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WordPress Is in Trouble

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Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#381

Post by jopsen »

kemayo wrote: post #114
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…

> shake the baggage of being PHP PHP is why WordPress was a success. PHP is available basically everywhere, for cheap. You can get a $5/month hosting plan that'll give you a VPS with mod_php and mysql and you'll be able to install WordPress. (Also, WordPress put some actual effort into having a quick-and-simple setup process. If you can upload some files onto a server, it can take it from there.) Thus anyone can triv…

It's actually a bit surprising that no other languages tries to make server pages the way php and asp3 did.

Of course the model is flawed, but so easy to get started with :)

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#382

Post by Nectar0516 »

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…

I would hope that this would cause more people to realize that allowing total control of the things you use to be centralized in one person (or business) is bad, but well... quite similar things have happened to plenty of other open source projects before.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#383

Post by ethbr1 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #209
ethbr1 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Benevolent dictators of open source are great for productivity until benevolence gives way to malevolence. Autocracy is more efficient, with the best leaders. Democracy is more stable, with the worst leaders. The suboptimal cases are autocracy with bad leaders or democracy with good leaders. I think it's also pretty common that autocratic leaders go badly quickly. The same focus and dedication that drove them also…

> The suboptimal cases are autocracy with bad leaders or democracy with good leaders If we're talking real-life dictatorships and republics, the latter make much better use of brilliant leaders' talents. In part by not having a power struggle at the end that, on a coin flip, decides if the work survives.

In the short or intermediate term?

I'd argue that democracy is almost always a roadblock to a great leader's ability to execute their vision quickly and fully.

On the other hand, it often wins out in the long run by not losing as much when the inevitable terrible leader comes to power. (As well as providing a pressure release mechanism to prevent populist revolution)

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#384

Post by elendee »

shkkmo wrote: post #331
gspencley wrote: post #140

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…

> So what, specifically, led to WP Foundation choosing to ask WP Engine to pay for the services they are using? That isn't what happened. The for-profit company Automatic asked for money, and then used their CEO's exclusive control of the non-profit foundation to punish their direct competitor. It would be an entirely different thing if this was part an initiative to charge commercial users of WordPress.org for the c…

20 years at the helm and one major conflict over a half billion dollar business doesnt strike me as particularly weak. Personally I would be much happier if he just keeps on keepin on. The BDFL model has a strong precedent for jerk-ness a la Linus Torvalds

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#385

Post by Nectar0516 »

prepend wrote: post #95
internetter wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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)

Or you can just pay someone to host it and maintain and support the web server for you, for a lot cheaper (often free, like Github Pages).

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#386

Post by Nectar0516 »

akadruid1 wrote: post #254
tylershuster wrote: post #196

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…

Wordpress is clunky but it never broke backwards compatibility. HN grumbles about Drupal because many got burnt by picking the wrong horse. Drupal was the biggest CMS in the world and like a safe bet until they told their users they would have to rewrite their 7 code to go to 8 and their users decided they would rewrite to WordPress[1]. Drupal never regained the trust they lost. They extended the life of d7 over and…

Honestly, py3 wasn't a compelling replacement until distros started setting dates to remove py2.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#387

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#388

Post by [deleted] »

crowcroft wrote: post #190
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)

The web server can be hacked so it serves something other than the static HTML you uploaded but there is no 'app' to hack, there's a whole class of problems that can happen on WordPress that can not happen with static sites. What would hacking an HTML file even mean.

[deleted]

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#389

Post by eslaught »

prepend wrote: post #95
internetter wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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)

Other siblings have piled on this, but let me just add:

Your source of truth for a static site will never be the deployed contents of the server (even if you do go that route). It will be your local Git repo or possibly your upstream Git forge.

Even in the rare case that such a simple case gets you hacked, you can throw away your entire setup and start over quite easily. Whereas all of the Wordpress/Drupal/etc/etc. options I'm aware of will require you to do your own database backups, if you are self-hosting, or else you are simply hosed (as the attacker could corrupt or erase the source of truth).

If you are with a hosted solution then obviously your security (and backups) will be as good as their security/backups, and all of this will be moot except for pricing.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#390

Post by Nectar0516 »

andix wrote: post #98
greggman7 wrote: post #49

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.

That's probably the best explanation. There is no real alternative to PHP if you want to host cheap and simple. It's also really easy to deploy WordPress to a shared hoster, just by uploading a few files via FTP/etc and setting up a MySQL connection. Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces?

These days everything that would've been CGI is now FastCGI (even PHP). Or in other words, run one server whose only job is to reverse-proxy requests to another server over a slightly different protocol.

It can be used in shared scenarios, but it's nowhere near as automatic as "every file with a particular extension" like PHP...

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