 7 days a week to keep their server from getting hijacked or nuked.

So they throw Cloudflare in front of it and get defaced yearly. I've worked for companies (thankfully not in a position dealing with the website) that did just that. Somehow they're even still around a decade later. To be fair though that was actually Bluehost, not a VPS.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#379
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. Matt would be allowed to charge for access to Wordpress.org. It's his property. What you can't do is: make a service publicly available and then threaten a company that it needs exclusive terms In the lawsuit the judge asked Automattic to come up with a…

Isn't he within legal rights in fact to take away certain public services whenever he does want? Assuming that's the case (and that is an assumption), the fact that WPEngine went all in on a half billion dollar business model dependent on Matt is a big risk they took; I would think it would be absolutely top priority on their part to understand the nuts and bolts of the ecosystem they depend on.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#380
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just CGI. You could theoretically do the same with any other language, but PHP is just the most popular.

PHP integrates with the server. It does not have the spawn a new process per request like CGI

I think dreamhost runs php as fcgi.

I'm actually not sure that fcgi is that bad, even for other languages, but most shared hosts will probably limit what you can do in terms of resources.

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