Ghost — rethinking WordPress • Hacker News Board

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#31

Post by whalesalad » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 1:58 PM UTC

For those of you who might want to follow the dude on Twitter, but tried to copy/paste his username and realized it was an image:

http://twitter.com/johnonolan

John makes some great points, which is why I'd like to follow him and see the progression of this. One of us (or a few of us) are going to need to just get down-n-dirty and start building it.

The internet is indeed filled with a lot of sentiment for rebuilding WordPress. Most of us who've worked with WP a long time (since b2) have considered it (myself included).

I'd love to roll out of bed one morning and press a red LAUNCH button that releases a fresh new fork of WordPress to the world that's compatible with most of it's theme/plugin ecosystem.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#32

Post by qeorge » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 1:59 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #24

"People often say that WordPress is free as in speech, not as in beer" Do they? What do they mean? Can't you download the full, working source code of Wordpress anymore?

The author has the saying backwards.

WP is free as in beer (you don't pay for it) but not as in speech (you can't do whatever you want with it because of the GPL).

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#33

Post by agumonkey » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 1:59 PM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #22

STRML wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slow loads are an individual implementation problem as much as it is a Wordpress problem. Wordpress will happily give you more than enough rope to hang yourself with (e.g. Recent Comments), but even slightly savvy engineers should be able to avoid the pitfalls and AJAX expensive queries when needed. I agree that Wordpress should have saner defaults but it is not impossible to build a fast site with it.

I'm not talking about front-end, I mean back-end. WordPress is over 100 files of code 3mb size, loading on every page, BEFORE plugins. It's impossible to build an active, non-cached site with it. I have 100% dynamic php forums running side-by-side with wordpress and they are completely uncached - for WordPress that's impossible at the same load.

I used the sociable plugin (like/tweet/+1 buttons). Out of extremism I tested under elinks, saw some weird empty ul/li hanging around, inspected the plugin config and then went into the code. The latest release at the time was barely beta code, large spans of deadcode, copy/pasted pages-long loops that were 90% similar. Wordpress plugin pages quote millions of download for this plugin. Who needs quality ?

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#34

Post by EnderMB » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:00 PM UTC

I'd almost like to see it go the other way. WordPress is a good blog, but a poor CMS choice for anything but the most basic of websites. I reckon the "66%" that use WordPress use it for personal sites or very small business sites (1-10 visitors a day) on shared hosting. There are huge sites using it, but they seem to be the exception that proves the rule.

I cannot see why people use WordPress over the likes of Concrete5 or a full CMS on any other platform outside of WordPress being accessible for entry-level developers. For this reason, a full rewrite of WordPress to be solely a basic CMS would probably have these novice developers flock to the system, allowing WordPress to scale back down to doing what it does best.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#35

Post by dave1010uk » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:03 PM UTC

As someone who makes WordPress sites almost 8 hours a day, what would be the best start is a rewrite of the WordPress core on a popular, modern framework (my vote would be Symfony2). This would bring a breath of fresh air to coding for WordPress. Ideally much of the API would be similar too.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#36

Post by tibbon » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:07 PM UTC

This proposal makes many good points. If I were rewriting Wordpress, here's what I'd think of:

- Seriously consider redesigning the logical layout of the software. Some sort of rough MVC-ish pattern would be a huge improvement over the 'loop' in Wordpress which is almost impossible to deal with.

- I personally dislike PHP, but I do see its benefits in deployment.

- Make it easy to make beautiful typographic layouts. There's a reason this 1-page wasn't done in Wordpress itself; it is almost impossible to make 'hand-crafted-web' looks in Wordpress without deep CSS and HTML diving. Great blog post layouts shouldn't be that hard. Not all content is the same.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#37

Post by kmfrk » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:10 PM UTC

Note to the author: if you throw those images into ImageOptim, you can save at least 15%.

Probably convenient when you get hit by HN - and don't seem to be hosting images on S3.

http://imageoptim.com/

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#38

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:10 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#39

Post by tsewlliw » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:10 PM UTC

johnonolan wrote: post #25

calinet6 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would absolutely be better solved by an entirely new application, written from the ground up. And the whole-page-is-images thing really bothered me too. Some nice designs and interesting ideas for sure, and knowing CSS isn't a prerequisite for being a designer, but damn, I have some doubts about the understanding of the technologies here. Which is probably exactly where the concept of "forking Wordpress" came fr…

I've been committing code to the core WordPress codebase for 3 years, so while I'm not a PHP developer - I have some idea. Perhaps one thing overlooked in the argument for fork vs new build is that there aren't a huge number of developers with the skills to make this happen who would do it entirely on an Open Source contribution basis as opposed to, say, a startup basis. Appealing to existing WordPress developers, bu…

I'm relatively new to the WP scene, and already its totally clear that WordPress is tolerated because it has a vibrant ecosystem. Getting to keep that is way bigger factor in uptake over the next five years than anything a rewrite could deliver.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#40

Post by JimWestergren » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:12 PM UTC

What is needed is a rewrite and not a fork.

But why Open Source? Such a proper rewrite is a big undertaking and I don't see how that could be pulled off without financial compensation. Why not offer it for let's say $19 per domain? I would easily pay for it and I am sure many others. This way you could at least pay salaries to developers working on it.